Neon, March 1997

If you want a psycho, a loser, a deranged cop or someone who's just downright nasty, you call James Woods. Just don't ask him about studio executives. Or his ex-wife ...

It's Los Angeles, 1979 and James Woods is auditioning for director Harold Becker. Becker is making The Onion Field, an adaption of Joseph Wambaugh's book about psychopathic cop-killer Gregory Powell. Woods wants the Powell part, but is taking an oblique approach to securing it.
"Look at me," he tells Becker. "Look at this face, the way I look. It's not what you're looking for, is it?" He's right. Powell calls for a big, blond all-American. Woods is wiry, dark and pock-marked. Given the semi-documentary nature of the movie, Becker knows his collaborator Wambaugh is keen to cast someone with a visual likeness. There's no shortage of blond males in L.A., but Becker's having trouble finding someone capable of taking on the personality of Powell - a sociopath, someone who can be as sympathetic as he is sadistic. Becker is struck by Woods' sharp self-assessment. This James Woods guy, he thinks, is fearless. He insists that the weaselly actor at least get a screen-test.
Woods gets the part.
No-one plays a scumbag quite like James Woods. Whether it's Gregory Powell, Once Upon a Time in America's slippery gangster or Salvador's maniac journalist, calculating sleeze is his trademark. If a script involves a beady-eyed lowlife, and the producers can afford it, they'll pencil in Woods. It's impossible to believe that Sharon Stone's rinky-dink cokehead ex-boyfriend in Casino was meant for anyone else. Pauline Kael called him "The most hostile of all American actors". Mike Tyson prepared for championship bouts by watching Woods' films, psyching himself up by absorbing the actor's agressive back-catalogue of fuck-ups and headcases. Whatever he's in - whether it's a dodgy TV movie or a glossy major studio event - he will always make it worth watching.
But sitting in a suite in Manhattan's Parker Meridien Hotel in his corduroy jacket and neat trousers, Woods could easily be a maths teacher. The professorial air he wears as he approaches 50 isn't diminished by horn-rimmed glasses and his long, melancholic face, but it's still impossible to separate him from his schizoid screen persona - from the driven, twitching, hyperactive presence that monopolises entire movies.
Woods' fast-talking, relentless intelligence makes him as appealing as he is malevolent. He might play schmucks, but he makes them likeable.
Salvador's Richard Boyle is a drug-taking, burned-out chancer but you root for him because, even when facing goon-squad execution, he still shoots off his mouth. "His energy is electrifying," says Harold Becker.
Woods is a wilful outsider. Becker charitably describes him as a "demanding presence on set", someone with an opinion on most things. Oliver Stone, speaking from his experience on Salvador and Nixon, is more direct: "He's a lunatic. He always knows better, which is very irritating. Salvador was a 15-round fight. We were both beaten, but we respected each other." "Everyone thinks of him as the world's most intense man," says Michael J. Fox, who starred opposite Woods in 1991's serial-killer comedy The Hard Way.
"What's wrong with being intense," barks Woods, "if that means you have an intense concentration and specific attention to detail and are very precise in your work? The reason why people are attracted to me is they sense there's a true love of life underneath. You can't work off anger or self-hate for 20 years and be interesting. If anything, I tend towards self-love."
Woods hates the Hollywood merry-go-round. His venom's so palpable you'd think girlfriends regularly leave him for big-shot studio execs. God help anyone who gets in the way of his art. "The only thing that's guaranteed to get me angry is having some fat fucking pig in an Armani suit greasing around trying to interfere with my work," he says. "Trying to shave the budget so he can put it up his nose or have two 17-year-olds service his stubby little dick. And they call you 'babe'. One of those guys said, 'You know your problem? There are vitamins that slow you down and you need them.' I said, 'I don't need to slow down - I just need to be paid on time and have a motor-home that isn't full of dogshit.' So he went off and stole some more money from the production. That's why he was in it. That's why a lot of them do it: 'Oh good. I'll get some free drugs and a blow job.'"

Woods was born in Vernal, Utah on April 18, 1947. He spoke his first words that November and was holding conversation five months later. His school-teacher mother would read him Flaubert while he was in his pram and his father, an army intelligence officer, would recite Shakespeare to him. "I was a phenomenon," says Woods. "I didn't much like being a child. I always wanted to be an adult."
Home life followed his father's military postings in Illinois, Virginia and Guam, and then Rhode Island. Always the new boy, having to leave old friends behind, Woods' 180 IQ made his mark for him. He was always put in classes for the gifted, and his ambition was to be a surgeon, or join the airforce. "I wasn't one of those kids who jumped around singing, 'There's no business like show business', wearing his mother's feather boa," he says.
Woods' father died when he was 12, during routine surgery. His mother initially struggled to raise him and his brother - "we were so poor it was ridiculous" - but later set up a prestigious nursery school in Rhode Island. Although it attracted the offspring of politicians and professionals, Woods' mother always accepted 20 per cent of its pupils for free. "Because she knew," he says, "about the stigma of poverty."
At 17, Woods sat his SAT tests, which would determine the university he went to, and scored full marks. He was offered scholarships for four colleges; the dean of Tufts phoned him personally to offer an eight-year surgery placement.
But the same year, he accidentally put his hand through a glass-door, cutting it so badly he severed tendons in his wrist. It meant he would never be able to wield a scalpel accurately, so he accepted a political science scholarship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, America's foremost science hot-house. It was the mid-'60s; the US was invading south-east Asia. "Most of my advisors," says Woods, "were involved with the Department of Defense, running the Vietnam War."
He began acting at MIT, to relieve the tedium. By his final year, he'd been in 36 plays. Though under pressure to pursue a high-flying career, Woods wanted to do something "startling". In 1968, two months before graduation, he dropped out - in protest against MIT's involvement in Vietnam. He moved to a garret in New York and began auditioning. "My education," he says, "wasn't worth shit for what I do now."
New York 1968 - James Woods is on the subway, wearing his second-hand parka. The man opposite him is wearing a beautiful suede coat and pointing a gun at his head. He takes all the money Woods has - $34 in total.
"Give the fucking money back", says Woods. "I've been up all morning, I'm hungry, and your coat is worth more than my entire nest egg."
The mugger gives Woods $2 for breakfast.

Woods scraped by in fringe theatre in New York until 1971, when a faked Scouse accent secured a part in Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy. Then he won an Obie - the off-Broadway equivalent of an Oscar - for Edward Bond's play Saved. His first film role, in Elia Kazan's Vietnam-vet drama The Visitors, was in 1972, along with a part as Barbra Streisand's political-activist college boyfriend in The Way We Were. "I was going to the movies every day," he says. "So I thought I should make them."
Before The Onion Field revealed his irresistible screen presence in 1979, he appeared in grubby police drama The Choirboys, and as Meryl Streep's husband, a Jewish artist in Buchenwald, in the mini-series Holocaust. Then, in 1982, he did Videodrome with David Cronenberg.
"Even though we don't look alike, Jimmy Woods' presence on screen felt like a projection of me," says Cronenberg. "It was exciting to find an actor who was my cinematic equal. I'd never considered that as a possibility before."
But Woods was still forced to hustle. In 1983, he was rejected for Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America, but persuaded Robert De Niro, who had been given a free hand by Leone, to do a joint screen test. Leone changed his mind as a result. While they were filming scenes with De Niro and Woods as old men, de Niro insisted that Woods' character would have had capped teeth. So, De Niro paid for the dental treatment.
"At the beginning De Niro said, 'If you're not great, I can't be great. I'll do anything to help you.' And he did," says Woods.
Acquiring the lead role as Richard Boyle in Salvador also required work. Woods initially read for the part of the photographer, which eventually went to John Savage: he had to cajole Oliver Stone into letting him play Boyle. Woods received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for the role in 1986, although the film's critical view of US policy in Central America ensured its death at the box office. It remains his finest moment. The biggest response he's ever had for a role was from a woman who recognised him as Boyle. "She saw me outside the theatre and got down on her knees and kissed my hand," he says. "It was amazing. This, like, 50-year-old woman said, 'You've told my story, thank you.' 'Til this day it still puts tears in my eyes."

James Woods has only taken two acting lessons in his life. The notion of 'The Method' makes him recall. "It's just a bunch of old shit - all these guys pretending to be a radish," he says. "If it's a great script and you're working with good people, the most obvious thing is to work out who your character is, where he's coming from, where he's going. I've had to deal with so many football players and models because Lee Strasberg said anybody can act. They're so fucking annoying. It's 4 am, and you're trying to get some shot done, and they're there with some fucking coach moaning about how they can't feel this, can't feel that. Don't tell me what it feels like to be a radish. Just say the goddamn lines and get on with it."
In 1985, Woods met blonde horse trainer Sarah Owen, 22, at a Chevron petrol station in California. The pair quickly moved in together, and Woods declared he had found harmony in his life. "I'd rather take a year off and be with Sarah than make a movie," he said. He'd divorced model Kathryn Greko, two years earlier, after a three-year marriage. She describes him as sweetly domineering. "He loved the way I look but he never really trusted me," she says. "Jim thinks his way is the only way."
The Boost is one of the most relentlessly depressing films ever made. It unflinchingly tracks the rise and drug-assisted crash of yuppie Lenny Brown (Woods) and his hapless wife (Sean Young). Both actors denied rumours that they were engaged in an affair during filming. "I've a lot of memories of The Boost," chuckles director Harold Becker archly. "But I won't go into 'em. Was it a difficult time? Oh yeah."
It was certainly the most infamously difficult period of James Woods' life.

In November 1987, Sarah Owen filed a report with the LA police about her fiancé, James Woods. It accused him of verbal and physical abuse, and of forcing her to have an abortion. It also said that she threw him out of their house, but he returned with a shotgun, forced her to strip at gunpoint, lie on the floor and repeat: "I am a whore, I am a baby killer."
That autumn, a mutilated doll was left on Woods' Beverly Hills doorstep, wrapped in a Vancouver newspaper. Its neck was slashed, iodine stained ts chest and its face had been smeard with white, corpse-like make-up.
Someone had also destroyed $300-worth of flowers in his garden. The next day, Woods got a letter that said: "I'm a friend of Sean Young's. She told me to put this on your doorstep. I think she's rotten. Signed - a friend of Sean Young's."
Woods had the police question Young, who was in Vancouver filming Cousins, then filed a $6 million harassment suit against her. It alleged that she made his hair go gray, gave him tinnitus and sent him pictures of dead babies and animals. By the end of 1988, he'd also begun to divorce Sarah Owen, after only 127 days of marriage, thanks to the discoveries of his private detective, Anthony Pelifane. The suit against Sean Young was finally settled with her insurance company on June 30, 1989. She received her $277.000 legal costs.
It took Woods three years to disentangle himself from Owen. She opened up to the tabloids, alleging that Woods was addicted to porn and that she found him masturbating outside her mother's bedroom door. She even filed a separate suit for the recovery of her diamond engagement ring.
Woods was victorious. "I never paid a penny," he says. "They just said she was horrible."
Woods is now full of praise for Sean Young, but acknowledges his past vitriol. "I was furious with her when I thought she'd done those ugly things," he says. "I wasn't used to dealing with this kind of person (Owen). In general, when you're an amateur and you meet a professional con artist, you don't stand a chance."
Young is remarkably sanguine about events. "There were signs all along that this person was really a liar," she says. "He would say things then change the story. I was really innocent. My detectives had found out some bad stuff about him and Sarah Owen. I had rights to all their medical records. She had a police record and he had a whole history of taking medication. They realised: 'Shit, we are going to have to get out of this law suit.' They were locked in a really bad relationship and didn't have the courage to get out, so they put all their negativity on me."
Mention Young to him, and Harold Becker hesitates: "I'd ignore anything she says."
In the time since The Boost, Woods seems to have succeeded in putting his marital problems behind him and has got on with his life. He's now single, dating Murder One's Missy Crider. Nevertheless, he would, he says, happily marry again.

Men love James Woods because he plays the appealing bastard. Women find him sexy for exactly the same reason. He might make it cool to be a loser, but more importantly, he makes being a thoroughly disagreeable short-fuse hardcase look very seductive. Crazy is the Jack Nicholson thing. The Christopher Walken thing is Spooky. James Woods' special gift is Nasty. Ask him if he's ever met anyone who inspires characters of such consummate evil, and he answers without hesitation: "I married one, I really did."
Suddenly his mind snaps back ten years. "I married the Antichrist," he explains, and begins referring to Owen as "the sociopath". "I was so sweet to the sociopath because I thought she was good. She presented the 'I'm a poor little girl' ... Well, let me help you, honey. It was arrogance. I thought I could fix her. But she didn't care how she hurt me. This is an evil person; that kind of person should die of cancer. She would lie about the colour of the moon. I was a fat, rich movie star and she came in for the kill. I was a big, fat sheep standing in the meadow and she and her coyote friends came in to rip out my underbelly, hamstring and the arches of my feet. The woman's got chromium steel for tendons and mercury for blood."
Christ.
"As soon as I was lucky enough to scrape her off my shoe, I never dealt with her again," he says. "I've never been treated so evilly. Bad, ugly stuff that I could understand the motive for at the point of divorce: it was money. It's usually so people can gorge themselves on money, food, gold. They always want things. "I say to myself every day: 'I know there's a God because he didn't let her spawn.' If you look for dysfunction in families and somebody comes from an abusive, alcoholic, divorced family of car thieves, chances are they're not going to be much fun. Crappy people come from crappy families. As the divorce rate soars in America, I realise they had it right a century ago with arranged marriages. Common values, common background, common religion, heritage and aspirations are a bond stronger than true love. "A friend of mine once said: 'If I could just meet a woman who hadn't been raped by her uncle, been a drug addict since she was 14, a feminist and had four abortions and gonorrhoea, I might just meet one woman who is decent.'"

Despite his traumatic personal life, Woods continued to make an impact as an actor in the late '80s. But he never capitalised on the critical success of his part in Salvador to become a major box-office draw. His fantastic turn as the lunatic amoral hitman Cleve at the centre of 1987's Best Seller went almost completely unnoticed. He won an Emmy as Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, in My Name is Bill W. in 1989 - but that was a TV movie.
Even so, there's still no-one quite like him. Director Michael Ritchie knew Woods would be ideal for the fast-talking con artist in 1992's Midnight Sting. "He's perfect to play someone who appears larcenous and wicked but actually has great soul and passion," he says. On set, Woods eagerly quizzed co-star Bruce Dern about legends he'd worked with, like Hitchcock and Nicholson. Dern was struck by Woods' intelligence and energy. "You've got to be on top of your game when you act with Jimmy Woods," says notorious sports fan Dern. "It's like playing against Borg or Becker." Ritchie was surprised by Woods' knowledge of the whole film-making process. "Sometimes he can be too smart for his own good," he says. "He knows so much about film-making that he can appear to be jumping into other people's territory. There's that part of him that rubs up people the wrong way. But ultimately everything that he does is for the good of the picture, not because he's James Woods, the star."
Ritchie says Woods was liable to erupt when anything, such as noise from the set during a take, interfered with his work. "It's his modus operandi, more so than other actors, who might ride over it knowing there's another take. But he was concerned about his concentration."
Woods admits he may be a tad irascible. "Film-making, like sex, isn't a polite enterprise," he says. "It involves a lot of mess, sweat and tears, and the bottom line is: If somebody ain't screamin', you're not doin' your job."
Woods' loathing of the movie-star process runs deep. He eschews all the trappings of the Hollywood star. He drives a jeep, because, he says, "it's a big, comfortable car to put my ass in." The most extravagant thing he's ever bought is a diamond ring for his mother's 70th birthday. "I don't know what I spend money on. Well, I bought a house and that was ridiculous; I'll be paying for it 'til I'm 90. People don't realize that the government takes half the money you earn; you pay a publicist, lawyers. Literally, you get 15 per cent of what you make. So we never make that much. Instead, you work for the art and you have a good time. The only thing I ever spent on myself was a membership to a country club, because I like to play golf and it takes weeks to get tee time. The only things I collect are books. I have a bit of art because I like it on the walls. I go to flea markets and spend $30 on some cheesy painting everybody hates. I'm just not a material person. I'm not like a big socialist or something - it's just that things don't interest me that much."

Miami 1993, the set of The Specialist: Woods is filming a scene with Rod Steiger. He has to tell him that his son is dead. Unplanned, Steiger, who has a two-year-old son, grabs his tie and the pair clash heads. Woods goes white. The take is abandoned and Steiger goes off for a coffee. Woods follows, and Steiger asks whether his approach is worrying him. Woods immediately snaps: "I can cope with you, I can cope with you!" As they ready themselves for another take, Steiger shouts: "James, can you cope with me?!" The crew laughs. It becomes a catch-phrase on set; whenever they set up a shot, director Luis Llosa asks Woods if he "can cope". "I thought he was really upset, but he took it in good spirits," says Steiger. "James is an extremely intelligent, talented person - but rather nervous underneath it all."

Up in the hotel suite, his slightly lopsided mouth doing its best to smile, James Woods is discussing his latest scumbag - one that's tipped to win him another Oscar nomination. He plays Byron De La Beckwith in Ghosts from the Past, a racist who drove 97 miles to murder civil-rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963. Woods didn't meet Beckwith when preparing for the role, refusing on 'moral' grounds.
"I believe in evil," he says calmly. "I know it's unfashionable to say, 'So-and-so had problems, that is why they killed.' The bottom line is, you can say your girlfriend is mean - but if you're pissed off with her, you don't cut her head off. If you do, you're an evil person. Beckwith was, and is, evil. It's a simple equation. When you take away all the bullshit and excuses, there are really bad people out there who do evil things." "When somebody is really bad, like this guy, I just get in there; it's like doing an imitation. I'm not down-grading how hard it is to play, but it's not like I sit there and wonder if I really hate black people. It's like playing a Nazi: it's so absurd that it's easy to separate yourself. I discovered that about myself when playing Gregory Powell in The Onion Field. It's helped me with every strange guy I've played since."
After Ghosts, Woods stars in Killer, about America's first serial killer, Carl Panzram. It's written and directed by Tim Metcalfe, who wrote Kalifornia, and Woods may direct another of Metcalfe's scripts, about a father falsely accused of abusing his children. Before that, he appears as the head of a CIA-type organisation in Robert Zemeckis' Contact, adapted from Carl Sagan's novel about extra-terrestrials, starring Jodie Foster. "She's a great old pro," he says. "She was like, 'I've been doing this for 30 years.' I said, 'I know the feeling.'"
Woods has been working long enough now to see scripts call for "a James Woods type". It's payback for being turned down for the first 15 years of his career. For not fitting the conventionally attractive Hollywood mould. And weird-looking, over-intense, too-clever-by-half James Woods might be vindicated if he gets that Oscar. Not that he cares. "I've never paid attention to what people think of me," he says. "Unless they send me money or flowers or something."

story by Gareth Grundy and Garth Pearce