Parliamentarians of the only quite recent past used to cultivate a certain theatricality: Harold Macmillan, Jeremy Thorpe, Dennis Healey, Enoch Powell, to say nothing of Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Dennis Skinner - who gives an extremely vivid performance of a Hyde Park Corner heckler - is something of a throwback, bucking the present trend towards a carefully cultivated normalness, à la Tony Blair and David Cameron. This is paralleled in the theatre itself, where the young actor's aspiration is to look like a slightly more handsome version of everyone else. As acting has changed, so the politician-as-actor has changed with it.
But the conjunction of acting and politics does not stop there. In addition to the politician as actor, there is the phenomenon of the actor-as-politician. Thirty years ago, Equity was riven with factional disputes, to a large extent fomented by the recruitment to the Trotskyite Workers Revolutionary party of a number of actors including, most famously, Corin and Vanessa Redgrave, who saw Equity as a testing ground for the imminent revolution - a dress rehearsal, so to speak, for the transformation of society.
Vanessa and Corin, unswervingly true to their beliefs, have stood for parliament on several occasions but, while keeping their convictions, have only lost their deposits. Glenda Jackson is certainly the most prominent actor to have abandoned her career in favour of politics; she briefly rose to a certain eminence as a junior minister, but has rarely used her skills as an actor in the chamber or out of it. Some years earlier, a robustly bearded party of the name of Andrew Faulds maintained both professions for many years, but his impact in both spheres was limited by his tendency to erupt loudly at the slightest provocation. Finally, there is Michael Cashman, who, inspired by his highly effective activities in gay politics, has allowed himself to be elected as a member of the European Parliament, the political equivalent of doing rep in Barrow-in-Furness.
It may be that the British system is discouraging to the politically inclined thespian: too slow progress, years as an understudy, small chance of that all-important break. The US principle of direct election to office has proved much more attractive to actors, as we see from the careers of Clint Eastwood (mayor of Carmel), Arnold Schwarzenegger (governor of California) and Ronald Reagan.
It was with a certain wryness that Orson Welles observed that he had been discouraged from standing for election because he was a) divorced and b) an actor; Reagan was, of course, both. Welles reflected even more wryly on the fact that the man who won the Wisconsin seat for which he had been invited to stand was Joseph R McCarthy.
In later life, Welles tended to play down his political aspirations, but they were real enough at the time, and his views stood at the opposite end of the spectrum from those of the former star of Knute Rockne: All American. Like many of his colleagues at Mercury Theatre, New York, in the mid- to late-1930s, Welles was radical in inclination, strongly left-wing and pro-union. This was partly a matter of family background - his mother had been a leading radical and reformist in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he grew up - and partly a matter of the circles in which he moved. His collaborators, the playwright and poet Archibald
MacLeish and the composer Marc Blitzstein, had taught him to think politically and to progress from mere mainstream party allegiances. He had a famous falling-out with the Roosevelt administration when he attempted to stage Blitzstein's anti-capital musical The Cradle Will Rock under the aegis of the Federal Theatre Project, defying the FTP's order to cancel the show despite being barred from the theatre. Leading his actors heroically down Broadway, they found an empty theatre for hire and did the show right there: no sets, no light, no staging. It became one of the great theatre events of the late-1930s, and the spareness of the performance only confirmed the frankly Marxist message of the piece.
Welles inevitably came under the active surveillance of the FBI from 1937; to their intense irritation, they could never discover any evidence that he was a communist, despite the obvious intensity of his closeness to Blitzstein. Nor was he a member: neither the intellectual rigidity of Marxism nor the authoritarian structure of the Stalinist party could have accommodated Welles's approach to public affairs. He was no joiner, then or ever.
Essentially, he belonged to that loose but highly influential grouping of like-thinking radicals, the Popular Front - libertarian, suspicious of capital, supportive of organised labour, anti-imperialist (which at the time meant anti-British) and, most characteristically, anti-racist - and he would appear in a mainly token capacity at rallies and galas in support of any or all of these causes. He was a determined co-signator of petitions, statements and protests, and a member of committees without number. His work, from Citizen Kane to the stage play Native Boy (a version of Richard Hughes's incendiary anti-racist novel) and the radio play His Honor the Mayor, about civic corruption, was explicitly radical; at his own expense, he distributed copies of Arthur Miller's first novel, Focus, an anatomisation of anti-semitism, to like-minded friends and colleagues; he wrote an introduction to a pamphlet denouncing the unjust conviction of some young Hispanic men in what came to be known as the Sleepy Lagoon Case.
But all this was simply part of Welles's natural mind-set, all in a day's work for the committed individual. It was the war - specifically America's involvement in it - that made Welles think in terms of practical politics. He took his duties very seriously when, just days after Pearl Harbor, he was asked by Nelson Rockefeller to make a film in Brazil to promote pan-Americanism. His increasing fascination with that project led to the mutilation of his own film The Magnificent Ambersons; he was in the north of Brazil shooting epic footage of fishermen while his ambitious second film was cut, rewritten, reshot and finally released unheralded as part of a double bill with the Lupe Vélez vehicle Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost. His alienation from Hollywood was complete with his departure from RKO shortly afterwards.
And so Welles began to look for outlets for his growing sense that nothing was more important than to change the world, and that films were an excessively oblique way of doing so. He publicly attached himself to George Wallace, Roosevelt's visionary vice-president, at the same time learning from the man he called his political mentor, a somewhat shady individual called Louis Dolivet. Disappointed in his career as a film-maker, he returned to radio but in a new capacity: as a commentator, a role he then adopted in print, with daily columns in the New York Post; in addition, he toured the country, making speeches in vast stadiums and congress halls on Soviet-American friendship, latent fascism in America and, again and again, racism. He seemed to renounce his former activities. "Having a theatre and putting on plays is FUN," he said, "but working for the cause of human liberty against reactionism and retrogression is the most serious job I can do today ... the theatre must wait for a few months until I see what part I have to play in this greater drama, no matter how small the part may be." Despite Roosevelt's ditching of Wallace, Welles campaigned passionately for FDR's re-election, and when the ailing president died shortly after being returned to power for an unprecedented fourth term, he led the public mourning in emotional speeches of huge rhetorical power.
The most extraordinary political campaign he mounted was a series of radio broadcasts in 1946 to identify and bring to justice the policeman who had blinded a returning black veteran; his dangerously hysterical but ultimately effective campaign brought him vilification, death threats and, finally, caused him to be banned from the airwaves. The time had turned against Welles's brand of politics. After the war, Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, appeared to be turning away from everything that Roosevelt had stood for, and Welles succumbed to an intense bitterness, the uniquely painful bitterness of finding that the party you support is led by a man you despise. Meanwhile, now that he had returned to film-making - The Stranger, The Lady From Shanghai, Macbeth - he was deeply distressed to find himself being picketed by unions from his own industry, and attacked by them in print as a communist, the first stirrings of the witch hunt that came to its lurid climax with the hearings led by the junior senator from Wisconsin - the seat for which Welles declined to stand.
It is scarcely possible to doubt Welles's seriousness in his political crusade, but the giveaway is his increasing desperation and peevishness when he found that his passionately held views were not prevailing. Politics is a long game, acting is a much shorter one. No role is for life, and no political career proceeds according to the rules of dramatic construction. Climaxes and confrontations come but rarely; the committee room is the crucible of action. Welles would never have had the stamina or the patience for that.