Barry Miller The Guardian 2020
Fame star Barry Miller remembers Alan Parker: 'He changed my career, almost instantaneously'
The Tony-award winning actor, who played Ralph Garcia in Parker’s 1980 hit, looks back at a collaboration which was fraught, fruitful – and life-changing
• ‘We were dancing on cars in the epicentre of porn and filth!’ An oral history of Fame, 40 years on.
My relationship with Alan Parker was the most important and seminal experience of my youth. He understood me in a way that very few people had the ability to ascertain at that time. Working together as we did was difficult, it was tumultuous; our personalities often clashed or were brutally misaligned. But he fundamentally knew what he could extract out of my aspirations for myself. And he alone enabled me to rise to a level of critical acclaim that changed the entire course of my career, almost instantaneously.
Alan was a major film-maker, who consistently sought to make movies that were in the tradition of his legendary mentor Fred Zinnemann, the Oscar-winning Austrian director who gave revolutionary actors such as Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift their first leading roles in motion pictures in the early 1950s. He was also one of the last of the truly epic British stylists and auteurs who managed to combine serious subject matter with wide commercial appeal in a Hollywood that harboured him in the years before corporate takeovers sullied any future opportunities for a strong individual voice, such as Alan’s, to create a potent and culture-changing combination of the two.
Art and commerce were never at odds in his work. A singular thread runs throughout the fabric of the constantly oppressive and decaying worlds that he created on screen; a vividly-coloured strand of passionate rebellion and opposition set against the dull and entrenched banalities of everyday life. This was often manifested through an actor’s most uncompromising and ferocious emotions.
