Pleasure Bumps

At 25, British Actor Michael Craw ford, knockabout champ of Broadway's boffo Black Comedy, has had enough movie successes (including The Knack and The Jokers) to be able to say with justifiable immodesty: "I expect to see Fame arriving next week in a little, neatly labeled package." The only thing that could waylay Fame would be for Crawford himself to wind up prematurely in a neatly labeled coffin.

Crawford's reverence for his own talent is exceeded only by his contempt for his own life. Even career stuntmen quake at his sight gags. In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, he was almost bisected by a chariot. In How I Won the War, an unreleased film with Beatle John Lennon, he is nearly mashed by a German tank. In Black Comedy, eight times a week for four months, he has skidded down staircases on his heel, hurtled into doors face first, crashed to the floor entangled in a phone wire.

Better Lemmon. For such reckless abandon Crawford pays a price. In Black Comedy to date, he has suffered a whiplash neck, a gashed and infected back, four ankle sprains, eight torn ligaments, and splinters in all ten fingers. The other night, while fastening the neck brace he has to wear between performances, he was asked why he didn't put out a little less or stay home and play his favorite sport of Monopoly. Crawford, aghast at such an unprofessional thought, replied: "I wouldn't give up those laughs for anything. My injuries are pleasure bumps."

The pleasure is mutual. New York Times Critic Walter Kerr wrote: "He deserves a Tony, if not the Nobel, for expertise in a special nose-bashing category." Richard Lester, who directed the Beatles' movies and three of Crawford's, last year called him "England's answer to Jack Lemmon." Last week Lester corrected himself, saying that "Michael is no one but himself now, and I think he'll be one of the great, great stars." Veteran British Actor Peter Bull, who is featured with him in Black Comedy, says: "There is no limit to what he can do."

Crawford, like so many of his British colleagues, was launched by radio acting and repertory. The family* was not theatrical. His father, a World War II pilot, was killed six months before

Michael's birth; his stepfather is a grocery-chain manager. His first walk-on part was as lead choirboy in a processional at St. Paul's Cathedral "because I looked such a cherub. I would just mime the words." He dropped out of school at 15, toured as a boy soprano in Benjamin Britten's Let's Make an Opera. His real education came from performing in 500 radio playlets for the BBC's "School Broadcasts."

Theaters of Action. The first payoff was a chance to audition for the U.S. film, The War Lover. He was given 24 hours to acquire an American accent, spent the night steeping himself in an album by a comic named Woody Woodbury. The jokes, recalls Crawford, were awful, but his accent was bang-on and he got the part. Next came his West End debut in the comedy Come Blow

Your Horn, and his first humorous screen role in British Lion Films' Two Left Feet. "It was to be," he says, "the first of the kitchen-sink comedies, but unfortunately it was not released for three years, making it the last of the kitchen-sink comedies."

Eventually, Crawford would like to try straight drama again. "But I enjoy working," he says, "more than starving." (He has one child, a second on the way.) Within ten years he fancies himself out of acting and into directing and producing. Dick Lester already considers Crawford such a natural that he let him direct his own scenes in A Funny Thing. But reading the papers last week, Michael fretted about a possible delay in his plans. "If I go home," he mused, "I may be shipped off to Israel. If I stay here, I'd go to Viet Nam." Either theater of action, of course, might be safer than the one where Crawford is currently engaged.

*The surname, Dumbell-Smith, so tickles John Lennon that he is writing a Beatle tune about it.

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