Out at the Movies by Steven Davies

Author:Steven Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781842434048
Publisher: Oldcastle Books
Published: 2016-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

BRAD DAVIS

Actor

1949–1991

Brad Davis was both ruggedly handsome and amazingly versatile, a male lead who made his compelling film debut as an American drug smuggler incarcerated in a Turkish prison in Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978).

Davis’s relatively sparse screen roles include off-beat classics such as American Olympic runner Jackson Scholz in Chariots of Fire (1981); the title character – a gay sailor – in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982); and his only comedic role as the eccentric pilot in Percy Adlon’s Rosalie Goes Shopping (1989).

A risk-taking stage actor, Davis won acclaim as Ned Weeks, alter ego of playwright and Gay Men’s Health Crisis-founder Larry Kramer, in Kramer’s harrowing AIDS drama The Normal Heart (1985). He also starred in Steven Berkoff’s avant-garde adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis at the Mark Taper Forum.

Davis’s reputation for bad behaviour both on and off set meant that good parts were rarely offered to him and his roles in Midnight Express and Querelle remain the only ones for which he is remembered. His friend, Larry Kramer, stated: ‘He was one of the first straight actors with the guts to play gay roles.’

Davis contracted the AIDS virus in 1985 but hid the fact from Hollywood execs in order to keep working. In the last few years of his life the actor became a committed AIDS activist, speaking out about Ronald Reagan’s policies and describing the American president as ‘an unbelievably ignorant, arrogant, bigoted person’. Davis continued: ‘How could he possibly think that his opinion on homosexuality had anything to do with a devastating disease that was ravaging people, reducing them to skeletons and killing them.’

The actor, who had been suffering with complications from AIDS, reportedly committed suicide at age 41, not before leaving a handwritten statement blasting Hollywood homophobia: ‘I make my living in an industry which professes to care very much about the fight against AIDS, that gives umpteen benefits and charity affairs. But in actual fact, if an actor is even rumoured to be HIV-positive, he gets no support on an individual basis – he does not work.’

His widow, Susan Bluestein Davis, who continues with Davis’s activist work, is the author of the only published biography of her husband. Worth reading, it gives a fascinating insight into a hugely complex character, although readers will be left feeling that she probably knew her husband rather less well than many of the others in his life.

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