Old actors never die - they just fade away . . .

The late Tony Scott with Denzel Washington.

Do you know I have been an actor for over 40 years; amazing really when I am only 39 years of age!!!!

So in that time I have worked with more actors than I could count; they are generally nice people and lack something they need more of – confidence; the rest is an act.

It's usually a basic shyness which brings people into acting and a need for – who knows? Attention?

There may be some need for artistic expression too but I think a lot of that is just bullshit; they (we) want to act because we like it; nothing more nothing less. Conversations with actors can be both stimulating and boring. In fact those things can happen in the same conversation within seconds.

A lot of actors when they become famous say in interviews that they don't mix with other actors and keep aloof – well they read that Montgomery Clift was aloof as he didn't really want to be an actor at all; he was forced into it by his 'stage mother' and felt unhappy.

He was part of the rebel actor that came in the fifties; it's supposed to have started with John Garfield then spread to James Dean, Marlon Brando and Clift but Humphrey Bogart was a rebel too – and don't forget James Cagney. A great actor, Cagney, an actor who didn't mix much with other actors and would go back to his pad in Martha's Vineyard instead of mixing with other actors – aloof!! Where have I heard that before?

Since then a lot of actors have played the 'rebel card' – I don't have to point them out to you but it's all been done before.

I remember how rebellious Russell Crowe was when he came to Hollywood. A friend of mine did a film with him – LA Confidential – and she said he was one of the most protective people she had worked with, always courteous and caring.

When he won the Academy Award the emotion hit him and the rebelliousness dropped for a bit – but he went on to be a bit of a bully grabbing a TV director for cutting an acceptance speech and some trouble in a New York Hotel for which he was arrested; but I'm sure he's a nice man. Good actor and didn't really deserve the drubbing he got when he played Robin Hood; I thought the accent he chose to use on that was fine, I mean who knew how people spoke at the time of Robin Hood.

But as I've said before about accents – it's a British thing; they have this thing about accents. Can you imagine Humphrey Bogart using different accents in each film like Meryl Streep?

Usually when a group of actors get together on a film or a TV job they never tell each other how much they are getting paid – and if they do they usually inflate it. I'm talking in the 'they' again when I do mean 'we.'

If you are acting with a big star they wouldn't dream of telling you what they get but if you are 3 or 4 crooks, for example with the same sized roles, in a cop show the bullshit is high. The reason for this? Who knows – maybe a touch of the bravado or being scared of admitting you would work for so little or that your status is not as high as you would like to think it is.

There is also the game of telling the tale of how much they wanted you for this role and that you initially turned it down.

All that is natural but in this little post I want to pay tribute to the director; I have worked with a lot fewer directors than I have actors and the difference between actors and directors is that directors, no matter what their age, will try anything.

Look at the older directors – great directors – Sydney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, Clint Eastwood and Robert Altman; only Clint left now, unfortunately.

They are great directors; I know there are loads of great directors, and Hitchcock seems to get all the plaudits but people who work with Clint Eastwood say 'he's the man.'

I mean look at his work.

Then you have a director like Tony Scott, who has just died. He was at it all the time; an old fashioned Hollywood type director who would go from job to job and always coming in under budget and producing a good movie.

Actors on the other hand, older actors, don't like to try anything new. Let me say here that I am not referring to any of my friends – which I hope will save any emails!!

In 1975 I was in a play; it was set in a country house and Scotland Yard and I played a London working class detective. One day the director couldn't come in to rehearsals so he let a younger man take over the directing for the day; well it was only a morning as it was a Saturday when there was a matinée of the current play (I was in rep).

The new replacement director started the rehearsals and gave us a few pointers. I was in a scene with an old actor and this was probably the first time in his life that he had received proper direction.

It was a scene between me, the older actor (who played a cockney criminal) and the Detective Inspector who was posh.

The director pointed out that there were class differences between each of us in the scene; two of us were working class and the other fairly middle class and this might cause an interesting dynamic.

The older actor, playing the cockney, didn't like this kind of direction. The director wasn't giving him line readings – telling him how to say the lines – so he shouldn't really have been offended. He complained to me at the coffee break but he wouldn't say anything to the director.

The other actor, by the way, the middle class one, didn't complain at all even though he was an old boy; but he was also a director.

He knew that actors in the theatre in those days were just told to move here or there and we would mark our script, in pencil, with the moves; we would use pencil as the moves would invariably change. For example d/s/r – meaning 'move downstage right' – and you would put a little x on the line or word where you were supposed start the move.

Directors on the other hand accept the latest technology and go with it.

Look at Clint Eastwood's movie Letters from Iwo Jima – most of the film is in Japanese, the technological 'know how' and the logistical headaches this kind of film would give even the most skilled director, would put younger directors off the task (including Spielberg who was one of the producers). There were 35 people on sound, more on technical effects and over 30 doing stunts.

(However they got one thing wrong - the motor vehicles in the movie have the steering wheel on the left. Japanese vehicles, like the British, have the steering wheel on the right, as they keep to the left side of the road); I read that on the dreaded IMDb.

The same goes with the other directors mentioned above; all did movies out of their usual genre later in life and all worked well in to their 80s.

Actors and writers tell you how long they have been at it, how many things they have done and that the young are no good 'we did it all years ago' they say and in doing so miss the benefit of knowledge. I wonder how better that scene would have been if the older guy had listened – maybe not much but it would have filled us, or me, with a bit more ammunition.

The film director, Tony Scott, who killed himself yesterday in San Pedro at the age of 68 directed one of my favourite films True Romance. It was written by Quentin Tarantino and it was Tarantino's best script.

Tony Scott, who was the younger brother of Ridley Scott, had 10 movies on the go in various stages of completion at the time of his death.