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Alan Cox takes on Frost-y role
A native of Great Britain, the only thing Alan Cox knew about American politics before moving to New York two years ago, was from having read “The Federalist Papers” in school.
That reading was enhanced somewhat by the fact that it took place after the Watergate Era and around the time of the interviews of Richard Nixon by David Frost, an event he recreates in playing the latter in the national tour of the award-winning play “Frost/Nixon.”
“I had a bit of knowledge in the back of my mind,” he said, “but didn’t realize that it was the tipping point for the ‘trial by television’ phenomenon,” he said.
“Those interviews were really about the American public getting to know Richard Nixon and his grim determination to overcome the obstacles that came his way,” Cox said, and a chance for the former president to redeem himself in the medium that caused his humiliation a decade earlier during the debates with John F. Kennedy.
“America is such an event-oriented culture, it seems Nixon had a sense that there was a historic movement and the entertainment world would give him a chance to rehabilitate himself with the American public,” Cox said.
Those interviews are the focus of the last one-third of the play, Cox said, with the first two-thirds about the negotiations that put the deal together.
Cox’s start in acting: Family business
Cox is the son of Scottish actor Brian Cox, and even though his parents were reluctant to have him trod the boards himself, he seems to have been born into it.
“The theater has always been a part of my life, really” he said. “It was a world I was familiar with and I knew all of the people in London. My father started having New Year’s Eve parties for all of the re-located Scots in London, but that eventually became one of the swanky business gatherings.”
He started doing TV roles when he was six, including a role opposite Sir Laurence Olivier at age 12, played in “Strange Interlude” in London with his father when he was 13, and starred in “Young Sherlock Holmes” at 15 as Young Watson, the role that made him want to pursue acting as a career.
“We did a big premiere in London and then I flew to New York and Los Angeles to do publicity,” he said. “After that, I didn’t want to put on my public school uniform and go back to school.
“Then we started doing plays in school,” he said. “Since it was an all-male school, it meant we could get girls in, so that was a big incentive.
“By and by, I decided to go for the classical training,” he said. “So turning professional and being a performer was my own. In fact, when the letter came about my acceptance (to London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) I called my mother and asked her to open it for me.”
She said, “You got in, but you can’t go.”
But he did.
Top photo: Alan Cox as David Frost in “Frost/Nixon”. Photo by Carol Rosegg
Also, Brian Cox and Alan Cox at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.
See more about David Frost at the jump…..
Sir David Paradine Frost, born April 7, 1939, in Tenterden, England, has been a leading figure in television news and entertainment for over forty years. He has hosted top-rated shows in both the UK and in the US, and is the only person to have interviewed all of the past six British Prime Ministers and the past seven US Presidents.
While still an undergraduate at Cambridge University, where he was also secretary of the Footlights Drama Society, Frost began presenting TV programs, leading ultimately to the groundbreaking satirical show “That Was The Week That Was”, broadcast by the BBC from 1962 to 1963. Frost’s interviewing style often resulted in charged exchanges and coined the phrase “trial by television”.
Several other successful shows followed, including “The Frost Report” in 1966 in which Frost collaborated with comedians John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett, and for ITV “The Frost Programme”. Interviewees from the world of showbiz included Muhammad Ali, the Beatles and Orson Welles. But it was after a moving tribute to the assassinated President John F. Kennedy on “TWTWTW” that Frost became famous in the US and began presenting “Frost Over America”.
It was the 1977 interviews with former US President Richard Nixon that helped revitalize Frost’s career, which was in decline in America following the cancellation of his network talk show. The four 90-minute programs, in which Frost persuaded Nixon to admit he’d let the American people down over the Watergate scandal, achieved the largest television audience for a news interview in history and has since become a benchmark for political interviews.
In addition to being instrumental in the creation of two important TV franchises, LWT in 1967 and TV-am in 1982, Frost has produced several films and has his own production company, Paradine Productions. He is perhaps best known today as the presenter of such programs as “Through the Keyhole” and “Breakfast with Frost”, both fixtures of the Sunday schedules for over twenty years.
In 2005 Frost added a BAFTA Fellowship to his many awards and now, at the age of 67, he is still courting controversy having recently agreed to present a weekly current affairs program for Al-Jazeera International, the English language version of the Arab broadcaster unpopular in the US.
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