The Stone Tape – Blood and Porridge

June 15, 2025

Cinematic heroes 6: James Cosmo

© Icon Productions / Ladd Company / Paramount Pictures

I’ve just realised that it’s the 30^th anniversary of the release of Mel Gibson’s woad-slathered and not-entirely-historically-accurate epic Braveheart (1995). This was the movie that added the battle-cry “FREEE-DOM!” to the chorus of things you hear outside Scottish pubs at closing time (along with “SHUT YER PUSS!” and “I’M OOT MA FACE!”). Thus, it seems an appropriate time to post this tribute to one of the very best things in Braveheart, James Cosmo.

I’ll make no bones about it. I f**king love the mighty Scottish character actor James Cosmo.

These days the hulking, craggy and formidable Cosmo – whose visage is usually bedecked with long white tresses of hair and a moustache that on anyone else would suggest ‘ageing hippy’, but on him suggest ‘someone you really don’t want to mess with’ – seems most familiar when he’s clad in armour and wielding a broadsword. He’s carved a profitable niche for himself playing characters in movies and TV shows set in the ancient world, the Middle Ages and medieval fantasy lands, such as Highlander (1986), Braveheart (1995), Ivanhoe (1997), Cleopatra (1999), Troy (2004), The Lost Legion (2007), Game of Thrones (2011-2013), Hammer of the Gods (2013), Ben–Hur (2016), Outlaw / King (2018) and The Last Redemption (2024) However, Cosmo, who was born in Clydebank and attended the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the Bristol Old Vic Drama School, worked long and hard on television before he cornered the market for playing grizzled bear-like warriors in historical and fantasy epics.

He earned his acting spurs during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in a long line of TV shows and TV plays. The better-known titles he appeared in include Doctor Finlay’s Casebook (1965 & 69), Softly Softly (1969), UFO (1971), The Persuaders (1971), Sutherland’s Law (1972), Quiller (1975), Survivors (1976), George and Mildred (1977), The Sweeney (1978), The Onedin Line (1979), The Professionals (1979), Strangers (1981), Minder (1984) and Fairly Secret Army (1984). The most distinguished TV productions from this time to feature Cosmo were probably Nigel Kneale’s haunted-house-cum-sci-fi-horror-story The Stone Tape (1972) – its influence is detectable in many films and TV shows made since then, including the recent In the Earth (2021) and Enys Men (2022) – and the 1974 Play for Today adaptation of John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, the most important piece of political theatre to surface in Scotland during the 1970s.

© Hammer Films / ITC Entertainment

I was in my mid-teens when I started to notice Cosmo as an actor. He played a villain in an episode of The Hammer House of Horror (1980), which climaxed with him driving a cleaver into the skull of the fragrant Julia Foster, something that must have shocked those viewers who remembered her from the wholesome 1968 musical with Tommy Steele, Half a Sixpence. That grisly scene made a big impression on me, although nothing compared to the impression it obviously made on Julia Foster. He also appeared in 1981’s The Nightmare Man, a cheap but creepy BBC mini-series scripted by the great TV writer Robert Holmes about a mysterious killer stalking a fogbound Scottish island. The Nightmare Man saw Cosmo in good company, as the cast also included Celia Imrie, James Warwick, Tom Watson and an equally craggy Scottish character actor, the late Maurice Roeves.

By the late 1980s Cosmo was becoming the go-to guy if you needed an imposing Scottish hard man in your production. For example, he appeared in Brond, a 1987 Channel 4 adaptation of the novel by Frederic Lindsay, set in Glasgow and a thriller involving conspiracies and terrorism. It tells the story of a hapless innocent, played by a very young John Hannah, who falls under the influence of the mysterious and sinister Brond of the title and ends up being accused of carrying out a political assassination. Brond is played by the portly and menacing Stratford Johns, although Cosmo is no less intimidating as Primo, the silent, lethal hulk who acts as Brond’s henchman. Two years later Cosmo had a similar role in the glossy Glasgow-set BBC thriller The Justice Game, in which this time he terrorised Dennis Lawson – yes, Wedge Antilles in the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-83) and real-life uncle of Ewan MacGregor.

Meanwhile, in 1986, Cosmo had appeared in Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander, the fantasy movie about immortal beings feuding throughout human history. He plays a member of the MacLeod clan in the medieval Scottish Highlands and he helps Christopher Lambert to escape when their superstitious fellow clansmen get alarmed about how, within hours, Lambert’s battle-wounds miraculously heal up. Not only does Lambert turn out to be one of the immortals but he’s also the world’s most French-sounding Scotsman. Later in the movie he encounters Sean Connery, who’s another immortal and also the world’s most Scottish-sounding Spaniard. (The scene where Lambert explains to Connery what a haggis is has to be heard to be believed.) Totally scatty, but loveable, I suspect Highlander was the movie that helped Cosmo secure the sweaty, muddy sword-and-sandals roles he became well-known for in the 1990s and 2000s.

© Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment / 20th Century Fox

The key sword-and-sandals role for Cosmo arrived in 1995 with the Mel Gibson-directed, Mel-Gibson-starring Braveheart, in which he plays Campbell, father of Hamish, best friend to 13th / 14th-century Scottish freedom-fighter William Wallace. Playing Hamish is the huge, ursine Brendan Gleeson, who later found fame in Michael McDonagh’s glorious 2008 comedy-thriller In Bruges. If anyone is even huger and more ursine-looking than Gleeson and could convincingly play his dad, it’s Cosmo. In reality, the two actors are only seven years apart in age.

Seven years old is also about the age that Isabella of France would have been in real life during the events depicted in Braveheart. In the film, she’s played by Sophie Marceau (in her late twenties at the time), is presented as English King Edward I’s daughter-in-law and has a sizzling romance with Gibson’s Wallace. This sums up the film’s cavalier disregard for historical accuracy. (It also gave stand-up comedian Stewart Lee material for a routine about William Wallace being a paedophile, which he bravely delivered in Glasgow.) The film is also anti-English to a degree that wouldn’t be acceptable against any other ethnic, national or cultural group in a Hollywood movie. But in the film’s defence I’ll say that the battle scenes, for their time, were excellent. And the supporting cast that Gibson assembled – Cosmo, Gleeson, Marceau, David O’Hara, Patrick McGoohan, Catherine McCormack, Angus McFadyen, Ian Bannen – is excellent too.

As Campbell Senior, Cosmo comes across as a near-unstoppable force of nature. He gets skewered with an arrow at the initial uprising in Lanark but ignores that and carries on fighting. He gets his hand chopped off at the Battle of Stirling but ignores that and carries on fighting too. Even when someone embeds an axe in his stomach at the Battle of Falkirk, he keeps going long enough to deliver a moving farewell speech to Gleeson.

A year later Cosmo appeared in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, the movie that gave the world an equally potent image of Scotland, if a rather different one from that given by Braveheart. In fact, Trainspotting, based on the 1993 novel of the same name by Irvine Welsh, is the modern-urban-Scottish-junkie yin to Braveheart’s heroic-medieval-Scottish-warrior yang. In Trainspotting, he plays another dad, this time of Ewan MacGregor’s Renton character, a junkie so desperate for his next fix that he’ll crawl into the shit-encrusted bowl of the Worst Toilet in Scotland to get it.

While it’s nice to see his face in the film, Cosmo is kept very much in the background. Gratifyingly, he got more to do when Boyle, MacGregor and the rest of the Trainspotting crew finally reunited in 2017 to make Trainspotting 2, based loosely on parts of Welsh’s original novel that were left out of the first film and on its 2002 literary sequel Porno. Trainspotting 2 concludes — in an ending that radically differs from that of Porno — with Renton deciding home is the best place for him. So he gives his now-widowed father a hug and moves into the latter’s spare bedroom (where, of course, he promptly starts dancing to Iggy Pop’s 1977 classic, Lust for Life).

© Material Pictures / Highland Midgie / Amazon Studios

After Braveheart, Cosmo was kept busy with sword-wielding roles, including 12 episodes as Jeor Mormont in Game of Thrones. However, he’s also become something of a fixture in recent British and Irish horror / thriller movies – he’s appeared in Urban Ghost Story (1998), Outcast (2009), The Glass Man (2011), Citadel (2012), January (2015), Dark Signal (2016), Malevolent (2018), The Hole in the Ground (2019), Get Duked! (2019), The Kindred (2022) and The Beast Within (2024). Of these, I enjoyed the horror-comedy Get Duked! the most. It’s the story of four lads tramping around in the Scottish Highlands whilst trying to earn their Duke of Edinburgh Award – and realising they’re being hunted by a weird pair of aristocratic psychopaths (played by Eddie Izzard and Georgie Glen). Cosmo turns up in it as a farmer the boys encounter in the course of their misadventures.

It’s normal for secondary characters in horror films to be nothing but cannon fodder – they soon get killed off to ratchet up suspense and demonstrate the power and evilness of the monster or villain. But Get Duked! makes those secondary characters interesting, keeps them around and has a lot of fun with them. Which is smart because it has a splendid supporting cast: Cosmo, Jonathan Aris and, as bumbling police officers, Kate Dickie, Alice Lowe and another veteran Scottish actor, Brian Pettifer. Despite first being sighted in a boiler suit and at the wheel of a tractor, Cosmo’s character proves to have a side not normally associated with Highland farmers. He has a fondness for certain hallucinogenic substances and is soon grooving to a mix CD that the lads give him.

Unexpectedly, Cosmo has a further speciality, which is for playing Santa Claus. According to his IMDB profile he’s now filled the furry boots of Saint Nick on three different occasions, most famously in the 2005 Disney version of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

He’s a pleasingly ubiquitous and varied performer. In the past decade I’ve seen him in things as different as SS-GB (2017), the BBC drama serial based on Len Deighton’s 1978 alternative-history thriller and set in a Nazi-Germany-controlled London in 1941; Wonder Woman (2017), one of the few decent DC Comics movie adaptations, in which he plays Field Marshal Douglas Haig; and the HBO miniseries Chernobyl (2019), where he’s one of the miners drafted in to dig a tunnel under the stricken plant’s melted uranium and prevent it from leaking into the Black Sea. His IMDb page currently lists no fewer than eight upcoming projects, so clearly he’s keeping busy. Meanwhile, on the non-acting side, he was a contestant in the 2017 series of Celebrity Big Brother and has recently been doing a speaking tour entitled An Evening With James Cosmo.

Though he’s well into his eighth decade, James Cosmo looks as daunting as ever. His visage, bulk and general demeanour suggest a man whom you definitely don’t want to give any cheek to. And if you are foolhardy enough to give him cheek, he’ll probably kebab you on a long rusty medieval pike and simultaneously slash your throat with a sgian dubh. That’s the sort of guy I’d like to be when I become eligible for my bus-pass.

© HBO Entertainment / Television 360

October 6, 2023October 19, 2023

Du Maurier, du merrier (Part 1)

© Penguin Books

As Halloween is approaching, here’s a reposting of something I once wrote about the novella that inspired one of the greatest horror movies of all time – Daphne du Maurier’s 1971 tale Don’t Look Now, turned into the Nicolas Roeg movie of the same name two years later. And there’s mention of some other disquieting stories by her too.

I have a tiny sliver of a connection with Daphne du Maurier, the popular 20^th century English writer responsible for novels like Jamaica Inn (1936) and Rebecca (1938) and short stories like The Birds (1952) and Don’t Look Now (1971). When I was at college in the 1980s, I knew her great-nephew very slightly. Actually, I was better acquainted with her great-nephew’s flatmate and a few times, because of him, I visited their apartment. Its walls were slathered with pictures of George Michael and Andrew Ridgely from the then-massive pop duo Wham, cut out of popular teen magazines of the time like Smash Hits and No 1. I assume the young du Maurier and his flatmate had stuck up these pictures in an attempt to appear ironic. Unfortunately, it meant that thereafter when I saw his great-aunt’s name on the cover of a book, I couldn’t help but hear, by way of association, the irritatingly bouncy strains of such Wham pop-dance numbers as Club Tropicana (1983) or Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (1984).

For a long time the only thing by Daphne du Maurier I’d read was The Birds (1952), a story that because of its remote Cornish setting feels even more claustrophobic and desperate than the North America-set film version directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963. However, a while back, I got a chance to familiarise myself with more of her fiction when my partner gave me a copy of du Maurier’s 1971 collection Don’t Look Now and Other Stories as a present.

A novella about a grieving English couple who’re taking a break in Venice when they’re approached by two strange women – one of whom claims to be a medium – and told that their dead daughter’s spirit is trying to warn them against danger, Don’t Look Now has been filmed too. Nicolas Roeg directed a movie version in 1973 and it’s now regarded as a classic, both as a horror film and as an example of Roeg’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, which combined fragmented and elliptical narratives, haunting and recurrent images and scenes of violent and sexual intensity to unforgettable effect. Having seen the film several times over the years, I was keen to read the piece of fiction that’d inspired it.

My first impression when I started reading Don’t Look Now was that film and story felt like they belonged to different eras. The couple, John and Laura, seem more modern, liberated and chic in the film, though that may be because they were played by 1970s icons Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. On the page, John and Laura have an old-fashioned English starchiness and they try to get over their loss with stiff upper lips and a strained Keep Calm and Carry On cheerfulness. Also, the literary John and Laura are in Venice as tourists, so they seem less confident and more vulnerable. Their cinematic equivalents are there for work reasons – John is helping to restore a Venetian church – and thus know their way around better.

Then there’s the presentation of the story. Du Maurier’s novella is a briefer and more economical account of the events I was familiar with from the film. As it stands, it could easily have been made into a 45-minute TV play. (The film clocks in at 110 minutes.) It begins in Venice with John and Laura encountering the medium. The death of their daughter, by meningitis, is mentioned retrospectively. And the suggestion that the dead girl’s spirit is urging them to leave the city before something terrible happens feels like a simple device to kick-start the main story – wherein John doesn’t leave Venice, through a series of mishaps, misunderstandings and further supernatural shenanigans; and then, when he tries to intervene in what he thinks is the mistreatment of a child, something terrible does happen.

The movie opens with a harrowing sequence showing the death of John and Laura’s daughter – not by meningitis but by drowning in a pond in the English countryside. Roeg and his scriptwriters Allan Scott and Chris Bryant create a sense of a cosmic, all-encompassing evil at work. Even as the girl dies, everything that’s still to happen in Venice seems to be prefigured. We see John studying pictures of the Venetian church where he’ll be working and discovering a mysterious figure wearing a red coat in one of the slides. When he spills water onto the figure, its redness spreads across the slide like a bloodstain. John’s daughter is also wearing a red coat when she drowns and, later, so too is the child-figure John sees scarpering alongside the night-time Venetian waterways.

Indeed, in the film, John clearly makes a connection between the two characters thanks to the coat. Is the red-clad figure by the canals the ghost of his daughter? But this association doesn’t appear in the original novella.

Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now is efficiently gripping. But I think Nicolas Roeg’s brooding cinematic version, spinning a web of portents, visions and uncanny coincidences in which John’s doom seems pre-ordained from the start, is better – a work of art. That’s despite the fact that, by changing the girl’s death from meningitis to drowning, the film can be accused of illogicality. As the website British Horror Films observes pithily: “If tragedy has struck and drowned your daughter, why go to a place with an excess of water?”

Actually, with Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, I preferred a couple of those ‘other stories’ to the title one. And interestingly, nearly all of them share a similar theme, in that they deal with English people going abroad and coming unstuck as they leave their cultural comfort zones.

Not After Midnight is about an amateur artist taking a holiday in Crete to do some landscape painting. In a manner reminiscent of the hero of John Fowles’s novel The Magus (1965), he encounters a strange man and becomes embroiled in some equally-strange activities touching upon ancient Greek myths. However, while Fowles’s novel is an airy and exuberant affair where a Prospero-like figure orchestrates spectacular and elaborate ‘masques’, Not After Midnight is altogether grungier. The man putting the events in motion is a drunken, debauched brute and, accordingly, the myths invoked concern “Silenos, earth-born satyr, half-horse, half-man, who, unable to distinguish truth from falsehood, reared Dionysus, god of intoxication, as a girl in a Cretan cave, then became his drunken tutor and companion.” Du Maurier doesn’t say explicitly what bacchanalian depravities her hero finally succumbs to; but as he’s a teacher at a posh English boys’ school, we can guess.

In A Border Line Case, a young woman who works as a theatre actress tries to honour the dying wish of her father. She goes in search of her father’s long-lost best friend, to tell him that her father had wanted to “shake the old boy by the hand once more and wish him luck.” She finds the missing friend in the Republic of Ireland, living as a recluse on an island, mysteriously lording it over a cohort of local men, and engaged in activities that are probably illegal and possibly weird. Unlike the hapless protagonists in the other stories, the heroine here is a resourceful type. She uses her skills as an actress to improvise, hide her identity and talk her way out of tight spots. However, when at one point she suspects she’s stumbled across a secret society of homosexuals (“They were all homos… It was the end. She couldn’t bear it…”), you feel surprised that a theatre actress should be so wary and intolerant of gay men. Still, A Border Line Case is well-paced and balanced nicely between an adventure story and a mystery one. It builds up impressively to a nasty, if slightly predictable ending.

The book’s most humorous story is The Way of the Cross, about a group of disparate English tourists making their way to and then around Jerusalem. The characters and plot seem slightly contrived at times. It’s unlikely that a progressive left-wing lady who’s worried about the plight of the Palestinians should be married to a hard-nosed right-wing businessman. Also, a climax where two characters are stricken by unconnected illnesses and a third one suffers a serious accident stretches credibility. Nonetheless it’s an enjoyably satirical account of English folk abroad.

The final story, The Breakthrough, is the exception to the rule. Its engineer hero doesn’t leave England for another country, although he is posted to the desolate flatlands and beaches of East Anglia. There, an ambitious experiment is underway in a scientific / military laboratory, ostensibly involving computers, but really about capturing a psychic energy that surrounds people when they’re alive and escapes when they die. The Breakthrough’s blending of the scientific and the supernatural calls to mind the famously frightening TV play The Stone Tape (1973), written by Nigel Kneale. Bravely, du Maurier opts for a non-sensational ending that prioritises character over action or horror. Admittedly, some readers might find that ending a bit of a let-down.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed reading Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, because of the author’s precise and no-nonsense prose, her ability to pack a lot of incident into her narratives without letting them get too convoluted, and her determination at all times to tell a rattling good yarn.

Indeed, on the strength of this, I’m now starting to think of Daphne du Maurier as being in the mould of Stephen King – and not so much in connection with George Michael and Andrew Ridgely. Yes, better the author of The Running Man (1982) than the authors of I’m your Man (1986).

Expect more on Daphne du Maurier very soon…