There was an affecting moment in a television preview theatre yesterday morning, as the husband of Wendy Richard watched her final performance – in A Pocketful of Rye, the first in ITV1's new set of Miss Marple stories. Although the drama is most notable for a powerful debut by Julia McKenzie in her assumption of the title role, there is also a strong undertow of poignancy for any follower of British showbusiness because the episode includes not only Richard's swan song but a typically maverick cameo by Ken Campbell, another actor who died soon after filming.
The complex emotions of the family and friends of the two performers as they watch these closing roles can only be imagined because, even for a viewer, there is a peculiar charge – in which enjoyment is complicated by sadness – in seeing an appearance by someone who has recently disappeared from view. This is perhaps especially so because the drama is a whodunnit, so that the desolation of real deaths collides with Christie's jaunty pile-up of corpses.
This double take also affects the latest JK Rowling adaptation. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is intentionally darker than its predecessors – it includes the death of a major and sympathetic character – but has also become unintentionally so because Robert Knox, a young actor, was stabbed to death in London last year after filming the part of one of Harry's classmates. For any member of the audience aware of this horrific back story, Knox's scenes – which deal with the flourishes of first love – are almost impossible to watch. Innocent fiction is destabilised by tragic fact.
One reason that these shadows across the screen are so intense is that film and television are such vital artforms: a powerful screen performer feels almost as immediately present as a theatre actor, and so a posthumous appearance has the shocking impossibility of playing back a voicemail message from someone who has recently died.
In his new book, Sunnyside, the American writer Glen David Gold fascinatingly reflects on the psychological adjustments that audiences were forced to make by the arrival of the movies. Early filmgoers struggled to accept that the vivid and active figures in front of their eyes could be both so obviously present and yet clearly absent.
And, no matter how sophisticated we have become about the nature of recorded performance, an element of this early-days confusion still survives when we watch a lively performance by someone we know to be dead. The case of Heath Ledger represents this problem at its most extreme. As a rare example of a frontline movie star who died unexpectedly and young, he left one completed film (The Dark Knight) and several sections of another: Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
Because that movie is not a linear narrative, the inventive Gilliam has saved the project by dividing the remaining unmade scenes between other actors. This is probably an occasion on which it is safe to apply the most dubious post-mortem cliche: Ledger really may have wanted this. Even so, the film – like The Dark Knight – moves into a category separate from regular releases. Neither reviewers nor viewers can receive it in the way that they otherwise would: feelings of loss and regret external to the plot keep creeping in.
Some actors knowingly collaborate in posthumous appearances: Wendy Richard had good medical reason to believe that she might not live to see her part in Miss Marple, and also filmed a touching TV documentary about her illness which was screened after her death – a decision also taken by Farrah Fawcett. Realising that they were working in a medium that allows a type of immortality, these performers took advantage of it.
The sudden death of Michael Jackson has already resulted in two sensitive decisions about the handling of a departed star. Sacha Baron Cohen, although one of the most fearless comedians we have ever seen, was persuaded to remove a sequence from Brüno in which Jackson is satirised: even in a film with a mission to make the viewer feel uneasy, it was felt that reference to such a raw story would damage the film's reception.
But, with rather less sensitivity, some among the late star's entourage seem at least to have thought aloud about the possibility of Jackson fulfilling his cancelled O2 dates either as a hologram or through transmission of rehearsal footage. Billed as a tribute, this smacks more of necrophilia. Television and film stars accept that their performances will outlive them, although Ken Campbell and Heath Ledger would have hoped to be around to see what became their final work. But simply to pretend that the performer is not dead – to allay some of the financial inconvenience – is a very different matter, and feels dead wrong.
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