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Burton Stephen Lancaster, actor: born New York City 2 November 1913; married 1935 June Ernst (marriage dissolved 1936), 1946 Norma Anderson (two sons, three daughters; marriage dissolved 1969), 1990 Suzy Scherer; died Los Angeles 21 October 1994.

ROBERT SIODMAK's The Crimson Pirate is prefaced by a brief pre- credit sequence. In it Burt Lancaster, resplendent in striped crimson pants, silver dripping from his ears, with a grin as wide as a Cadillac's radiator, swings out from the rigging of his brig to the very foreground of the screen, so close that one half expects him to leap through it as gracefully as if it were merely a paper hoop in a circus ring and alight in the auditorium, breathless but upright. Directly addressing the audience, he asks them to believe everything they are about to see in the film. Just a moment later, however, following a second, equally implausible leap and a second, equally irresistible grin, he amends this to 'No - believe only half what you see]'

Yet the paradox of the film is that Lancaster's prodigious acrobatics, which find him, accompanied by Nick Cravat, swinging from balcony to wall, from wall to window, from window to rooftop and from rooftop right into the audience's laps, were entirely authentic. Lancaster, already the recipient of an athletics shcolarship to New York University, actually launched his show-business career in the Thirties as a professional acrobat, partnering the wiry, diminutive if not quite dwarfish Cravat (as 'Lang and Cravat') in third- rate circuses, night clubs and vaudeville theatres. And in such early swashbuckling movies as Jacques Tourneur's The Flame and the Arrow (1950), The Crimson Pirate (1952) and Byron Haskin's His Majesty O'Keefe (1954), in Carol Reed's melodrama Trapeze (1956) and also in numerous westerns, he was one of the rare Hollywood actors to dispense with stuntmen.

Though he would subsequently extend his range to the point where it became impossible to imagine a genre to which his personality was unsuited, and at the close of his career he would appear totally at ease in films (specifically of European origin) which succeeded in eluding the tentacular influence of genre altogether, the essence of Lancaster's presence as an actor continued to reside in this intense, if increasingly introverted, physicality - the physicality, so to speak, of the acrobat in mufti. Nor was it without latent sexual connotations. At an era of film-making when moral convention required that bodies be 'masked', like faces in a carnival, his glistening, muscular, irremediably proletarian physique tended to remain disturbingly indiscreet.

Lancaster, who had been raised in the violent East Harlem area of New York, mooched around for years after the failure of his circus act. In 1940 he enlisted and saw action with Special Services in the North African and Italian campaigns. Then in 1945, according to the sort of Hollywood legend of which one should probably believe only half, he chanced to share an elevator ride with a theatrical producer who assumed that someone so rugged, virile and good-looking could only be an actor and who consequently invited him to audition for a leading role in a Broadway play, The Sound of Hunting.

Whatever the truth of that, it is a fact that, by virtue of his performance, he was almost at once cast opposite Ava Gardner in Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946), a tight, atmospheric, low-budget thriller that established Lancaster's reputation in Hollywood.

Lancaster's career spanned 40 years and encompassed more than 50 movies; and, at least until the Seventies and Eighties (ungrateful decades for stars of his generation) when Hollywood utterly capitulated to the Fordist (Henry, not John) assembly-line ideology of remakes and premakes, sequels and prequels, he had the good fortune to make fewer outright duds than most of his peers.

His natural extroversion and ebullience were seen to advantage in westerns, of which some memorable examples were Robert Aldrich's Apache and Vera Cruz (both 1954), John Sturges's Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), in which he played Wyatt Earp to the Doc Holliday of Kirk Douglas (a not dissimilar actor whose career has run oddly parallel to Lancaster's), John Huston's The Unforgiven (1960), Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid (1972), which was widely read as an allegory of the Vietnam War, and Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976).

By what is only an apparent paradox, however, his physicality was intensified when, chafed and trammelled and internalised, it was left to coil in upon itself. In Brute Force (1947), a repellently grim prison melodrama by Jules Dassin, the sweaty glitter of his bared torso was transformed by William Daniels's high-contrast cinematography into an Expressionist icon not unworthy of O'Neill's Hairy Ape. In Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity (1953) he made love to Deborah Kerr in a beach scene that set a standard in romantic soft-core eroticism for years to come an

Illustrations of corvid birds from F.O. Morris's Book of British Birds (1861-1891): graphic collage by Giles Watson.

THE MORRIGAN'S DARK MINISTERS:
Poems by Giles Watson

Cu Chulainn and the Morrigan

It was a shriek to clot blood, or curdle milk;
The night air hung in clumps about our room.

I saw his buttock flash white in moonlight, the skins
That lined our bed strewn behind him.

With his britches I pursued him, grabbed
His sword, his gleaming battleaxe, his shield.

His chainmail weighed me down. His breath
Hung behind him like a stain in crystal night.

Her horse, blood-red in blenching moonshine,
Tramped on a single leg, the chariot pole

Pegged to his bleeding head, rammed
Through his body, out his sanguine, puckered arse,

His whinny made angels writhe. And She
Was red as him, her eyebrows gore-tinged, her cloak

Dipped in dregs of battle. Beside them, a man
Drove a cow by hazel-fork, with tonking bell, inanely grinning.

My husband, goosepimpled in the dark, his bollocks
Taut with cold, bellowed, “I am Cu Chulainn, cattle-master

And you, a cow-stealer. Submit, or feel my sword.”
And she of the reddened brow strode up to him,

Riled him with riddles, till he clutched the chariot wheel
And wept with rage. Her screech made mud clots

In the puddles where they stood.
I felt ridiculous,
Out at midnight, clutching britches, sword and axe

And a chainmail suit, for a man, alone and naked.

On his shoulder, a croaking crow.

Source material: The Ulster cycle records a number of encounters between Cu Chulainn and the battle goddess, sometimes known as the Morrigan, and sometimes as the Babdh. This poem records a typical meeting between the two, from the perspective of Cu Chulainn’s wife. See Miranda Green, Celtic Goddesses: Warriors, Virgins and Mothers, British Museum Press, 1995, pp. 44-45: “The hero was lying asleep one night when he heard a fearful shriek and rushed, naked, outside, his wife following with his weapons and his clothes. He encountered the battle-fury in the image of a red woman, with red eyebrows and a red cloak, riding in a chariot to which was attached a single red horse with one leg, the chariot pole passing through its body and secured to its forehead with a peg. Next to the vehicle walked a man holding a fork of hazel, driving a cow. Cu Chulainn challenged the appropriation of this animal, since he was guardian over all the cattle of Ulster. The couple responded in riddles… the apparition disappeared save for the fury herself who remained, in the form of a crow.



A Game of Gwyddbwyll

Armies of gold on a silver board
Reflect the fractured faces
Of a pair of kings.

Distorted raven-shadows
Wheel across them
Like windblown ash.

A king’s finger makes a move,
Its whorled print spreads
And fades on yellow metal.

Cries of men and raven-cronks,
Flurries of black talons
And wings. The impassive faces

Of two kings. Skulls crash
To ground, backbones fracture,
Spleens rupture, gashes bleed.

Eyes are picked out, sucking
Out of sockets. Birds tussle
For dead-man morsels, and craw.

A raven yawns; a bridge of blood
Spans his bristled gape. The king
Withdraws his hand.

“Your move.”


Source material: ‘The Dream of Rhonabwy’ from the Mabinogion, tells the story of a surreal battle between the forces of Arthur and Owain’s ravens. Arthur and Owain play Gwyddbwyll (a game similar to Chess), with golden pieces on a silver board, while the slaughter continues in the valley below. This poem describes the part of the battle in which the ravens have the upper hand, and destroy a large section of Arthur’s army by carrying the men into sky and smashing their bodies against the ground. The carnage of the battle is graphically depicted by Alan Lee in his illustrations to accompany Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Mabinogion.


Tsauha

I am Tsauha,
Arthur returned
With bloodsword beak
And burning eyes;
I skywheel above Dover
To save fools from suicide.

I am Chauk Daw,
Blacker than a crow,
With bloodstained legs,
Becketed and blazoned
On Kentish banners
Above their burnished blades.

I am Killigrew,
The Cornish Jack,
Ousted from my homeland.
In pinewoods and
On inland fields,
I sneeze my own orisons.

I am Palores,
The darksome Celt,
Drubbed for my druid ways
By Romans and by Christians.
My black wings are
Flapping above you.

Source material: Francesca Greenoak, British Birds: their Folklore, Names and Literature, pp. 189-190. Tsauha, Chauk Daw, Killigrew, Cornish Jack and Palores are all common names for the Chough, which used to be specifically associated with Cornwall, but is now extinct there due to persecution. In King Lear, Edgar tells the blind and suicidal Gloucester that there are choughs wheeling high above the cliffs of Dover, suggesting that in Shakespeare’s day this was a distinctive feature of that area (it is not today). The bird is also associated with Thomas a Becket, and five of them appear upon the coat of arms of Canterbury. The association of the

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