“He’s going to be around until he’s an old, old man”: The actor Steven Spielberg called “my William Holden”
Having been around the block enough times to know whether or not an actor has the chops to become a fixture of the silver screen for decades, Steven Spielberg opted to compare one of the many iconic stars he’s worked with to one of the most reliable performers of their era.
Before his tragic accidental death in November 1981 at the age of 63, William Holden was one of the most versatile and dependable performers around. An Academy Award and Primetime Emmy winner, he collaborated with some of the industry’s greatest directors on a number of classic films.
His back catalogue includes Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 and Sunset Boulevard, David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Sidney Lumet’s Network, John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers, and classic disaster thriller The Towering Inferno among others, with Holden becoming a favourite among Hollywood’s most renowned auteurs.
That side of his career may have been pushed to the background in recent years, but Spielberg is very familiar with an A-list mainstay who made a point of seeking out and collaborating with as many top-tier directors as possible, comparing them as the ideal hybrid of a character actor and a movie star.
It’s been two decades since they worked together for the second and, so far, final time, but Spielberg once envisioned himself enjoying a long and fruitful partnership with Tom Cruise. “I like to consider Tom my William Holden,” he told Roger Ebert. “He’s going to be around until he’s an old, old man, if he wants to continue acting. He’ll be great-looking and he’ll be heartfelt as he is now; he’ll get better with age.”
Spielberg paid tribute to the way his Minority Report and War of the Worlds lead isn’t “afraid to cry, to lose his temper, to become unglued” before pointing to his proficiency for disappearing into a role despite his superstar status. “I think of him as a character actor,” he mused. “Look at his character in Magnolia and his Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July and Jerry Maguire, and the vampire Lestat. Those are characters.”
Obviously, Cruise is much too famous to be a regarded as a character, and it’s not something he’s even been interested in since he went grey and psychotic as a hitman in Michael Mann’s Collateral. The prophecy is on the cusp of coming true, nonetheless, even if it’s a morbid way of interpreting Spielberg’s prediction.
By the time the eighth Mission: Impossible movie hits cinemas in May 2025, Cruise will be just weeks away from turning 63 years old, which was Holden’s age when he died. A little grim, perhaps, but time remains on Spielberg’s side to get the band back together at least one more time.
