Profile: Brian Cox
This appeared in Scottish Field in February 2020
BRIAN COX, award-winning Hollywood actor, has the values of his Dundee upbringing printed through him like a stick of rock — and not just because he once asked the city to bestow an honour upon the Dandy’s pigtailed provocateur, Beryl the Peril.
Like Dundee itself, Cox has faced tough breaks and hard knocks; “They call it the City of Discovery, but they should call it the City of Survival,” he once said. “It’s about a group of people who’ve been written off more times than I know, and they still go on.”
Cox’s reinvention began early when his father Charles, a factory weaver, was sent to register him as Colin. “The registrar said: “I don’t like that name,” and my dad said, “I don’t either.” So he renamed me Brian instead.”
The prologue to his 1991 memoir Salem to Moscow describes an adoring relationship between Cox and his dad, which was shaken to the core when Chic Cox went bankrupt, developed pancreatic cancer and died three weeks after the diagnosis when Brian was 8.
His mother Mary resented the money her husband’s good nature had cost their business, and forever reminded the youngest of her five children, “charity begins at home, Brian.” After Chic’s death, she had a nervous breakdown and was found by her small son with her head in the gas oven. “I thought she was cleaning it,” he said. “They gave her electroshock therapy, which destroyed her memory, and she wasn’t even sure of who I was for a while.”
Brian was taken in by his oldest sister, Betty, who was 21, married with two children and a third on the way, in a two-room tenement, where a toilet on the stairs was shared with five other families. “It was tough for her to take me on. But she did me proud and I’m devoted to her.”
At school he struggled and was put in a stream classified as educationally subnormal. “A good bunch of guys but some headbangers” he recalls “Quite a lot ended up in prison”. Eventually, he taught himself to read by listening to his sister’s gramophone records and matching the songs to the words printed on the label.
Yet he was articulate and would be sent on complex errands into town by the headmaster, often staying away all day. He also “plunked” school in favour of the cinema for repeat viewings of Giant and Hell on Frisco Bay, once waking up at 4am to find the picturehouse in darkness and he was locked in.
From an early age, he also enjoyed performing, placed on top of the family’s coal bunker by his dad to entertain his cronies with Al Jolson impressions. “People would applaud and laugh and I thought, “This is nice.” So I chose my path from very early on and can’t remember thinking I’d want to be anything else.
However he might never have trodden the boards without Dundee Rep. After Scotland’s answer to Albert Finney failed his 11-plus, he left school at 15 just as a job opened up shifting sets, mopping floors and bulking out crowd scenes at the local theatre. “I had an accent you could cut with a knife, but nobody commented on it. People just made me feel at home. Everybody called each other darling. Backstage you saw half-naked women running around in their underwear, their dressing gowns half-open. People were so uninhibited and I thought it was amazing.” For the teenager, this was a comforting place full of acceptance until it burnt down on his 17th birthday. By then however, he’d found the confidence to apply for a place at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and was accepted. Six years after leaving school, he was on stage in the West End, playing Orlando in As You Like It.
He also fell in love with fellow actress, Caroline Burt, who was polished, stable, and sensible. They had two children, Margaret and Alan, and while Cox built up a reputation on the London stage at both the RSC and the National Theatre Caroline held the family and finances together in Fulham.
Despite his love of movies, film acting came relatively late to him when he was 40 and landed 10 minutes of screentime in a film called Manhunter as the first incarnation of Thomas Harris’ homicidal cannibal Hannibal Lecktor.
Cox based his chilly rationalist on Peter Manuel, the Beast of Birkenshaw, who was a serial killer before the term was even invented. When the film’s producer went bust, the film and Cox’s performance was buried — but then rediscovered after the success of Silence of the Lambs
Cox likes to speculate how sick Sir Anthony Hopkins must have become of critics raving about Cox’s clinical Lektor whenever they’re supposed to be reviewing Hopkins more Grand Guignol Lecter; “I only made £10,000 and Tony has made nearly $60m. That’s the only regret I have.’
However just as things were coming together professionally, his 18-year marriage to Caroline was falling apart. “It’s sad when you have success and people who have come along with you are not there at the final hurdle, especially when you’ve both worked so hard for it. Caroline was the first person to believe in me, apart from my family,” he said once. “She was a wonderful mother to my kids. I have never quarreled with her.” However, his son, Alan, who was to become an actor himself, was more public in his complaints, remarking that his father had never been around. He even missed the birth of his firstborn by ten minutes.
To make money quickly and locally, Cox returned home to the stage in Britain and put Hollywood on hold. He now feels that if Manhunter had become a bigger hit and pulled him into Hollywood, it might have been the worst thing that could have happened: “I don’t know if I could have handled it. I had to learn through rejection — and the lesson with Manhunter is that a film like that doesn’t have success locked up.”
Four years later, however, with a divorce and two failed relationships under his belt, he had amassed enough rejection to roll the dice again. Since then he’s been in crowd-pleasers such as The Bourne Identity, Braveheart and Rob Roy, critically acclaimed work including Adaptation and Match Point, and stinkers like Mad About Mambo, Chain Reaction and SuperTroopers.
Often he’s cast as the villain, not only because these are meaty roles for a thespian carnivore but because the knife-edge into wrongdoing fascinates him “There is a choice from early on, especially coming from where I come from. You could go one way or another, and breaking the law was a very easy option.”
The money is another influencing factor: he’s now a wealthy man with properties in London and Brooklyn New York but his greatest fear is poverty, making his career a mix of comfortable Hollywood paydays and less fiscally rewarding projects. Even when Sir Tom Stoppard wrote the lead in Rock’n’Roll with Cox in mind, he accepted the west end stage role in a manner that was half-rueful. “Financially this makes no sense,” he told The Times. “We’ll have to have a yard sale when we get back and sell the kids.”
Yet the same fiscal alertness has also made him a patron of many good causes. He funds a scholarship every three years for promising working-class actors. During his two terms as rector for Dundee University, where he campaigned via Skype from film locations in Canada, he helped fundraise the university’s research centre into global diseases including diabetes, which he was diagnosed with several years ago and blames on his poor diet as a child (“I practically never saw an apple till I was 15.”)
Until very recently he was also the figurehead for the Mid-Lin Daycare Centre for the elderly but was dropped after he told the Guardian that cannabis was “wonderful” and would “‘recommend to everyone to get stoned’ because he felt it helped take the edge off today’s politics. “Dundee is drug-ridden, we just can’t support Brian’s views on cannabis,” said a spokesperson.
Unlike younger stars, Cox has never been shy about offering views on topics beyond film. He is anti-Brexit and was one of several prominent Scottish cultural figures who joined the SNP on a platform calling for independence. He is still considering whether to publicly campaign for Scottish independence for a second time. “Probably — except maybe I’ll have to keep my mouth shut because people will be saying ‘what is he daein’, he lives in America.’”
In his defence, Cox points to roles such as his six-year tenure as Dundee rector, “I think my track record from my relationship to Scotland speaks for itself… I’ve done my time as a full Scot”
Surprisingly for a self-described ‘lefty republican’ Cox accepted a CBE in 2002. At the time he said it would please some of his family: “I have a sister who is a royalist and I’ve another sister who’s not.” His loyal royalist sibling suggested he was due a knighthood too, but Cox felt this was a step too far. “I used to make jokes about Sean Connery; I said, “Well if he becomes president of Scotland, how can he be president Sir Sean Connery?’
Now he says he even regrets the CBE, telling a podcast this year that he should have “thought better” instead of accepting the honour, especially since he has been a Scottish independence activist, although “they are determined to keep the Queen… It will never be a proper republic.”
This year Cox also revealed a more intimate brush with royalty, when Princess Margaret visited him backstage when he was 23. “I’d just washed my hair so I was sort of glistening . . . She put her fingers on my shirt, and said, ‘This is a lovely shirt’. And she started to run her fingers down the inside.” A 2007 biography of actor Alan Bates, who appeared with Cox in the play, recalled that the Queen’s sister had then invited him to “dine with her privately at Kensington Palace” and after Cox refused, Margaret “turned her attention to Alan and a similar invitation was forthcoming, but he too declined.”
If nothing else, this reminds us how few romantic roles Cox has had in his career, although he did manage to scoop up Helen Mirren and carry her off in the spy caper RED, aged 63. His delight in scene was palpable, not least because off-mic, a mischievous Mirren whispered in his ear: “My bloody husband couldn’t do that”
Off-screen, Cox’s second marriage, to German actress Nicole Ansari, has brought him new happiness, solidity and two teen sons, Orson and Torin. With characteristic candour, Cox admits the absence of a father figure in his own childhood has meant he wrestles with parenting. “I don’t think I am a bad person, but I’m not one of those hands-on parents,” he has noted. “I’m not disciplined enough and I’m too soft, too anarchic. And I’ve got a terrible temper. I’ll get very angry, particularly with my youngest as he’s a bit of a chancer.”
“ I get angry at them taking things for granted in a way. But you can’t damn them because they didn’t have your disadvantages. And my disadvantages turned out to be my advantages. I consider myself lucky to have had them, and they don’t have that struggle.”
As a young man, Cox says he couldn’t wait to leave Dundee, but in later years came to embrace his roots Every summer he brings his American-based half-German/half-Scots sons to Dundee. “I love coming back here and my wife adores Scotland. The only trouble is the weather. It’s the light. I remember being in Glasgow doing Strictly Sinatra and I got depressed. At 11 o’clock in the morning it was already getting dark. If I could take Scotland and put it in South Seas it would be wonderful.”
Last summer, however, he brought not only his family but an American TV crew to Dundee for Succession, the profane HBO saga about the power struggles in a media mogul family in which he plays patriarch Logan Roy.
The role won him Best Actor in a TV Drama at this year’s Golden Globes and he considers himself lucky to have this showcase at his age. “I thought my sell-by date had come,” he admits. “I’ve been doing reasonably well, I can’t complain, but a role like Logan Roy comes along once in a generation and you just go ‘Wow.’” Even more astonishingly, he is now approached by fans who no longer ask for autographs but want him to tell them to “f*ck off” in the stentorian manner of Logan: and usually, he obliges.
His character was originally supposed to hail from Quebec but Succession’s creators changed it to Dundee and wrote an episode where Logan hosts an event at Dundee’s V&A as a surprise (“I said, ‘You’re telling me it’s a f*cking surprise. It’s in Episode 9!”) During a break from filming, Cox took his fellow actors on a tour of his old haunts, including the church where his parents were married.
This is not the first crew Cox has brought back to the city; In 2009 he made a BBC documentary about the city’s jute trade, and in 2013 he was Broughty Ferry burger king, Bob Servant, showcasing his long-buried Dundee accent in Neil Forsyth’s BBC Scotland comedy series, where the impresario’s political campaign was less about independence, more about offering free fake disability stickers to disgruntled car owners on Broughty Ferry’s Brook Street.
However, even the Don of Dundee occasionally gets pushback. “Lorraine Kelly has been pretty worried about it,” he joked about Dundee’s other durable superstar. “She told me she was nervous what the show would do for her back yard.”
