When Ringo Starr played the Pope: “A superb actor, an absolute natural”
Even when a film deals with real-life subject matters, there is always a level of fiction involved. Actors shake off their skin and step into someone new, whether it be someone similar to them or vastly different. “All I’ve gotta do is act naturally,” Ringo Starr once bragged in a song about his position in the motion picture world, but surely that didn’t quite apply when, for some reason, Starr was cast as the pope.
While the rest of The Beatles happily obliged when the band’s team kept coming to them and asking them to make movies like A Hard Day’s Night or Help!, Ringo Starr seemed to fancy himself an actor. His not-so-secret dreams of stepping out from behind the drum kit and in front of the camera were emboldened by the directors the band worked with, like Walter Shenson, who declared Starr “a superb actor, an absolute natural.”
As sung about in his track ‘Act Naturally’, the majority of his roles didn’t require much acting. Largely he played himself or some fictionalised alter ego of himself. With a celebrity status as high as his, having been part of one of the biggest bands in history, it’s quite hard to subtly drop Starr into a movie without it breaking the spell cast on the audience as they shake their heads and ask, “Isn’t that one of The Beatles?” But in 1975, director Ken Russell didn’t care about that when he cast the drummer as The Pope in a strange take on a historical biography.
Really, Starr’s take on the religious figure is the least of the movie’s worries. Russell’s attempt to retell the life of composer Franz Liszt certainly earns its ‘surrealist’ label by being utterly baffling. The Guardian declared the moving “Possibly the most embarrassing historical film ever made” as the director seemed capable of refining his ideas instead of letting the film spiral more and more.
What begins as a biopic about the 19th-century composer just keeps getting odder. Suddenly the hungarian musician is launching a spaceship attack on the ghost of German composer Richard Wager who is, for some reason, dressed up as Adolf Hitler.
So, with all of that going on, having Ringo Starr there as the pope is only one tiny detail to the cinematic chaos. Unable to hide his Liverpudlian accent, as is an issue in all of his films, Starr’s questionable acting here merely blends in with the rest of the film, which is saying a lot.
Maybe Russell simply wanted to hang out with the rockstars some more. Fresh off the back of making Tommy, the musical fantasy based on The Who’s concept album, he called in Roger Daltry to play Liszt. Perhaps Russell had got a taste for the rock and roll lifestyle just as much as Starr seemed hungry for life on the screen. Hopefully, Barry Keoghan will do a better job as he steps into the role of Starr himself in the upcoming biopic.
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