Clive James: ‘I vowed that I would stay as cool as Yul Brynner when the god Chronos came for me’

The new TV drama Westworld is predicted to astonish this generation of viewers even more than the movie it is based on astonished the global cinema audience back in 1973, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Actually, I saw the movie at the time and wasn’t astonished much. We were asked to be amazed that Yul Brynner, underneath his cowboy costume, was really a robot. It was like being asked to be amazed that when he played the lead in The King And I, he was powered by a generator. He was that kind of actor: precise, but you could hear the valves fizzing.

It wasn’t Yul’s fault, and if he hadn’t been so successful, I wouldn’t dream of belittling him now. Elbows slightly extended to indicate the bulk of his lateral muscles, he carried himself with dignity right to the end. On location in Britain for The File Of The Golden Goose, he had to arrive dramatically in Liverpool. They ran out of dough and pretended that London’s Liverpool Street station was Liverpool, a pretence accomplished by covering up one end of a station name-plate with canvas. Yul, instead of downing tools, played the scene in full grimness mode, elbows dramatically flexed. Watching in awe somewhere in the cinematic dark – I was one of three paying spectators – I vowed that I would try to stay as cool as that when the god Chronos came for me.

Showbusiness is tough, and anybody who breaks through deserves a nod of respect, especially when the river of time rises to wipe him out. That’s why I so often give a polite mention to Steven Seagal. Scattered all over the Los Angeles region, there are men pumping gas and washing cars who wanted to be Steven Seagal, too, but didn’t have the magic. He is actually a charismatic actor, although sometimes you have to look closely to be sure of this.

And I have no guarantee that I, as a writer, will be remembered as having made anything like the same impact. The final fade-out approaches, and the chances are that nobody will now make a movie of my book Unreliable Memoirs, the story of my growth to manhood. There was going to be one once, but when it became clear that the leading role would need to be recast for every scene, the budget blew out straight away. I should have written the book so that the small boy grew up to be a very small man: nobody would have minded.

Usually the best we can hope for is to be typecast. I was recently watching American Gangster, the Ridley Scott crime epic in which the radiantly decent Denzel Washington plays a crook. He might as well have been cast as Queen Victoria.