When The Sun Goes Down In The South
Warning: This blog discusses mental health issues.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time…
Thomas Merton
I’m pretty sure that most of you are aware that I have recurring bouts of anxiety and sometimes even depression.
Part of my coping mechanism is to escape into a world that gives me a chance to head off the worst effects of that illness. I know it might sounds a bit over the top but when you suffer from anxiety you really do build a wall around your life, to try and protect yourself from the things that might trigger an attack. Behind that wall you feel a little safer, it’s the place you can always retreat to when things get a bit too much.
My love of the arts is a huge part of that coping mechanism.
Music, theatre, films and TV, literature, these parts of my defence are made up of many people, actors, musicians, authors, all providing me with an artistic refuge from this world that, at times, I can barely stand to live in.
Rene Auberjonois was part of that defence.
I’ve been obsessed with acting since I was a child. I have a vague memory of being a reindeer in an infant school nativity type show and although the details are foggy, I believe whilst the other reindeers did two circuits of the stage, I completed a third solo circuit!
I would spend hours watching old films on our black & white TV and soon became a huge fan of John Wayne, Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello and those wonderful old horror films with Karloff and Lugosi.
It seems pretty clear to me now, that the appeal in those films was never about the stars though, it was the great supporting actors, the character actors, that drew me in.
John Wayne was great but Chill Wills and Walter Brennan were much more entertaining.
Soon I was keeping records, lists of all the actors who I enjoyed watching, and so I was the only boy in secondary school who not only knew the name Gale Sondergaard but I could bore for England on the topic of George Sanders.
My interest in character actors has never wained and that brings me to the multi talented, Tony Award winning, Rene Auberjonois.
The first film I recall seeing him in was The Hindenburg, and he was in good company surrounded by brilliant actors like Charles Durning, Burgess Meredith and Richard Dysart. He was also in the TV series Benson playing Clayton Endicott III - the snobbish, hypochondriac chief of staff.
The face, the voice, it just worked and I became a fan.
Of course he was also well known from numerous other guest appearances on The Bionic Woman and The Man From Atlantis (you can see what my TV diet was in the 70’s) and his voice was used in countless cartoon series over the years including Scooby Doo and famously as Chef Louis in The Little Mermaid, but I’ll come back to that voice in a while.
Of course as soon as he appeared in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and later created the role of Odo in Deep Space 9, he cemented his place in my list of all time favourite performers.
When you read up about him, when you see his theatrical background & pedigree, there is little doubt as to why he was able, from behind
this prosthetic and unmoving façade, to deliver such heartfelt and moving performances as Odo.
With a long and successful career, he was still cropping up in many of my favourite series of today, most recently Madam Secretary.
I did get the chance to meet him when he came over to a Star Trek Convention in Birmingham. He was a delight to spend time with: refreshingly honest and a little grumpy but still willing to chat about another aspect of his career which is narrating audio books.
I haven’t really read a book for about 10 years instead I’ve become an addict of audio books. For me it’s not the subject that makes the book interesting, it’s the voice reading it.
It’s why if Scott Brick is reading it then I’ll buy it. The same is true for Rene Auberjonois. Luckily though he reads books that I have come to love, including the Agent Pendergast series by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child.
18 novels bought to life by his voice and in my head the voice of Special Agent AXL Pendergast will always be Rene’s. That low, almost whispered, southern drawl, I can hear it even now. Goodness knows how they replace him and how I can listen to the next book without his voice reading it.
Without even knowing, or caring, Rene Auberjonois became part of the support network I have built around myself these last 20 odd years.
His voice, his appearances on TV, his humanitarian work (especially with Medecins Sans Frontieres) all part of a reassuring and stabilising presence.
Those who know me well will understand that I don’t mind talking about the somewhat fragile nature of my mental health over the years, and being quite honest I’ve been at a low ebb for sometime…it’s why I was very saddened when I heard that Rene had died.
For his family and close friends this will be a difficult time, and although he lives on in all the good work he has done, they will miss him.
But as an artist, he will survive and today I wanted to say thank you Rene, thank you for the quality of your work, work which enabled me to lose myself when I most needed to.
With thanks to Douglas Preston for the photo
