W INTERVIEW
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AN INTERVIEW WITH
BRIAN BLESSED OBE
83-year-old Brian Blessed is one of the great British acting
legends who has graced the stage and screen during a career
which has spanned over decades and yet he shows no signs
of slowing down! Just weeks away from him hosting the
prestigious 2019 Wirral Life Awards, which are being held at
Thornton Manor on the 8th November, we are indeed ‘blessed’
to speak to the man himself who has starred in everything from
Shakespeare to Z-Cars to Peppa Pig. I’ll tell you a story, a short while ago, I was on a six-month British
expedition to the magnetic North Pole, I’m the oldest man to
reach it and we were getting quite close. A typhoon submarine
like the one in the Hunt for Red October with Sean Connery, a
Russian submarine, came up through the ice. The turret opened
and the captain climbed out and he looked at me and said, ‘Oh it’s
him! Please, say – Gordon’s Alive!’ So of course, I said ‘Gordon’s
Alive! to a bloody Russian submarine!
Wirral Life tried to gain some insight into what made the
brilliantly booming Brian Blessed tick… I love saying it! I think it’s very important in your life to have
something that people know. Prime Ministers, the butcher, the
baker, everywhere I go people ask me to say it and it’s fabulous.
We can't wait until you host the Wirral Life Awards in
November. Have you been to Wirral before?
Indeed, I have on several occasions. My wife is a huge Liverpool
fan and she has a fantastic signed portrait of Jurgen Klopp on
the wall in our house. Of course, long before you were born, I
starred as Fancy Smith in Z-Cars in the 60’s and we filmed a lot in
the Wirral, in Seaforth and other parts of Liverpool. I’m looking
forward to a wonderful evening.
You've just celebrated your 83rd birthday last week, haven’t
you?
Yes, I am 83 now, I run 5 miles a day and I bench press up to
300lbs and I’m always ready for an expedition! I’ve never been
better.
You have worked with literally a who's who of actors, writers
and directors. Who have you most enjoyed working with and
why?
I feel I have a father-son relationship with Kenneth Branagh. He’s
the Father and I’m the son! I’ve done about seven films with Ken
and I think Henry V was one of the best films ever made.
I also absolutely adored making Flash Gordon which was a great
film with amazing style and wonderful music and colour. It had a
comic strip style which is perfection… and of course anywhere I
go in the world, whether I go to the Antarctic, climb Kilimanjaro
or visit South America literally everywhere I go, there will be
tribes, eskimos, whoever is there, asking me to say – ‘Gordon’s
Alive!’ I could say it all day!
Is it true you used to play your Flash Gordon character, Prince
Vultan, in games as a child?
During the war years, when I was growing up in Goldthorpe
between Barnsley and Doncaster, we used to have two cinemas. At
the Empire Cinema once a week you used to have Flash Gordon
in black and white with Buster Crabbe, who was a brilliant Flash
Gordon. After each episode, we used to come out and run down
the railway embankment and I would pretend I could fly – I
would always pretend to be Vultan. I never dreamt that one day I
would play him in a film!
There is very little you haven't done, from climbing Mount
Everest 3 times, to travelling to the North Pole and even 800
hours of training for the International Space Station - would
you say you've achieved most of your ambitions?
Oh no no no! I haven’t even started yet! I want to go to space and
I want to go to Mars. One of my great loves is space and I am a
fully trained cosmonaut/astronaut having undertaken 800 hours
of training in Moscow and in the Pacific with NASA. I don’t think
we’ve begun yet; we’ve got to go to other worlds. I also want to go
to the bottom of the sea – the Marianas Trench 35 thousand feet
down. There’s lots of things I want to do.
Lately I’ve been directing lots of plays which is great fun and
I’ve been enjoying some wonderful write-ups, so I’ve got lots of
energy!
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