My Life in Pieces

Actors no doubt spend too much of their time together recounting stories which celebrate the absurdities, the perils and the glories of their profession. Inevitably, conversation turns on the great figures. We don't talk about just anyone; you have to be pretty remarkable to be discussed; either very much loved (like John Gielgud or Michael Gambon) or very much hated (like some other people); or simply phenomenal.

Into this last category falls, or rather fell, an actor little known to the public but a byword in the business, talked about wherever any of us more than thirty years old gather together. His name was Victor Henry, and he died ten days ago.

He acted mostly at the Royal Court in the late Sixties; unforgettable in the D. H. Lawrence trilogy and in a revival of Look Back in Anger, new-minting Jimmy Porter's rage; terrifying in Heathcote Williams's acid trip AC/DC; raw in the part he created in Christopher Hampton's When Did You Last See My Mother? He also created, magnificently, the role of Rimbaud in Total Eclipse; finally he gave an outrageous and ill-disciplined but quintessentially Jacobean Bosola in Peter Gill's production of The Duchess of Malfi. A phenomenal actor he certainly was but it was the strangeness of his destiny that made him the subject of our hushed and sombre exchanges.

Victor was a hellraiser - almost literally; not a mere roaring boy, boozing and smashing the place apart, though God knows he did enough of that, but somehow diabolically possessed. Scrawny, sandy-haired, short, his pebble glasses flashing madly away, once he had a drop of booze inside him (any time after, say, 10.30 in the morning), he set out on his lifelong quest for trouble.

If there was none readily available, he would gladly provoke it. No one was immune: innocent bystanders, the larger the better, would be urged to hit him. He didn't really much bother to offer a reason. If they refused he became very angry and would prod or punch them until the desired blow was forthcoming. Fearing that they might not like to hit a man with glasses, he'd obligingly take them off.

When, goaded beyond endurance, the victim would finally belt Victor, an expression oddly like satisfaction would suffuse his features, like an adder that's just swallowed a mongoose. If there was no one around to provoke, he'd inflict the damage on himself, taking a beer glass and eating it, for example, or knocking his head against the wall.

He could have killed himself at any moment, indeed, seemed most anxious to do so. How ironic then that he should have been stone-cold sober and completely placid when fate, in the form of a red London bus, struck. He was standing at a bus stop when the bus swerved and hit the stop, which in turn cracked down on Victor's head.

From that moment he never uttered another word. That was fourteen years ago. Since then, his mother and father have both died. His sister, who lived some distance from the hospital, visited him as often as possible, as did many friends and colleagues, all hoping that somehow he might speak again. His brain was apparently undamaged. His eyes were open and clear and expressive, sometimes seeming to be filled with rage.

From time to time he would be shown a television tape of one of his greatest performances - Gogol's Diary of a Madman. Nothing happened.

What makes his story particularly haunting is that all the rage and craziness of Victor's offstage personality was present in his performances, sometimes destructively as far as his fellow actors were concerned, but always at maximum intensity, terrifyingly dangerous, the stark opposite of anything routine or dull.

Dionysus is a destructive god as well as a celebratory one; Victor was his true votary.

It was an awe-inducing and deeply serious experience to see Victor act. Perhaps Kean was like that: everything Victor Henry ever did on the stage seemed to be glimpsed by lightning.

Thank God for him he is dead. Alas for us he is no more.

Greatness seemed to be everywhere at that time. Thanks to the cross-London box-office mafia, I went to dress rehearsals at Covent Garden: Joan Sutherland in Lucia di Lammermoor, with an unknown young tenor called Luciano Pavarotti, who cracked on one of many his top Cs and in his frustration hurled his sword into the pit, where it impaled a drum; Boris Christoffin Boris Godunov, one of the most terrifying actors I have ever seen on any stage, in any medium, at almost Victor Henry-like levels of intensity; Geraint Evans supreme as both Falstaff and Wozzeck; Jon Vickers poleaxingly anguished as Peter Grimes. I saw ballet for the first time there, the great Russian masterpieces, all the Ashton ballets, the MacMillans; I saw Fonteyn and Nureyev. I thought him the sexiest man I had ever seen in my life; his photograph, all Tartar animal energy, adorned my bedroom wall. This is my review of Julie Kavanagh's 2007 biography of him.

No one who was alive and conscious at the time will forget the dramatic circumstances of Rudolf Nureyev's precipitate defection to the West at the height of the Cold War, the sudden eruption of this shocking new talent into the rarefied world of classical dance and his subsequent conquest, in short order, of the great stages of Europe and America. Julie Kavanagh's magnificent and emotionally overwhelming new biography makes it clear that this was no brief dramatic interlude in his career: it was all like that, every minute of his fifty-five years on earth. From the moment of his birth on board the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Rudolf Nureyev's life was lived out in capital letters. His wartime childhood in the Bashkirian capital of Ufa was one of desperate impoverishment; his early passion for physical self-expression led to his engagement at the age of seven by a folk-dancing troupe; he was then taken up by various local ballet teachers and struggled to progress until, flagrantly defying his father, he arrived, rather late for a dancer, at the Kirov Ballet School. There - despite earlier inadequate training and physical shortcomings which he would never wholly overcome - he showed unyielding certainty about the path he intended to follow. His wilful and often unruly behaviour in class and on stage did nothing to impede his rapid and triumphant progression through the ranks of the company, leading to his ecstatic acclaim on tour with them in Paris in June of 1961 and the unpremeditated last-minute defection, straight from the pages of le Carré, at Le Bourget Airport, abandoning, it seemed for ever, his family, his fellow dancers, his teachers, his country.

But that was just the beginning. In Julie Kavanagh's scrupulously researched and supremely well-informed account, the remaining thirty-six years of his life have the trajectory of an epic novel, an exemplary tale of the artist as demiurge - a story of demonic determination, heroic immersion in life and work and ultimate, inevitable self-immolation. Kavanagh's unfolding of the story is all the more telling for its restraint, clear-eyed but properly appreciative of the uniqueness of her subject. People like Rudolf Nureyev come rarely. When they are artists, the impact is electrifying; they generally leave a trail of devastation in their wake. Nureyev was no exception. Even as a child, he was gripped by the drive, the pressure, the ruthlessness which enabled him to overcome every conceivable obstacle - including, most potently, the fierce opposition of his true-believing Stalinist father, who had spent the 1930s diligently implementing the collectivisation of farms - to reach a goal that must have seemed positively lunar in its unattainability.

His destiny was set at the age of seven when his mother smuggled him into a performance of the famous Soviet ballet The Song of the Cranes. 'I knew. That's it, that's my life, that will be my function. I wanted to be everything on stage.' Once he reached the Kirov, his Tartar pride was deeply offended by the racist scorn heaped on him ('Bashkirian pig' they called him), which confirmed his determination to show them all; by now, too, at the ripe age of seventeen, he was motivated by a lifelong compulsion to make up for lost time. He worked slavishly, in and out of class, pushing himself forward in every way, demanding the opportunity of partnering the much older female stars of the company, rejuvenating their dancing while learning from them, a pattern which would be frequently repeated over the next decade. He immersed himself in music, literature and art; a virgin at the age of twenty-one, he had an affair with his revered teacher's wife, another area in which he would soon be frantically making up for lost time, though not, for the most part, with women. Soon after, he started an affair with a male dancer; typically of Nureyev, they didn't just go to bed together: they became blood brothers. Immature, in some ways technically inadequate, poorly educated, he never doubted that his way was the right way, refusing point blank to dance choreography that displeased him, always demanding to know the meaning behind the steps. He knew the value of his Kirov training but was determined to broaden his technique, and his departure for the West was as much driven by that determination as by anything else.

Russia was simply too small for him. His ambitions were precise: he wanted to study with his idol, the Danish danseur noble, Erik Bruhn; and he wanted to partner Margot Fonteyn. Soon after his defection, he had met, worked with and...