James Fox: ‘The class system. Revolution. Quite interesting stuff, isn’t it?’

The last time James Fox saw The Servant it was 2018. The screening took place in a Soho hotel, organised by Antonia Fraser, widow of the film’s writer, Harold Pinter. Even 55 years after it was released, Fox was still wowed by the vicious allure of the story, his own presence — at the age of 24, he played the part of Tony, a wealthy Londoner who falls prey to the wiles of his manservant Hugo — only part of the fascination. At the drinks party afterwards, he found himself mingling with Stanley Johnson, father of the British prime minister. The conversation was a disappointment, says Fox: “He didn’t have anything to say about the film at all. He just talked about himself.”

The actor was nonplussed given the nature of The Servant, an endlessly unnerving film about the power struggle between his character, a foppish Chelsea aristocrat, and his cold-eyed valet, played by Dirk Bogarde. It has now been restored, a re-release imminent. “Most people who see it are in a bit of a state of shock afterwards,” he says.

Today Fox, 82, is at home in London, speaking over Zoom, dressed casually for late summer. A deft, adventurous actor, his movie career extends from David Lean’s A Passage To India to the strutting Sexy Beast. There was a withdrawal from public life for much of 1970s after a conversion to evangelical Christianity. But before then, Fox starred in two of the most darkly brilliant films in all British cinema: Performance (1970), the mindgame of gangsters and rock stars, and The Servant.

He hopes the restoration will lead a new audience to its menace and intrigue. At that Soho screening, a group of young attendees approached him. They were shy, he says, but the themes of the film clearly spoke to them. “Oh yes. The class system. Revolution. Dominance and submission.” Fox smiles playfully. “Quite interesting stuff, isn’t it?”

“Introducing James Fox” reads his opening credit on the film. Even that was a sleight of hand. His real name was William, changed not long before. And while he says he was an “ingénue”, Fox had been introduced to film-goers already. There had been parts as a child actor and, the year before The Servant, a small but pivotal role in British new-wave landmark The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. There too he was cast as a blue-blood. That was the real con, Fox says. His family were solidly theatrical, actors and agents dating back to Queen Victoria. The Foxes moved among the upper classes but only as the entertainment.

“It wasn’t the same at all! We were journeymen with pretensions. But I spoke with a posh accent and seemed terribly overconfident. So when I met Harold and Joe [director Joseph Losey], I breezed in as if to say, ‘Well, of course you want to give me the job.”’

I made money in the Sixties but I was never actually cool. My confidence got shaky because of it

What came next happens to vanishingly few actors — a role people still want to talk to you about almost 60 years later, the masterpiece that doubles as a snapshot of yourself at 24. Losey was an American leftist, blacklisted in Hollywood, Pinter the intellectual Hackney bruiser. “Fabulous mix,” Fox says. “I loved it. I’d never met anyone so wonderfully grumpy and acerbic as Harold. You just laughed all the time.”

Fox began dating co-star Sarah Miles, despite what he says was a timidity with women. Then there was Bogarde. The first time we see Fox on screen, his servant gazes down at him knowingly. In reality too, Bogarde was the senior party. But the working relationship thrived. Off camera, there was an entrée to Bogarde’s social circle. “I don’t think he fancied me but he took me under his wing. That’s what Dirk did. While you were working, you became part of his entourage. Even if he got rid of you later.”

This odd collective produced a deeply subversive movie. Can film still be subversive in 2021? “Oh I hope so. We should have more subversion in films, shouldn’t we?” Fox rues the blandness of much modern drama. In 2013, he guest-starred in Downton Abbey, playing a cash-strapped lord opposite Shirley MacLaine. “Shirley bloody MacLaine! One of the greatest screen actresses ever! And there’s me on the make, her character with money, all these dramatic possibilities — manipulation, older people sexually duelling. So much to explore. And none of it was. I remember thinking, they don’t have a clue what the potential is here.”

If Pinter was too oblique a writer for The Servant to be about class alone, it did reflect the real social tumult of early 1960s Britain. Actors led the way. While Bogarde’s scheming Jeeves upended the domestic order, working-class talent such as Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay were propelled to top billing. Fox was glad to be along for the ride. But it was a strange place for a young actor, cast as the embodiment of feeble old England. “I made money in the Sixties but I was never actually cool. My confidence got shaky because of it.”

He still embraced the swing of countercultural London, but it cost him the last of his friendship with Bogarde. In 1967, invited to a screening of Accident — another collaboration between Bogarde, Losey and Pinter — Fox arrived with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. “Dirk was disgusted by my velvet trousers. He was clear I had gone very much in the wrong direction.”

Jagger went on to be his co-star in Performance. Now Fox played a figure wholly removed from his life experience, a fugitive from the East End underworld, holed up with Jagger’s rock-god recluse. The movie makes a perfect bookend with The Servant, another scramble of power, identity and frisson between male leads. “In The Servant the homoerotic stuff went over my head. But the films do feel like kindred spirits.”

Professionally, Fox does not consider himself retired, but he does admit to rarely seeing parts he wants any more. “Stuff out there for older actors is dull. People don’t think there’s anything going on when you’re older.” He now sometimes writes scripts, he says — unmade thus far but well-regarded. He has never created a part for himself. Pinter and Performance are hard acts to follow. “Well, exactly. But then I’ve always needed someone else to say, ‘I really get this other side to you.’ I need other people to imagine me, I think.”

‘The Servant’ is released in UK cinemas on September 10, and on DVD/BluRay/digital on September 20