Stephen Weeks writes: In the early 1970s I was directing a film version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for Carlo Ponti. Robert Hardy was playing Sir Bertilak and his scenes were shot outside Cardiff in the Victorian gothic Castell Coch, of which Tim, as I knew him, was temporarily lord. Ordering the porter to let some light in as Gawain stumbles into his dark hall, Tim spoke the scripted words “open those shutters there” with such a flourish that the whole unit adopted them as its catchphrase for the following weeks.
However, a week later, luckily not at work, Tim fell off a horse and was in a wheelchair for the rest of the film. I was able to photograph Sir Bertilak standing from the back with a double, and then cut to close-ups of him while sitting in the chair. But then the editor said that the sound quality on the line about the shutters was poor and it would have to be re-recorded by Tim in a dubbing studio. This was several weeks after the film had wrapped and Tim had been in his wheelchair all the while.
Sitting like that changes the voice, and no matter how he tried to imitate his original rendering of the line, or how many times – he spent a whole day in the attempt – it just wasn’t that line that everyone remembered, although audiences would never know nor care.
I first met Tim, who was one of Britain’s leading experts on the long bow, at his house near Henley-on-Thames where, in the cellar, were some 20 long bows salvaged from the wreck of the Mary Rose. Soon we were testing the flexibility of these 400-year old specimens. It was an exciting moment.
Stephen Bates writes: One film that escapes Robert Hardy’s filmography is the first he made, Black Legend in 1948. It was directed by John Schlesinger when both were Oxford undergraduates and used some fellow students, but mainly amateur actors from the village of Inkpen in Berkshire (where Schlesinger’s parents lived), and told the story of a 17th-century murder and hanging above the village on the North Hampshire downs.
The film shows both Hardy’s acting talent (as a gibbering village idiot) and Schlesinger’s nascent directing skills, a foretaste of similar idyllic rustic scenes in his Far From the Madding Crowd 20 years later.
As a sixth-former at the local grammar school in 1972 I led a project tracking down a copy of the film and interviewing members of the cast, including Hardy, Schlesinger and his parents. They could not have been kinder or more genial to a tongue-tied teenager conducting his first ever interviews as a would-be journalist.
Hardy said he spent the entire time on the film running through blackberry bushes. Obviously it didn’t put him off acting.
