An Actor & His Art: Herbert Lom Beyond the Acting World.
- This is a feature from the last issue of After Nyne Magazine, which I founded, and acted as Editor in Chief for until I left the company in 2019. This piece is too interesting just to sit in an archive, so I’m bringing it to Medium for general release, especially because there’s a previously unseen picture of Picasso’s studio, taken by the actor himself. Many thanks to Alec Lom, for being so candid, and so helpful.
Screen and stage actor Herbert Lom, best known for his role in the Pink Panther films, was also a lifelong painter and art collector who met famous artists like Picasso, recalls his son, Alec Lom
Like many actors, my father Herbert Lom strove throughout his 60-year career to avoid being pigeon-holed or typecast in any one particular role. He believed that to restrict the imagination of the casting director (from whom he earned a living) was bad for business.
However, because he was born in Prague in Czechoslovakia and emigrated to England around the start of World War II, British producers would often cast my Dad in his early films as the swarthy villain, the East European gangster, for example playing opposite Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers in The Ladykillers.
Later though, he went on to play many different characters, including Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (in the screen adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in 1956) and the shaven-headed King of Siam, in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The King and I at London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
And many years later, he was thrilled when Hollywood producer and director Blake Edwards (husband of our very own national treasure Julie Andrews) offered him the chance to play a comedy lead, in the Pink Panther series. In those films, he portrayed the eye-twitching and long-suffering Chief Inspector Dreyfus, who was driven mad by bumbling Inspector Clouseau, a role that cemented his lifelong friendship with Peter Sellers. I met Sellers once at the studio. He rather threw me when I was introduced as he was naked apart from two things — a pair of baggy ‘Y’ fronts and a false nose. But that’s another story.
Throughout his life, my father, who died in 2012 aged 95, maintained another passionate relationship — with art. As a creative artist himself with broad horizons as a performer, his tastes in art were also wide-ranging. His passion for collecting was combined with his desire to meet and mix with the famous artists of his day, with whom he felt an empathy and affinity. He was also a talented painter himself, although he kept that private, and just as he’d pick up a paintbrush to relax between film roles, he was also fond of playing the piano.
Appreciating the artistic talents of others, and spending time alone with his own easel, opened another world for him, far away from the pressures of the international movie business, the often-gruelling schedules and long hours at the studio and on location. He found a more peaceful life through his art, which helped him unwind between film roles, and he especially enjoyed sketching and painting members of his own family.
I also remember him telling me how much he admired Pablo Picasso, whom he met at his studio. My father was filming on location in Spain at the time and, on one of his days off, he visited Picasso’s workshop. My father was hugely impressed with the genius of the man, his prolific work ethic and passion for life.
Later, by contrast, I remember being under-whelmed when I saw a work by Picasso my father had hung in our home. It comprised a square, white sheet of paper with a single, thick, black brush-stroke, a circle (for a face), two dots (for eyes) and a semi-circle (for a smiling mouth). That was it. Oh, and Picasso’s signature at the bottom. The picture has long since gone, but I remember as a teenager feeling somehow cheated and thinking: “Hey, even I could draw that!”
In 1961, my father also had a chance to visit Georges Braque, the famous French painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. Braque welcomed him to his Paris studio and gave him a painting, which I remember he signed “Pour Monsieur Lom”, quite an honour. My father, like me, was also an admirer of the Swiss sculptor and painter Giacometti, famed for his elongated figures.
Another sculpture, a priceless statue of the beautiful Chinese Empress Li Soo, was one of my father’s most treasured possessions. Actually, I mention this in an entirely fictional sense, as I refer to one of his favourite film roles, in the 1966 film Gambit, in which he played opposite Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine. In the movie, my father was cast as Ahmed Shahbandar, said to be “the richest man in the world”, who coveted the statue because it reminded him of his late wife. In the plot, cat burglar Harry Dean (Caine) recruits Shirley MacLaine’s character to help him steal the bust. The three actors very much enjoyed working together. I won’t give away the ending, just to say that the real winner, after the film came out, was my father, who gained two good new friends.
Some years later, my father was lucky enough to own a holiday home in Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and he spent many months there, painting the rugged, volcanic landscapes of the island, and also those of neighbouring island Lanzarote. That was where he met and became friends with the celebrated Spanish artist, sculptor and architect César Manrique. I remember visiting Manrique’s house with my Dad. The house was built in the round like a doughnut, encircling a giant, gnarled and ancient tree. Manrique took my father and I on a grand tour of the house and I remember being shown a large room filled only with cushions, almost floor to ceiling. “Ah, this is one of my favourite rooms, Herbert,” the artist told my father. “This is the room I reserve for making love.” I made my excuses and left, as they say.
My father admired the works of Rembrandt and Guttuso, but also appreciated the more avant-garde, including many modern and abstract artists. He once cherished a bowl by the influential 20th-century Japanese potter Shoji Hamada. My father’s sister, Anna, was an illustrator who drew fashion designs, and I am delighted that this artistic gene has been passed to my own daughter, Rosie Lom, who is a photographer and designer (www.rosielom.com).
As for my own childhood, I grew up in a creative household where, because of the circles in which my father moved professionally, actors and directors often came to socialise. My mother, Dina, worked in the creative arts too, and ran her own literary agency, so authors and script writers were frequent visitors. I recall that most of the writers were impoverished, depressed and always seemed to have fallen on hard times. How curious then that this should have inspired me to become a writer myself!
I have worked as a Fleet Street journalist, BBC scriptwriter and author all my life and was, for six years, a reporter at the Press Association. As Arts Editor, I covered the arts scene, also film, theatre and entertainment news. I now run my own media agency (Alec Lom Events & Communications), helping businesses grow through the media and having a slightly unusual surname sometimes helps. A celebrity visiting for an interview might ask me: ‘Are you any relation to Herbert?’. When I confirmed this, it would put them at their ease. Once, when my father and I were alone together, he said to me: “You know, my son, there’s a trick I often use at parties. I say to famous people when I meet them: ‘Do you realise that I’m related to the great Alec Lom?’.” He had a wicked sense of humour and liked to make me blush.
One Christmas, many years ago, when my wife and I moved into our new London home, my father presented us with a unique house-warming gift. It was a piece of art that I treasure to this day and which still hangs on our wall. The ink had barely dried on the estate agent’s contract when my father arrived to help us move in — clutching a painting. It was a framed oil, in precise detail depicting our house. For the past several weeks, it transpired, he had been secretly painting the property whilst sat at the wheel of his car parked in the street outside our new front door.
“You don’t have a front garden yet, which is a shame, so I’ve added some roses and tulips to your painting,” he told me. “Now you will have to concentrate on growing a garden.”
I think that’s called artistic license.
Read more about Herbert Lom and his career on the film database IMDb: https://imdb.to/2E3UYgb. Alec Lom’s media support agency is at www.aleclom.com
