“I liked him very much”: the Hollywood icon who greatly admired Woody Harrelson
Acting is one of those professions where generations regularly collide and provide performers with opportunities to collaborate with those they’d grown up watching, which earned Woody Harrelson a major admirer in a ‘Golden Age’ icon.
To be fair, Harrelson has always come across as a nice guy, with his affable and easygoing personality ensuring that there aren’t many people in the industry who’d even consider saying anything bad about him. Even his mutual disdain for Quentin Tarantino was smoothed over when they met face-to-face, showing that even broken fences can be mended.
During his career, he’s worked with some of the biggest and brightest names Hollywood has to offer, but getting on the good side of a legend can often be a much tougher nut to crack. After all, the veterans have seen it all, done it all, got the T-shirts, and remain entirely unmoved by those who follow in their wake, but Harrelson nonetheless managed to quickly win one of them over.
In addition to working on multiple features with on and offscreen partner Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall was accustomed to being in the presence of greatness, having shared an ensemble with Marilyn Monroe, Gregory Peck, John Wayne, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, Rock Hudson, Paul Newman, and more.
After a lengthy sabbatical from acting that lasted most of the 1980s, Bacall reintroduced herself to audiences with her Academy Award-nominated performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces, which opened the doors to a second wind that saw her recruited by a new wave of auteurs like Lars Von Trier, Jonathan Glazer, and even Hayao Miyazaki when she lent her voice to the English dub of Howl’s Moving Castle.
She crossed paths with Harrelson in Paul Schrader’s 2007 crime drama The Walker, in which he plays an escort enlisted by the wives of some of Washington’s most powerful figures. It was hardly the pinnacle of either’s career, but Bacall was left suitably impressed by an actor she shared a number of scenes with.
“I like him very much,” she told Alex Simon. “He has a quality I admire tremendously; he’s a total professional. He is always prepared, always gives serious thought to what he’s doing, and he’s a really nice guy. We all got along amazingly well.”
From Bogie to Woody; Bacall was familiar with decades’ worth of elite-level acting talent, and it took somebody pretty special to stand out from the pack looking at the laundry list of all-time greats she’d pitted her wits against in the past.
Her late-career reinvention as a Von Trier favourite was somewhat unexpected, but it was a boon for Harrelson to not only share the screen with one of their era’s leading lights in Schrader’s film but find himself the recipient of such glowing praise in the aftermath.
