Christian Bale Read Online Free PDF Page A

praise your son; it’s an entirely different feeling to have Steven Spielberg do so. In David’s eyes, Christian was clearly on track to be the next Richard Burton or Anthony Hopkins, the next great Celtic actor—a confident prediction based on Christian’s glowing reviews for his performance in Empire of the Sun . Although the film tanked at the box office, it was enough for David to see the reviews and to encourage his son to pursue an acting career with a clear course plotted for Hollywood. He quit his job to manage Christian’s career. He wanted Christian to become a movie star in America. Christian explained his father’s fear of settling down as: “More because of a restlessness with Britain and an inability to leave it, than anything else.”
    Standing 6'4", David Charles Howard Bale always made a striking first impression. One evening at dinner at Cozymel’s, a Mexcian restaurant in El Segundo, David was talking about his family and that height ran in the Bale family. He said that he loved being tall as he could always look down at women’s tits! He was a big man with a big laugh and a hot temper. David’s father, Philip, and his uncle Rex were both over 6'3". To explain Christian’s acting talents, David often pointed to his family tree. He claimed that his father had doubled for John Wayne in the Duke’s 1962 African adventure movie Hatari . Uncle Rex, David asserted, was also an actor with more than twenty films to his credit. And Rex’s cousin, he said, was none other than Lillie Langtry, a famous Victorian actress from the Channel Islands.
    David himself was one of those men blessed with looks that, like a fine wine or Sean Connery, improved with age; he had silver-gray hair, character lines, sad eyes, and a tanned, open, andinviting face. David bore more than a slight resemblance to actor Adam West—television’s first Batman.
    Yet David’s most powerful asset wasn’t his physical presence. With a rumbling basso of a voice both theatrical and dramatic in delivery, David had a remarkable gift of gab. He could be undeniably charming, passionate, and insistent. His oratory skills combined with an uncanny ability to mimic different British and South African accents were the centerpiece of his charm. One wanted to applaud at the end of David’s magniloquent speeches and pontifications—duly impressed yet certainly relieved as he also had a tendency to be long-winded.
    David Bale was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on September 2, 1941. His father, he told me, a retired RAF officer and safari hunter, was a strict disciplinarian. His mother, he fondly described as exactly like the character Patsy Stone portrayed by Joanna Lumley in the British TV comedy Absolutely Fabulous . One of David’s earliest childhood memories was that of watching Disney’s Song of the South , which was released in 1946. He loved that movie and often whistled its theme song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” under his breath. In Los Angeles, another song he often liked to sing was “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Ha,” a quirky 1966 hit by Napoleon XIV.
    When his parents divorced, David followed his mother, attending boarding school to boarding school from Egypt to England and visiting with his maternal grandmother and cousins on tiny Guernsey—one of the Channel Islands between England and France. He spent much of his youth bumming around the beaches of Europe. Said Christian: “He did that for a lot of his life. But what he pointed out to me was that at the time he’d found nothing he was good at. He was quite happy wandering about.”
    At the age of seventeen, David’s mother put him back on a ship to South Africa to be reunited with his father and to pursue an education at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
    However, David was no scholar. He loved to drink, and he took the opportunity to party and enjoy student life, though