S*x, Eyebrows & A Sickening ‘Love’ – The Awful Truth of David Hemmings | Hollywood Mysteries
A young boy’s voice cracked in the middle of an aria somewhere in Paris, and the man who obsessed over him more than anyone alive turned and waved him off the stage as though he were shooing a fly. There was no goodbye, no more letters, and no second chance. The greatest composer England had produced in a century, a man who had written music expressly for this child and kept him close for years, withdrew his attention as you would switch off a lamp, and he never spoke to him again.
David Hemings was barely 14, and he would spend the rest of his life—right up to the tearful interview filmed only weeks before he died—swearing that nothing improper had ever passed between them. So, what exactly had passed between them? And how does a boy travel from being the muse of a national treasure to a fatal heart attack on a film set in Bucharest by way of full-frontal scandal, four marriages, a rock and roll fortune he managed to squander, and a face so beautiful it defined a whole decade before collapsing into a pair of magnificent eyebrows?
He was born in Guildford, Surrey, on November 18, 1941, into the gray, nervous, blackout England of the war’s middle years. The son of a biscuit salesman who played danceband piano, his mother nursed thwarted musical hopes that she transferred wholesale onto her son. The mother, Kathleen, doted on him, while the father, Arthur, pushed him hard. By the official record, young David Leslie Edward Hemings was a pretty ordinary suburban kid of modest means, but by every other measure, he was a prodigy waiting for someone to notice him.
At the age of just nine, someone did. He had a treble voice of unusual purity and an even more unusual intelligence about how to use it, and the English Opera Group, the touring company at the center of Benjamin Britten’s musical world, took him in. He toured with them, a child wage earner carried from rehearsal rooms to provincial opera houses and back, moving among fastidious adults who treated music like a sacrament. He was the only short-trousered figure in a very grown-up art.
The boy who would one day be photographed half-undressed among the most beautiful women in London began his professional life singing and being looked at rather intently by the most important man in the room. In 1952, when Hemings was 10, he sang the title role in The Little Sweep, the children’s opera at the heart of Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera. Two years later came the part that would define his childhood and haunt his entire adult life.
In September 1954 in Venice, Britten premiered The Turn of the Screw, his chamber opera after Henry James, a story soaked in ambiguity about a governess, two children, and whether the dead can corrupt the living. Britten wrote the role of Miles, the beautiful, possibly doomed little boy at the center of that corruption, with 12-year-old David Hemings expressly in mind. It is one of the great child roles in all of opera, and Hemings sang it so well that plenty of people who heard him swore it has never been bettered since.
For one short season, he was the most adored boy soprano in England. What happened around that role has been whispered about, written about, and televised, and it remains one of the strangest and most controversial relationships in 20th-century English art. Britten lived openly, at least by the standards of the day, with the tenor Peter Pears, the great love of his life. He was also, throughout his career, drawn with unmistakable intensity to adolescent boys.
In the judgment of those who have studied him, 13 was his ideal age, and he once accounted for his genius at writing children’s music by dubiously explaining that he was himself still 13. It is indeed as sinister as it all sounds. Into this world, Hemings walked at 12, and Britten fell for him the way the perpetually obsessed do. But let us not allow for romanticizing the fact; it was the falling of a predator for easy prey.
For two or three months in 1954, David lived with the composer in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast while a tutor took care of his schooling and Britten took care of everything else: the coaching, the presents, the treats, the long and frequent letters. Basil Douglas, who ran the company, put it clearly: Britten loved David. He was in love with him. There will be many, myself included, who will debate whether such a thing is even possible.
It is an oxymoron to call this love at all, because love surely cannot exist when the outcome for one of the people involved is guaranteed to be traumatic. The conductor, Charles Mackerras, watching all this from close range, was blunt about it in a way that implies a circling of the wagons, an attempt to paint the child as the bully and the sensitive 40-something artist as the victim. Hemings, he said, was an extremely good-looking young chap, and he also very much played up to Ben’s obvious adoration of him and drank it in.
Britten’s behavior, Mackerras went on, however, was so much that of the obsessed lover that one thought that maybe he might have behaved improperly with him eventually. And then came the line the whole episode turns on: obviously, it was a sexual attraction, but I’m sure that it was never actually fulfilled. That has been the party line ever since. It is worth noting what makes Hemings’s lifelong defense of the man so bizarre, which is that Britten’s attraction to children definitely did not, on every occasion across his life, remain safely theoretical.
Years before, in 1937, he had taken a 13-year-old chorister named Harry Morris on a family seaside holiday to Cornwall. Morris would maintain ever afterward that the composer came into his room one night and made an advance, that he screamed, that he swung a chair at him, and that Britten’s sister came running at the noise. That is the shadow the whole story is told under, and it is what makes the testimony of the grown Hemings so remarkable, because the closest thing to a verdict comes from Hemings himself, who guarded Britten’s reputation to the very end of his life and never once wavered.
He had, he cheerfully conceded, shared the composer’s bed. I have slept in his bed, yes, he said, only because I was scared at night. He had no illusions that Britten desired him. He simply insisted with the laddish directness that became his signature. That desire was where it stopped, and he produced one of the great deflecting lines in any show business memoir to settle the question. He had never felt threatened, he said, because he was more heterosexual than Genghis Khan.
His final word on the man, delivered in a documentary interview filmed only weeks before his own death, was not grievance, but love. Britten, he said, was not only a father to me, but a friend. And you couldn’t have had a better father or a better friend. That word, father, is the one that would matter most to the Freudian psychoanalysts, at least. His relationship with his own father had soured beyond saving, and he said openly that the composer had been more of a father to him than the man who raised him.
The substitution was complete, which is just what made what came next so cruel. Britten’s love for his favorites had a habit of ending early, and it ended the same brutal way every time. A boy would grow up, his voice would deepen, a new beautiful child would appear in his place, and the warmth would be completely withdrawn without ceremony or mercy. For Hemings, the moment came with literally operatic timing.
Around 1956, on a stage in Paris, in the middle of a performance of The Turn of the Screw, the 14-year-old opened his mouth to sing the aria “Malo,” and his voice broke in front of everyone. Puberty, which spares no soprano, had come for him, and it came at the cruellest possible second: mid-phrase and mid-performance. Britten was furious. He waved the boy away, and that, after years of adoration, was the end of it.
They never spoke again, not once, for the remainder of Britten’s life. Many years later, recalling it all on camera, the hardened, much-married, hard-living Hemings still wept over it. It was partly with pride at having made such music with such a man, and partly at the sheer clean savagery of being discarded the instant he ceased to be useful. He had been loved like a son and then dropped like a prop.
And you can see why a man who learned at 14 that affection could be switched off at will might grow into someone who never entirely trusted it again, and who would treat his own romantic life as a series of rooms to be entered and, in time, just as easily vacated. So, the boy soprano became overnight merely a boy, and a boy with no obvious purpose. He took up painting, studied at the Epsom School of Art, and was good enough at it to mount his own exhibition at 15.
He was good enough, too, that years afterward, every canvas hanging on the walls of his 1970 thriller, The Walking Stick, would turn out to be his own work. His abandoned vocation had been smuggled back onto the screen, but the stage had its hooks in him. As a teenager, he bolted from home altogether and washed up, of all places, in Austria, performing conjuring tricks and playing the guitar in nightclubs, a runaway in a dinner jacket, sawing the months in half.
Then he drifted back to performing in his late teens, singing in clubs before working the legitimate theater. He had been in front of the camera since childhood, and so the transition to the screen was an obvious one. His film debut had actually come in 1954 at 13 in the Ealing racing drama The Rainbow Jacket, and a small part in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan followed in 1957, where he lurked somewhere behind Jean Seberg.
He was an unusual sort of beauty for a leading man, boyish and slight, with large, heavy-lidded eyes and an undershot jaw, a face that contrived to look decadent and fragile at once, as though it knew something it had decided not to tell you. He was in repertory by 17. He was also married to Genista Ouvry and a father by 18. He piled up more small roles in pictures called No Trees in the Street, Sink the Bismarck!, and The Wind of Change, usually as a sullen, misunderstood, or delinquent youth, a type the times had suddenly developed an appetite for.
Then came the genuinely ridiculous stretch of early 60s teen idol musicals whose titles now sound like a lazy parody of that decade: Some People, Live It Up, Be My Guest, and The Girls, in which he traded blows with a young Oliver Reed and began a friendship and a drinking partnership that would hang over quite literally both their lives to the end. He had more than 30 films behind him before he turned 25, almost none of which anyone now can remember.
It was also embedded in the counterculture before it really had a name, and he smoked pot with John Lennon, among others, while the world was still primarily in black and white. By 1965, he was a known quantity in a small world, a pretty face with a faintly dangerous edge and going absolutely nowhere. And then an Italian arrived who did not like the way David Hemings looked.
Michelangelo Antonioni, the austere and unsmiling master of L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse, had been handed a huge wedge of MGM money to make an English language film in London, and he wanted a fresh, unknown, and unspoiled face to carry it. He hated the Method, loathed actorly fuss, and disliked on instinct the idea that David Hemings was right for the part. “You look wrong,” he told him at their first meeting. “You’re too young.”
The role had already been refused by Sean Connery, who balked when Antonioni declined to show him a full script and offered instead a seven-page treatment, which he kept with sublime insolence in a cigarette packet. Terence Stamp, freshly Oscar-nominated, was among the others in contention. The audition was a catastrophe, or at least it seemed to be, because Antonioni sat through it, shaking his head from side to side without pause, which any sane young actor would understand as a kind of clock ticking away his career in real time.
Hemings read it as just that. He did not discover until much later that the director had a mild neurological tick that moved his head whether he was pleased or not. “I left there totally depressed,” Hemings remembered. “Went to the pub and sort of said to anybody who’d listen, ‘I have just really, really blown this.'” His one chance to work with a director he worshipped was gone. He was sure of it.
He had not blown it; he had got it. And the film was Blow-Up. It made him overnight one of the most famous young men alive. He played Thomas, a rich, bored, gifted London fashion photographer modeled loosely on David Bailey, a man who beds and discards models with the same indifference that he photographs them, and who, enlarging a set of idle park snapshots, persuades himself he has accidentally recorded a murder.
The picture is achingly cool, enigmatic, infuriating, and ravishing. Its closing scene, in which Thomas is drawn into a game of tennis played by mimes with no ball and no net until he, too, begins to hear it bouncing, is among the most psychologically shattering endings in all of cinema. It was also highly indecent by the standards of 1966. The sequence in which Hemings photographs the model Veruschka astride her on the floor, shooting and shooting as though the camera itself were the sex, has been ranked among the most erotic ever filmed.
Similarly, an afternoon’s tumble with two aspiring models, one of them a teenage Jane Birkin, delivered the kind of full-frontal nudity no major Hollywood studio had ever risked, and it actually helped bring down the production code that had policed American screens for a generation. A nervous MGM released it through a subsidiary to dodge its own rules. Cannes gave it the Palme d’Or in 1967. The young man who had been too young was all at once the face of Swinging London.
And he greeted the circus with the line of English dryness. “I’ve been discovered half a dozen times,” he said. “This time I think I’ve made it.” The film around him was as strange and as charged as his performance in it. Antonioni had built it out of the actual furniture of Swinging London, real and borrowed: Vanessa Redgrave as the panicked woman in the park, Sarah Miles as a neighbor, Veruschka playing a heightened version of herself, and in its most fondly remembered set-piece, The Yardbirds.
It was captured in the brief, freakish window when both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page stood in the same lineup. Antonioni had wanted The Who, was turned down, and settled for The Yardbirds miming a number called “Stroll On” in a mocked-up club, with Beck, on the director’s instruction, splintering a cheap prop guitar against his amplifier and flinging the broken neck into a crowd of beautiful young extras who stand stone-faced until the instant the wreckage is in the air, at which point they fall on it like starved seagulls.
It is a perfect miniature of the whole picture, which is about the hunger to possess an image and the worthlessness of the image once it is possessed. Hemings’s Thomas grabs the neck, runs into the street, and drops it in the gutter the moment nobody is chasing him. The film withholds its own solution with magnificent arrogance. The supposed murder dissolving back into grain and shadow, and audiences who came for a thriller and left holding a riddle made it a sensation anyway.
It had cost MGM something under $2 million to make and earned around $20 million worldwide. It turned a sleepy-eyed Englishman into the most photographed young man of a moment that was now his. Blow-Up, however, became a personal albatross. The thing that flung open every door and secured him every invitation and then loomed over everything else. A flawless early summit from which there was nowhere to go but down.
He always refused to over-romanticize either the movie or the decade it crystallized, which is kind of why he is so good in it. There is a genuine coldness under the prettiness and aloofness that keeps the film from ever softening into nostalgia. He really didn’t care. What came next was the erratic and often misjudged run of a young star with the whole world’s attention and no idea of what to do with it.
He took a chunk of Warner Brothers money to play Mordred, the malevolent bastard son in Joshua Logan’s lavish, lumbering Camelot in 1967, opposite Richard Harris and his Blow-Up co-star, Vanessa Redgrave. The critics who were generous about almost nothing in that film were especially savage about his singing—a seriously wounding irony for a man who had once outsung every choir boy in England.
He appeared as the sinister brother of a young woman named Sharon Tate in the occult thriller Eye of the Devil, the very picture that gave Tate her first substantial screen role. A few years afterward, she would, of course, be murdered in the most infamous crime in Hollywood’s history, a chilling footnote in Hemings’s career. He reunited with Redgrave and worked for the formidable Tony Richardson on The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1968.
He played Captain Lewis Nolan in a handsome and mordant anti-war epic about military idiocy that everyone admired but almost nobody actually paid to see. The same year, he camped it up gloriously as the ridiculously named Dildano, the hopeless revolutionary opposite Jane Fonda’s space kitten in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella. This was a film so committed to absurdity that it has totally outlasted most of its more earnest sci-fi contemporaries.
And in 1969, he carried the title role of Clive Donner’s Alfred the Great, playing the burdened Saxon King as a reluctant, conflicted, quasi-monk, a brave and totally unglamorous choice that did his standing at the box office no good at all. It was on Alfred the Great that the other Hemings, the incorrigible womanizer who regarded every leading lady as an opportunity, supplied one of his great self-incriminating stories.
Cast opposite the actress Prunella Ransome, he decided, as he later wrote, that “if Prunella was game, so was I,” and resolved to test the theory in their first scripted kiss by, in the grand tradition of the Method, simply doing the real thing. “I was wrong,” he confessed. “I was brought up sharply by her indignant squeal and a very sore tongue.”
Around 1967, in one of the cinema’s great “might have been” stories, Hemings was in the frame to play Alex in an early, doomed attempt at Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, with a treatment by Terry Southern, the photographer Michael Cooper involved, and the Rolling Stones circling like the droogs they might have played. That version fell apart when the British chief censor made it clear he would never pass it in a million years.
The part waited not quite a million but four years for Stanley Kubrick and Malcolm McDowell. Hemings, meanwhile, did what every 60s idol eventually did and made a record. In 1967, he flew to Los Angeles and cut an album, David Hemings Happens, backed by members of The Byrds and produced by their mentor, Jim Dickson, with the single “Backstreet Mirror” written for him by Gene Clark.
It is a curio but not a disaster. It’s more the sound of a man who could genuinely sing, humoring the era’s conviction that anyone famous could pretty much do anything at all. By now, he had grasped the fact that would guide the rest of his career, which is that the money and the power in pictures live behind the camera and not in front of it.
In 1967, he co-founded the Hemdale Film Corporation with a sharp former insurance salesman named John Daly, the son of a Cockney dock worker. Hemdale began life as much as a tax shelter and a talent management shop as a studio. They managed rock bands, with Yes and Black Sabbath among them. They seized the worldwide stage rights to Lionel Bart’s Oliver! and then edged into producing with Ken Russell’s Tommy and Robert Altman’s Images among Hemdale’s early credits.
In time, under Daly, it would become one of the most consequential independents in the history of the movies: the company behind The Terminator, Platoon, and The Last Emperor, the firm that gave first breaks to Keanu Reeves, Denzel Washington, and Julia Roberts, and the winner of back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Picture. There was just one snag: Hemings sold his share early, long before the gold arrived.
The man whose name supplied the first syllable of Hemdale walked away from one of the great fortunes in modern cinema and walked from the cheap seats as his old partner built a mighty empire on it. He affected indifference. He had little patience for producing in any case, dismissing it with a perfectly weighted shrug as “a thankless task akin to hotel management,” before adding that unfortunately, there are not too many good hotel managers.
His private life, all the while, was run at the same reckless, charming, scorched-earth pace as his work. His first marriage had not survived his ascent and had never stood a chance of doing so. In 1968, he married the American actress Gayle Hunnicutt, a warm-hearted and ambitious Texan. For a while, they were one of the glamour couples of the transatlantic film world, a pairing he later summarized with characteristic deflation: “We were the poor man’s Taylor and Burton.”
They moved to Malibu, to the sun and the beach houses in the long, blurred Hollywood 70s, and in 1972, he began to direct, casting Gayle in his first feature, the thriller Running Scared. They had a son, Nolan, who would grow up to act himself. And then the marriage came apart in the most Hemings fashion imaginable. Gayle Hunnicutt did not lose her husband to one grand affair; she lost him to a kind of endless fractal of affairs.
The marriage broke when she discovered that he had been carrying on with his co-star Samantha Eggar from the 1970 film The Walking Stick and, at the very same time, with his own secretary, a young woman named Prudence Deas. The secretary was no passing indiscretion. When the divorce came through in the mid-70s, Hemings married her in 1976, which gave the affair at least some legitimacy, but it was mere filigree.
Fresh vows did not slow him in the slightest. Across the years of that third marriage, he conducted further affairs—the best-attested with Tessa Dahl, the actress and writer, daughter of Roald Dahl, a woman whose own romantic history ran through Peter Sellers and Bryan Ferry. Beside his memoir, when it arrived, he was completely unembarrassed about all of it.
He wrote of hiding half-dressed in an assistant’s closet to escape a wife and of the chronic, compulsive pursuit of women that ran in lockstep with the chronic, compulsive drinking. He was, friends and detractors agreed—and he never seriously denied—a serial philanderer and an alcoholic who declined to use the word, a man of enormous charm who left a long trail of damage behind the smile.
The boy who had been dropped the moment his voice broke had become a man always leaving rooms before anyone could leave him in one. There were, by the end, six children scattered across those relationships. Genista Ouvry gave him a daughter, Deborah, when he was barely more than a boy himself. Gayle Hunnicutt gave him Nolan, named after Captain Lewis Nolan, the part he had just played in The Charge of the Light Brigade.
Which is to say that he named his child after a doomed cavalry officer who gallops to his pointless death in the opening reel of a catastrophe. This was a choice that would acquire an afterlife neither father nor son could possibly have foreseen. The child grew up to be the actor Nolan Hemings. Prudence Deas gave him four more: a daughter, Charlotte, and three sons, George, Edward, and William.
He was a serially absent father, forever working, forever abroad, forever in the middle of leaving. The pattern that ran his marriages ran his fatherhood, too. The same enormous warmth and genuine love undone by the inability to remain in the room. His work through the 70s was scattered in every direction, which is what a clever and easily bored man with money troubles and a thirst for sex tends to do.
His energy spilled out well past the cinema, too. He was, slightly unusually for a man of his lifestyle, an active political force and supporter of Britain’s Liberal Party, who turned up to speak at its meetings between the benders and the movies—one more identity in a man who seemed to rack them up the way other people rack up debts.
He gave one of his finest straight performances as the haunted hero of Dario Argento’s lurid, dazzling 1975 giallo, Deep Red, a film now loved by everyone who loves horror, made with real style. He turned up in disaster pictures such as Richard Lester’s Juggernaut and in prestige literary adaptations alike, among them Franklin Schaffner’s Islands in the Stream, the 1975 Hemingway picture led by George C. Scott, and a glossy version of The Prince and the Pauper.
The same year, he lent his deepening voice to the narration of Rick Wakeman’s gloriously preposterous 1974 prog spectacle, Journey to the Center of the Earth. He took a co-writing credit on “Pasadena,” a 1973 hit for the Australian singer John Paul Young. He even played Bertie Wooster in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Jeeves in 1975, one of the very few outright flops of that composer’s career.
Mostly, though, he directed with the same hit-or-miss energy. The 14, his second feature, also released as The Wild Little Bunch, took the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1973, and this was a real and serious distinction. Just a Gigolo in 1978 was not. He directed David Bowie beside the legendary Marlene Dietrich in her last role, and Bowie famously wrote the whole thing off as “my 32 Elvis Presley movies rolled into one. It wasn’t very good.”
In other words, he moved to Australia and made the horror picture The Survivor. He made Race for the Yankee Zephyr. And eventually, he moved to America and became, bizarrely enough, a dependable, hard-working, faceless director of legendary 80s episodic TV: the hand behind installments of Magnum, P.I., The A-Team, Airwolf, and even the pilot of Quantum Leap.
On Airwolf, he acted as well as the show’s mad genius villain, Dr. Moffett—a surname a studio typist could not stop misspelling from one episode to the next. He even circled back in an episode of the horror anthology Tales from the Crypt to the very obsession that had made him, playing a big-brotherish master of surveillance who watches the world through banks of monitors. The voyeur of Blow-Up reincarnated as an institutional peeping tom.
The face that had hung on a million bedroom walls in 1967 had shrunk to a name in the small print of American prime time. And he met the fact, as he met every fact, with a joke. “People thought I was dead,” he said. “But I wasn’t. I was just directing The A-Team.” It is the funniest thing a fallen film star could possibly say, and very nearly the saddest, and he knew both halves of it perfectly well.
The drinking, which had begun in conviviality, had long since become the prevailing wind of his life. He and Oliver Reed, friends since those silly early pictures, made a famous and formidable pair of hell-raisers: two beautiful English men drinking their way around the world’s hotel bars across 30 years. And when Reed died in 1999, dropping dead after an afternoon session in a bar in Malta during the making of Gladiator, the symmetry escaped no one.
Least of all Hemings, who happened to be in that very film and who would follow his old friend into a sudden death on a set just four years on. They were two of a kind, and they went the same way, working, drinking in a foreign land, and without warning. In fact, Gladiator hauled him back into the light after almost two decades of journeyman work.
In 2000, Ridley Scott cast him as Cassius, the unctuous master of ceremonies of the Colosseum, and audiences who had loved the slender boy of Blow-Up squinted at the stout, gravel-voiced man with the immense curling eyebrows, and could not right away place him. The role was not huge, but it was indelible. The film won Best Picture, and the work came flooding back.
He relished the absurdity of it. “People saw me in Gladiator and said, ‘He’s still alive. Good lord, all of a sudden I’ve done eight pictures in the last 16 months,'” he marveled. Then he added a line that reads, in hindsight, like the universe clearing its throat: “I probably won’t do another until I’m 70, if I live that long.”
In his 60s, he was the busiest and arguably the best he had ever been—an elder statesman of British screen acting in the company of Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, and Albert Finney, the surviving lions of his own generation. He turned up in Tony Scott’s Spy Game and in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York as the corrupt grandee Mr. Schermerhorn, and as Frank Sinatra’s lawyer in the Australian comedy The Night We Called It a Day.
He had a sinister turn in the dystopian thriller Equilibrium opposite Christian Bale, and opposite Sean Connery, of all people, in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, closing a circle begun nearly 40 years before when Connery turned down the role that made him. But the performance that mattered most, the one that revealed what he had become, was in Last Orders in 2001.
It was a tender and ruminative adaptation of Graham Swift’s novel about a bunch of aging London men driving to scatter a dead friend’s ashes. Hemings played Lenny, a melancholy former boxer reckoning with a wasted, ordinary, irreplaceable life alongside Caine, Courtenay, Bob Hoskins, and Ray Winstone. The film reached for one last grace note: in the flashbacks, the young Lenny was played by Hemings’s own son, Nolan.
Father and son, the same man at the beginning and the end of his road. For an actor who had spent his life half-running from his own youth, there could scarcely have been a more fitting final great part. He had even begun at last to take stock, sitting down to write the witty, unsparing, and sardonic memoir he would title Blow-Up and Other Exaggerations.
He did not live to hold the published book in his hands. Late in 2003, he was in Romania, in Bucharest, shooting a supernatural thriller then called Samantha’s Child and later released as Blessed. And on December 3, 2003, he finished his scenes for the day, the way he had finished scenes for half a century, and turned to walk back to his dressing room.
On the way, his heart stopped. The paramedics worked on him where he fell and could not bring him back. He was 62. His wife, Lucy Williams, who he had married only the year before, the fourth and last of his wives, was with him. The man who had joked that he might not last to 70 had been right, and he died exactly as he had lived: at work, on a film set, mid-production, with his boots on and his scenes in the can.
Which is either the cruellest way for such a man to go, or the kindest, and is maybe both. He had been about to start a picture opposite John Malkovich. The memoir appeared the following year. The film he died making was dedicated to his memory. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Peter’s at Blackland, near Calne in Wiltshire, a very long way from the opera houses of his boyhood and the beaches of his prime.
He left behind four ex-wives worth of complicated feeling, six children, and the producer of Last Orders, Nick Powell, speaking for everyone when he said that the saddest thing of all was simply that “his acting career was really flowering.” Blow-Up did not merely make David Hemings famous; it fixed him permanently as the image of a single intoxicating instant in the 20th century.
He was the bored, beautiful boy with a camera in a London that believed, if only briefly and incorrectly, that it had solved the problem of being young. The voice that broke on a Paris stage and ended one life turned out to be the overture to a stranger, longer, messier one. Britten cast him out for growing up. The movies, in the end, loved him for exactly the same thing.
