... of the greatest soundtrack ever. Isn't it ?
I have that fantastic piano "Fun City" in me forever.

All the James Bond soundtracks he did are absolutely genius with Goldfinger possibly the greatest. The guy was way, way ahead of his time. This is very sad news indeed. RIP John.

I'd say On Her Majesty's Secret Service is up there with best soundtracks
along with Goldfinger of course in the James Bond series.

Great composer De man with a golden finger

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2011-01-31 12:34 by NICOS.

RIP Mr Barry.

Although I have to say I prefer Ringo's Goldfinger...

the soundtrack to OHMSS , is in my opinion, his masterpiece.

RIP

Oh this is sad. Agreed, OHMSS and the score to Midnight Cowboy are masterworks.

Quote
Shezeboss
... of the greatest soundtrack ever. Isn't it ?
I have that fantastic piano "Fun City" in me forever.

I love that track. No other piece of music captures New York City more perfectly. And the perfect irony is that "Fun City" is one of the most melancholy pieces of music you will ever hear.

interesting, last week i bought 17 Bond Soundtrack LPs on ebay.just finished listening to For your eyes only (of course no Barry, but the next one will be) a great composer and a man who knew how to live

Here is brillant piece from Vanity Fair

[www.vanityfair.com]



Go BackPrint this pageMusicThe Man Who Knew the Score As a kid growing up in World War II–era York, John Barry spent every Saturday in one of his father’s cinemas, figuring out what made a movie great. As a young musician in 60s London, he became an immortal part of the process, famous for arranging the “James Bond Theme,” writing the Goldfinger title song, and scoring more than 90 films, including Midnight Cowboy, Born Free, and Out of Africa. At age 75, after five Oscars, four wives, and a lot of glamour, Barry talks about the magic he made. by Bruce HandyWEB EXCLUSIVE January 8, 2009 Nancy Sinatra and John Barry prepare to record the theme for the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice, May 1967. From Bettmann/Corbis.

I was a melancholy kid, and growing up I found myself drawn to bright but melancholy music: Simon and Garfunkel, the gloomier Beatles tunes (George Harrison’s stuff), Smokey Robinson’s “The Tears of a Clown,” and—a less likely favorite—the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy, which for years my parents played every night at cocktail hour, so much so that even now, whenever I hear it, I get a potent sense memory of the smell of gin and tonic. The soundtrack combined pop songs, including Harry Nilsson’s plaintive version of “Everybody’s Talkin’,” with a handful of orchestral cues, notably the movie’s main theme, with its loping, bittersweet melody played on harmonica. I hadn’t seen the movie—it was rated X when it came out in 1969, and I was 10—but the music spoke to me. It was sad but also glamorous, urban, and it had scope, a kind of wide-screen sweep—the score for a Western re-written as an Eastern. As I got older, I realized it was witty. And when I finally saw Midnight Cowboy, I realized the music fit the movie’s odd meld of comedy and pathos perfectly: underneath it all, like the losers played by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, the music yearned.
I knew from the LP jacket that John Barry had written the instrumentals and supervised the rest, which didn’t mean much to me until I saw my first James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice. Watching it (in re-release) at the age of 11 was a revelatory experience, like mainlining a brand of movie heroin formulated especially for pre-adolescents—a peak filmgoing experience I’ve never really equaled. I noticed Barry’s name in the credits for that too. The same guy who did the sad, sparkling music for Midnight Cowboy also did that sexy, almost excruciatingly exciting James Bond music? This may have been my first intimation of what “genius” means. Or at least “range.”
Here’s what I’ve learned since.
The C.V.: An Englishman, John Barry has scored more than 90 films over the course of his career, winning five Oscars and four Grammys. He currently lives in an expansive waterfront home on Long Island’s North Shore (Great Gatsby country) with his fourth wife and teenage son. At 75 he has lived a long and what seems to have been a fulfilling life. (His second wife—whom he met in 1965 when she was 18 and, she has said, a virgin—was Jane Birkin.) Among those 90-odd films, aside from Midnight Cowboy and 11 Bonds—a run ending with 1987’s The Living Daylights—are Zulu; The Ipcress File; The Knack … and How to Get It; King Rat; Born Free; Petulia; The Lion in Winter; Mary, Queen of Scots; Robin and Marian; The Deep; Somewhere in Time; Body Heat; Frances; Out of Africa; Jagged Edge; Peggy Sue Got Married; Dances with Wolves; Chaplin; and Cry, the Beloved Country. His most recent film score was for 2001’s Enigma. But not all his credits glow, or even give off the thin light of noble failure: he wrote music for Howard the Duck, George Lucas’s 1986 flop about a duck from outer space, and the 1976 Dino De Laurentiis remake of King Kong, another unnecessary and expensive dud. Oh yes, and Demi Moore’s The Scarlet Letter.
But if there is a single piece of music he is most famous for, it is arguably the theme song for Goldfinger, the third James Bond film, released in 1964. Barry had made a key contribution to the first Bond movie, Dr. No, as the arranger of the famous “James Bond Theme,” giving it the nasty, knife-like guitar sound and the big-budget brassiness which can still get an audience’s pulse going and which continues to define the series aurally. He had scored the second film, From Russia with Love, expanding on the 007 sound, but the producers hadn’t yet trusted him to write the title song; he was still relatively inexperienced, and the job went instead to Lionel Bart, who had just had a big West End hit with Oliver! Bart did a serviceable job, crafting a melody that can hold its own with other movie themes from the era, such as “The Shadow of Your Smile” or “Sunday in New York,” but could as easily have been the theme for a romance or historical epic. “From Russia with Love” didn’t wallop an audience. It didn’t scream sex and danger and chic amorality. It wasn’t silly. It wasn’t “Goldfinger,” the title song that Barry would cook up with lyricists Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, sung with leather-bellows lungs and diamond-hard voice by Shirley Bassey:
Gold-fin-gah! [echoing brass section: wah-wahh-wah]
He’s the man, the man with the Midas touch …
If the “James Bond Theme” set a template, “Goldfinger” brought it home—the distillation, in sound, of all that a Bond movie stood for. Which is one of the more important jobs movie music has: not just to tell an audience when to be scared or when to be sad or when it’s O.K. to laugh but also, when done right and done skillfully, to express an ineffable sum that is greater than the movie’s parts. This is as true of Barry’s work on Goldfinger as it is of Max Steiner’s score for Now, Voyager, Nino Rota’s for Amarcord, John Williams’s for Star Wars, or—found art—that Moldy Peaches song they used in Juno.
Speaking of Amarcord, its director, Federico Fellini, once told an interviewer that Goldfinger’s was his favorite movie score.
Such a cold fin-gah! [wah-wahh-wah]
Beckons you to enter his web of sin
But don’t go in …
“Shirley belted the hell out of it,” Barry tells me on a windy, oddly autumnal spring afternoon, sitting in his plush music room, tea sandwiches between us and his Oscars on a nearby shelf, he pleased by the memory of Bassey’s belting, me looking at his exquisitely long fingers, thin and curved like a skate’s bones, and thinking I should really try to get him to play his piano before I leave, just for the visual effect. “Shirley was good because she didn’t ask too many questions,” he continues. “She didn’t intellectualize it. I mean, you didn’t want to think about it too much.” Barry, like the rest of the Bond movies’ creative team, knew you could slide a lot by an audience with sheer verve, muscle, and wit.
This would become kind of a credo for Barry as he worked on subsequent Bond films. A year later, preparing to record the theme for Thunderball, he found himself lecturing Tom Jones on that very point. The singer, perhaps flummoxed by the lyrics (“He looks at the world and wants it all / So he strikes like Thunderball”), wanted to know, “What the hell is it about?”
“Tom, don’t ask,” Barry replied, according to an interview he once gave Terry Gross on N.P.R. “Take a leaf out of Shirley’s book, get in the studio, sing the hell out of it, and leave. Please don’t get into it.”
Sadly, of course, I’m here to ask questions, to “get into it.” And Barry, who is so supremely self-confident that he would come across as arrogant if he weren’t also gracious and blessed with a seductive baritone purr for a speaking voice, is willing to suffer the endeavor as best he can, to explicate himself and his singular craft.
Movie music is a funny thing. It’s both the least literal part of a film and one of the most literal genres of music. It has a workman’s job to do, but at its best—as in much of Barry’s work—it achieves effects in inexpressible ways, so that admonition to shut up and sing wasn’t necessarily flip. “You know when you’ve got it, and you know when you haven’t,” Barry says of composing. It’s a matter of “putting your finger on the right group of notes,” he adds rather nonchalantly. (Is that what it feels like to conjure a world-class tune?) “When you’ve got it, you say, ‘Ah, Jesus, that’s it.’ And if someone asks, ‘Please explain what it is,’ I say, ‘It’s working, isn’t it? That’s what it is.’ It’s got the goods because it’s affecting you in a lovely way, or in a sad way that breaks your heart.”
A perfect example is Barry’s score for Out of Africa, the 1985 film for which he won one of his five Oscars. (The others were for the title song and score of Born Free and for the scores of The Lion in Winter and Dances with Wolves.) In some ways, the movie, an adaptation of the Danish writer Isak Dinesen’s memoir about running a coffee plantation in Kenya, barely hangs together. The two stars—Meryl Streep, submersing herself in character and Danish accent, and Robert Redford being Robert Redford, all sun-dappled, crinkly-eyed, and ultimately blank—are meant to play lovers but seem to be acting within separate and opposed movie universes. But the taste and craft of the director, the late Sydney Pollack, go a long way toward making the film cohere, and in no small part he could thank the score he commissioned from Barry. The director put it this way in a 2000 BBC documentary: “[The score] gave the picture more size than it really had. It gave the picture some kind of real romantic resonance.”
Sean Connery in Dr. No, 1962. From the Everett Collection.

The movie’s most memorable sequence, its emotional apogee, comes when Redford takes Streep up in a two-seater biplane over a vast and unspoiled African landscape for an aerial joyride. The cinematography is gorgeous, the two stars are gorgeous, Africa is gorgeous, and Barry’s orchestral score oozes all due feeling. But where you’d expect joyous or exhilarating music, the composer offers something more complex: an elegiac melody that seems to mourn, prematurely but astutely, the passing of both landscape and love. In the sequence’s key shot, Streep, sitting in the front seat with an expression mingling ecstasy and anguish like some martyred saint in an old-master painting, reaches back to hold Redford’s hand. Barry is really the third actor in the scene: his score swells, both supporting and enriching the visuals, and suddenly the scene is about that achingly delicious feeling of simultaneously exulting in a moment and mourning its fleetingness.
At least that’s what I took away from it; Pollack told the BBC he was after something “church-like” from the score. Stephen Holden, writing in The New York Times, thought it conveyed “a tone of high-styled mystical exploration.” I’m not sure what that means, exactly, but clearly all three of us were moved, and not just in the nudging, “cry now” manner of a hackwork cue. The beauty of Barry’s score is not only its open-endedness, its depth, but also its restraint: like a lot of the composer’s work, the Out of Africa music is sonically big—in that it has much in common with his James Bond scores—but it keeps its feet resolutely planted this side of schmaltz. As Pollack said, “I think John found a wonderful way to be unashamed of the emotion, but controlled, so that it never got into this sort of emotional bloodbath.”
I ask Barry about Pollack’s comment that his music had given Out of Africa “more size than it really had.”
“Well, I think you can achieve that,” he begins. “I mean, if you [use the music to] just follow the action—that’s what you do with a Bond movie: you follow the action. That’s the glory of it. You go for the jugular on everything—you know, as I once remarked, subtlety is not a virtue on a Bond movie. But with other movies you break your ass trying to find out: What can I do that’s still going to really work for this, but add another dimension to it? It’s not about going with the action; it’s going with what the people in the movie are feeling. If you can capture the love story, like in Out of Africa—the feeling between those two people—that’s what I write about. And when they go in that plane and she puts her hand back, to me it was a golden moment, when it was just the communication between them. I mean, that broke my heart. That is what the whole movie is about.” It was, he says, “that one simple thing” he always seeks to identify when setting out to score a film—“a certain smell that unifies,” as he put it quite evocatively early in his career.
Barry found that one simple thing in Out of Africa when Pollack screened him a rough cut. “Wait till I get ahold of that one,” he recalls thinking as he first watched the flying sequence. “What a treat that’s going to be!” He knew he was going to slay the audience. Barry, like a lot of filmmakers—Griffith, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Lars von Trier—is probably a wee bit of a sadist. “I love writing sad music,” he tells me. And later: “I think it’s wonderful when you can write instrumental music and break people’s hearts with it.”
John Barry had the perfect childhood to become John Barry. (I suppose you could say the same of any adult, but it sounds so wonderfully epigrammatic.) His father owned a chain of movie theaters in York, and Barry, who was born John Barry Prendergast in 1933, grew up going to the movies every Saturday afternoon; he’d go again during the week if the picture was worth seeing twice. At some point, for some reason, he began taking notes. “I had no idea that I wanted to be [in show business],” he says. “It was just something that amused me. I’d make notes about things that got to me, that made me laugh or cry, or just something that struck me. But the music, I discovered, was a major factor in that sense.” One score that particularly struck him was Eric Korngold’s for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), with Errol Flynn. Another was Max Steiner’s for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1947). Two classics—he had great taste from the get-go. “I really started to get interested in it,” he says. “Like this was something people actually did—for a living, you know.”
Barry’s mother had had ambitions as a concert pianist, and Barry, who began studying the instrument at the age of nine, had ambitions himself—until he gave it up, he says, because his memory wasn’t adhesive enough to retain entire concert pieces. He picked up the trumpet as a teenager, partly inspired by jazz records his older brother had turned him on to. Now a Chet Baker cool-jazz man, he left school and began playing in a local dance band, the Modernaires, until he was drafted into the army for a three-year stint, which he served playing in military bands in Cyprus and Egypt and studying jazz-arranging via a correspondence course with Bill Russo, who had written for Stan Kenton’s big band. Once back home, he formed his own combo: the John Barry Seven.
It was 1957, and Barry, now 23, surveyed the contemporary music scene with a calculated eye. Kenton and his ilk were on the way out. Barry’s group would be rock ’n’ rollers with maybe a little jazz around the edges. “Mostly we were copying Bill Haley and Freddie Bell and the Bellboys”—a whiter-than-white American group more popular in the U.K. than at home—“because we didn’t know anything. But it was an education.” The Seven backed Paul Anka on a tour of the U.K. and landed a recording contract with EMI. TV clips from the period show Barry as a handsome, but not altogether self-possessed, bandleader; with his long face, big chin, spidery body, and natural reserve, he looks a little like Henry Fonda trying his darnedest to do a Cab Calloway impression. Meanwhile, in the studio, Buddy Holly and Duane Eddy were providing further “education.” In truth, Barry was a bit of a magpie: listening to his records from this period you can hear a musician willing to try on almost anything. (Was that a steal from “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a loaner from “Take Five”?) Listening to those records, you also realize why Britain needed the Beatles even more than America did, which I hope Barry doesn’t take as a knock; it’s just that his true gift lay elsewhere.
Barry had also begun writing and arranging hit songs for Adam Faith, a blond, handsome, typically wan British rocker of the era who could do Elvis or Holly as the occasion dictated, and it was through Faith, in 1959, that Barry finally broke into film scoring. Faith was starring in Beat Girl, a rock ’n’ roll exploitation picture (“The dynamic drama of youth Mad about ‘BEAT’ Living for ‘KICKS,’ ” as the film’s typographically challenged posters put it), and Barry was hired to do the music. His brassy, hard-charging score owed something to Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme and to the jazzy music Elmer Bernstein had written for The Man with the Golden Arm and Sweet Smell of Success, but Barry’s music had a drive and melodic drama all its own. It was a sound that would lead directly to his involvement three years later with Dr. No.
The Bond producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, had hired Monty Norman, a British songwriter and musical-theater composer (he had a West End hit called Expresso Bongo and wrote the English lyrics for Irma La Douce, a French import), to score the film. He contributed some pleasant calypsos and other island songs—Dr. No is set in Jamaica—but the producers were not sure about his attempts at a main theme, so Barry, now with a handful of film and TV credits, was called in to help goose the Bond music in a more secret-agently direction. Armed with a notated melody (a tune Norman had originally written for an unfinished musical about East Indians, based on a V. S. Naipaul novel), a bit of direction, and a promise from Saltzman and Broccoli that if he aced the commission (for which he was paid a mere £250) he’d have future work on what they hoped would prove to be a long series of films, Barry came back with his contribution to the “James Bond Theme” as we know it today, officially credited to Norman as writer and Barry as arranger.
Shirley “Gold-fin-gah” Bassey on stage with the John Barry Orchestra, 1964. From Mirrorpix/courtesy of the Everett Collection.

That credit has long stuck in Barry’s craw. For years, his stock line in interviews has been variations on “Well, if I didn’t write it, why did they hire me for 11 more movies?” (He declined to explore the topic with me.) Authorship can be a moving target in any collaborative art, but auteurists and other fundamentalists can take comfort in knowing that the Bond credit has in fact been adjudicated three times in Norman’s favor, most recently in a 2001 libel trial when he sued The Times of London for having wrongly declared Barry the writer (though the paper was only recounting an article in the music magazine Mojo). Accounts of the trial, which featured testimony from both men as well as a number of colleagues and musicologists, are fascinating, and you could probably write a book parsing the whole muddy question. To me, three points seem clear. One, the sound of the thing, seemingly rooted in Barry’s previous work although here opening up like a sudden leap from two to three dimensions, is as essential to its effect as its sequential melodies. Two, like a lot of great 20th-century music, the “James Bond Theme” is a glorious mongrel, a singular hybrid of jazz, rock, and show music, with bits and pieces copped from or inspired by Artie Shaw, Stan Kenton again, Duane Eddy again, Indian pop music (by way of the West End), bebop, and Vegas. It is so bastardized as to be utterly original.
And three, regardless of who did what in cobbling the “James Bond Theme” together, it made Barry.
Nineteen sixty-four was a very good year to be young and single and successful in London, then the world’s most happening city, which is to say that it was a very good year to be John Barry. He scored five films that year as well as a TV special for Sophia Loren. The Goldfinger soundtrack LP went to No. 1 in America, knocking aside A Hard Day’s Night. Everyone loved the title song, except for the notoriously abrasive Harry Saltzman, who when he first heard it told Barry that if there were more time before the premiere (the music was written on an excruciatingly tight deadline) he’d scrub the whole thing and start over. One night, as it happened—and in the retelling, at least, it seems to have happened every night—Barry was having dinner at the Pickwick Club, the fashionable Swinging London–era restaurant, when Saltzman walked in. This was not long after the Goldfinger album had gone to No. 1, and the producer stopped at Barry’s table. The composer was dining with his new best mates, Michael Caine and Terence Stamp. “Harry was being very nice to Mike because he wanted him for The Ipcress File,” Barry recalls. “And then he just looked at me like I was something the cat had dragged in and said”—Barry here imitates a grudging Saltzman, his voice low and dripping with disdain—“‘Thank you.’ That’s how he said it. And I remember Terry Stamp, he said, ‘You @#$%& @#$%&!’ And the whole club, because they were all people in the business, everyone burst out laughing. Because everybody wanted to say that to Harry Saltzman.”
I should note that in alternative tellings of this story, Stamp called Saltzman a “@#$%&,” but Caine well remembers the evening’s gist—and many others like it. “Oh, every night. Every night we were in the Pickwick Club,” the actor says on the phone from London. “We were in the first great disco—can’t remember the bloody name of it now. The Ad Lib! Terry and John and I would be up there the whole time. We were sort of a trio going around and doing that stuff.” Apparently, the three cut quite a swath through London—Barry, a ladies’ man, “had his share and several other people’s,” as Caine puts it—with Barry further distinguishing himself, even in that peacock time and place, as a notably stylish dresser. “He’d always wear the very latest suits,” Caine says, “but never flashy. He was always … cool, I think, is the word for John. He was always cool, always quiet, and very, very sure of himself. I mean, he didn’t need to impress anybody. If you could write like he did, you didn’t need a red suit, you know?”
As it happens, Caine had been crashing at Barry’s Cadogan Square pad when the composer was pulling an all-nighter on the Goldfinger theme. “He was just going bong bong bing bong all night on the piano. Never stopped. I couldn’t sleep. And I got up about seven o’clock and I thought, Well, I guess some breakfast and coffee at least—and he was still banging away. And then he played me the song and I was the first person to hear ‘Goldfinger.’ ” I ask Caine if he kibitzed on that one or on the music for any of the films he and Barry both worked on (among them Zulu, The Ipcress File, and The Lost Valley). “Oh no, you couldn’t do that with him! I mean, I never tried—but you just knew you couldn’t do that. He was a very personal writer. Very personal. He didn’t discuss or ask your opinion or anything. He didn’t have to. He knew it was great.”
In 1966, Barry scored four films, including his first American movie, The Chase, with Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda, and Born Free. “I don’t think the song was too corny,” Barry tells me, still smarting from yet another producer’s slight. In 1968, he won his third Oscar, for his faux-medieval choral score for The Lion in Winter. The producers hated that one too, Barry claims—a leitmotif. (Not that he himself is always easy on his collaborators: Richard Lester, for whom he scored three films, including The Knack and Petulia, is “rather pretentious,” and Francis Coppola, for whom he scored The Cotton Club and Peggy Sue Got Married, “thought he knew more about music than he actually did. And I’m not saying that in a mean way.”)
Midnight Cowboy should have earned him another Oscar nomination; his score for 1971’s Mary, Queen of Scots did. But as the new decade wore on, Barry’s output slowed somewhat. He moved to Hollywood in 1975, became a tax exile (which prevented him from scoring The Spy Who Loved Me), and began honing the liquid orchestral style that would be epitomized by his music for Somewhere in Time, a 1979 time-travel romance starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, and later Out of Africa. He met his current wife, Laurie, in 1978 through Barbara Broccoli, Cubby’s daughter and the current producer of the Bond movies. The couple moved to Long Island in 1980, and—minus a few dozen films, a near-death experience with a ruptured esophagus, and an Order of the British Empire—that pretty much brings us up to date.
In Barry’s mind, his success goes back to those Saturday afternoons in his father’s cinemas, and the nuts-and-bolts instincts he developed for what works and what doesn’t in film, what will draw an audience in and what won’t. “Whether it’s a Bond movie,” he says, “or an Out of Africa or Dances with Wolves, or a comedy like The Knack, I think if I like it, if it really makes me laugh or makes me cry, if I do that, I think that the audience is going to go for it, too. And I’ve worked on some movies where I’ve not been able to do that. And I’ll just say to the director, ‘You know what? I’m really not right for this.’ And I’ve never once been wrong. I’ve never turned down a movie and then it’s come out and been a huge success. Now, I’m pleased about that.” He laughs, but doesn’t disown the remark. Instead he goes on: “I look at the ones I’ve turned down almost with more interest than the ones I’ve done, and I’m really pleased when they fail.” He laughs again. “It’s an awful thing to say.”
But sometimes, I point out, he’s been wrong in the other direction, choosing projects that for whatever reason failed to find an audience.
He cocks an offended eyebrow. “Like what?”
Howard the Duck … ? I venture.
“Oh, that was—well, Howard the Duck was a very rare situation. It was George Lucas, so I thought, It’s going to be great to work with George Lucas. This guy really knows his stuff. And it was one of the few times he didn’t. Jesus. I mean, it just did not work. It was a disaster.” For the record, since I actually watched the thing, Barry wrote a nicely moody film noir theme that was better than any movie with the words “Howard” and “Duck” in its title probably deserves.
Barry, photographed at his home in Oyster Bay, New York. Not pictured: five Oscars, four Grammys. Photograph by Gasper Tringale.

I ask about the vein of melancholy and loss that runs through so much of his work, not only in Midnight Cowboy and Out of Africa and Dances with Wolves, where Barry’s score almost single-handedly turns what could have been a Boys’ Life adventure saga—arrowheads! tepees! abducted white women!—into a meditation on the vanishing frontier, but even in some of the Bonds. You Only Live Twice, for instance, in which the downbeat title song, with its shivering countermelody, has the singer, Nancy Sinatra, sounding as if living twice weren’t such a great idea after all. Or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with its poignantly ironic love song, “We Have All the Time in the World,” sung with a breaking voice by Louis Armstrong in “What a Wonderful World” mode. Armstrong was ailing at the time of the recording, having been hospitalized for heart problems; Barry chose him, he says, precisely because Armstrong “didn’t have all the time in the world.” He would die two years later.
But where were we? Melancholy and loss. Rather than tackle the subject head-on, Barry segues rather abruptly into a long remembrance about the Luftwaffe fire bombing that devastated York in 1942, when he was eight: “I remember looking over the city—this big, big red thing in the sky. And then my mother took me down into the city. And the stink—ugh—the burning … whatever. It was just … it was just horrendous. My school was hit. And five of the nuns who stayed there—they were all killed. That was the first time we were in the thick of it. And the streets had melted. The heat from the houses burning on both sides actually melted the tar in the road. And years later they found all kinds of stuff that had been blown out of windows and into the tar. I still think of the stench. Oh god, it was unlike anything you ever smelled or smelled since.”
This isn’t the first time he has shared this memory with a journalist, and there’s something almost rote about the way he launched into it as soon as I brought up the subject of loss. But it’s hardly a canned response. His voice has gotten softer and even lower, and he seems genuinely moved by the memories he has summoned, that early experience of fragility of life and place. What he’s showing me, I think, either purposefully or reflexively, is that he’s a kind of Method actor, or Method composer.
“You make it personal,” he says. But he’s reluctant to delve too deeply into his psyche, plus he seems tired—we’ve been talking for a few hours—so instead I ask if I can look at his Oscars, and we both brighten up.
Bruce Handy is a Vanity Fair deputy editor.

KeywordsOscars, Awards, Movies, Music, Actors

I'll always remember him for the music of the Persuaders

Yeah, and the soundtrack from Persuaders contains, among others, "Midnight Cowboy". My reaction to that song was zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.........(boring harmonica)