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The Guardian
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It's a high-wire act. Every choice matters': Danielle de Niese takes on opera's most notorious femme fatale
Not a flounce, ruffle or rose clenched between teeth is in sight when Danielle de Niese sashays onstage as Carmen – dressed in a boiler suit. The Australian-born lyric soprano's Carmen will not be the Gypsy seductress audiences have come to expect. In Opera Australia's new production, set in present-day Seville, she is a grounded woman ending another long shift in a cigarette factory. She loosens the fastenings around the neck of her uniform – a glimpse of glistening shoulder, an arch of the back and throat. To her female co-workers, she is hot, exhausted and stiff. To the lads waiting and watching, she is something else. 'Through the male gaze, something functional can appear alluring,' De Niese says. 'To the males watching that moment becomes charged.' De Niese, speaking to the Guardian in June shortly after arriving in the country to begin rehearsals for her debut performance in the Bizet opera, says her iteration of Carmen has not emerged out of a desire to 'just do something different for the sake of it'. 'I just want every word, every gesture, to feel believable. That's the only thing that matters.' Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning For years, De Niese's fans had nudged her toward Carmen – a natural fit, they assumed, for a sultry-looking soprano known as much for her theatrical flair as her vocal precision. But until now she had resisted the obvious casting. 'It wasn't about the aria's reputation,' she says of the instantly recognisable Habanera, Carmen's opening solo. 'It was the story in the lyrics that really caught me. I realised I'd never actually listened to them before – not really.' What drew her in was the way Carmen's fate is foretold in her first few lines: Love is a rebellious bird / That no one can tame. 'We hear the Habanera and think, 'Oh here she comes, the femme fatale.' But the text is full of foreboding. It's a warning. That's what I wanted to tell – not just the song, but the story.' In this new take on Carmen, directed by Melbourne Theatre Company's Anne-Louise Sarks, cliches are both acknowledged and upended. In one sequence, the ensemble parades through a surreal Carmen-themed carnival, donning the very stereotypes the opera has long perpetuated – mantillas, castanets, off-the-shoulder peasant blouses. But the Carmen in this production is emotionally complex – proud, spirited and caught in a love that corrodes as much as it consumes. 'I'm really interested in the kind of love that can unravel you,' De Niese says. 'The kind that starts as passion and turns into something toxic – and you don't see it happening until you've lost yourself.' This is the challenge De Niese has set herself: not to reinvent Carmen, but to restore her complexity. 'I don't want her to be a cool enigma,' she says. 'I want her to feel like someone you know. Someone whose choices you understand, even if you don't agree with them.' She points to the recent testimony of singer Cassie Ventura in her case against her ex-boyfriend Sean 'Diddy' Combs as a contemporary example of 'those emotional entanglements, that blurring of control and desire. That's very real. And very now.' To an outsider looking in, De Niese's own life appears less than real, more like a fairytale. Born in Melbourne to Sri Lankan parents, her first taste of fame came early, becoming Young Talent Time Discovery Quest's youngest ever winner at the age of nine in 1988. The family moved to Los Angeles, and at the age of 16, De Niese won an Emmy for her role as a regular guest host of the TV program LA Kids. By then, the child prodigy had already made her operatic debut with the Los Angeles Opera. At 19 she was singing Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera. Seven years later, she wowed audiences as Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare at the prestigious Glyndebourne festival. Marriage to Gus Christie, the third generation of Christies to own and operate Glyndebourne, followed. Her life as lady of the manor at the historic English estate is 'idyllic', she admits, but it took a bit of work initially to be accepted by elitists as something more than an American interloper. She was interrogated about her knowledge of cricket – amusing she concedes, given her Australian and Sri Lankan backgrounds – and pilloried when the last of Glyndebourne's famous dynasty of pugs died and she replaced them with bulldogs and Portuguese waterdogs. Today, she graciously wears the New York Times title of 'opera's coolest soprano', and in 2023 Tatler named her as one of Britain's 25 best dressed. 'People see the highlights and think it was all silver platter,' she says. But her career, she insists, has not been filled with shortcuts: 'I've been the tortoise, not the hare. I've taken risks, yes, but every step, slow. Every choice, deliberate.' That discipline has preserved her voice – and allowed it to evolve. 'Ten years ago, I couldn't have sung Carmen,' she says. 'Now it sits perfectly. My voice has broadened, darkened. It feels like it's grown into its home.' As Carmen, she intends to do just that. Not an archetype, not a cautionary tale – but a woman, vivid and vulnerable, stepping out from the smoke, fully alive. 'Opera is a high-wire act,' she says. 'Every choice matters. But the most important one is this: tell the story like it's happening for the first time. Make it real.' Opera Australia's Carmen runs until 19 September at Sydney Opera House; and from 15-25 November at Regent Theatre, Melbourne
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It's a high-wire act. Every choice matters': Danielle de Niese takes on opera's most notorious femme fatale
Not a flounce, ruffle or rose clenched between teeth is in sight when Danielle de Niese sashays onstage as Carmen – dressed in a boiler suit. The Australian-born lyric soprano's Carmen will not be the Gypsy seductress audiences have come to expect. In Opera Australia's new production, set in present-day Seville, she is a grounded woman ending another long shift in a cigarette factory. She loosens the fastenings around the neck of her uniform – a glimpse of glistening shoulder, an arch of the back and throat. To her female co-workers, she is hot, exhausted and stiff. To the lads waiting and watching, she is something else. 'Through the male gaze, something functional can appear alluring,' de Niese says. 'To the males watching that moment becomes charged.' De Niese, speaking to the Guardian in June shortly after arriving in the country to begin rehearsals for her debut performance in the Bizet opera, says her iteration of Carmen has not emerged out of a desire to 'just do something different for the sake of it'. 'I just want every word, every gesture, to feel believable. That's the only thing that matters.' Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning For years, de Niese's fans had nudged her toward Carmen – a natural fit, they assumed, for a sultry-looking soprano known as much for her theatrical flair as her vocal precision. But until now she had resisted the obvious casting. 'It wasn't about the aria's reputation,' she says of the instantly recognisable Habanera, Carmen's opening solo. 'It was the story in the lyrics that really caught me. I realised I'd never actually listened to them before – not really.' What drew her in was the way Carmen's fate is foretold in her first few lines: Love is a rebellious bird / That no one can tame. 'We hear the Habanera and think, 'Oh here she comes, the femme fatale.' But the text is full of foreboding. It's a warning. That's what I wanted to tell – not just the song, but the story.' In this new take on Carmen, directed by Melbourne Theatre Company's Anne-Louise Sarks, cliches are both acknowledged and upended. In one sequence, the ensemble parades through a surreal Carmen-themed carnival, donning the very stereotypes the opera has long perpetuated – mantillas, castanets, off-the-shoulder peasant blouses. But the Carmen in this production is emotionally complex – proud, spirited and caught in a love that corrodes as much as it consumes. 'I'm really interested in the kind of love that can unravel you,' de Niese says. 'The kind that starts as passion and turns into something toxic – and you don't see it happening until you've lost yourself.' This is the challenge de Niese has set herself: not to reinvent Carmen, but to restore her complexity. 'I don't want her to be a cool enigma,' she says. 'I want her to feel like someone you know. Someone whose choices you understand, even if you don't agree with them.' She points to the recent testimony of singer Cassie Ventura in her case against her ex-boyfriend Sean 'Diddy' Combs as a contemporary example of 'those emotional entanglements, that blurring of control and desire. That's very real. And very now.' To an outsider looking in, de Niese's own life appears less than real, more like a fairytale. Born in Melbourne to Sri Lankan parents, her first taste of fame came early, becoming Young Talent Time Discovery Quest's youngest ever winner at the age of nine in 1988. The family moved to Los Angeles, and at the age of 16, de Niese won an Emmy for her role as a regular guest host of the TV program LA Kids. By then, the child prodigy had already made her operatic debut with the Los Angeles Opera. At 19 she was singing Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera. Seven years later, she wowed audiences as Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare at the prestigious Glyndebourne festival. Marriage to Gus Christie, the third generation of Christies to own and operate Glyndebourne, followed. Her life as lady of the manor at the historic English estate is 'idyllic,' she admits, but it took a bit of work initially to be accepted by elitists as something more than an American interloper. She was interrogated about her knowledge of cricket – amusing she concedes, given her Australian and Sri Lankan backgrounds – and pilloried when the last of Glyndebourne's famous dynasty of pugs died and she replaced them with bulldogs and Portuguese waterdogs. Today, she graciously wears the New York Times title of 'opera's coolest soprano', and in 2023 Tatler named her as one of Britain's 25 best dressed. 'People see the highlights and think it was all silver platter,' she says. But her career, she insists, has not been filled with shortcuts: 'I've been the tortoise, not the hare. I've taken risks, yes, but every step, slow. Every choice, deliberate.' That discipline has preserved her voice – and allowed it to evolve. 'Ten years ago, I couldn't have sung Carmen,' she says. 'Now it sits perfectly. My voice has broadened, darkened. It feels like it's grown into its home.' As Carmen, she intends to do just that. Not an archetype, not a cautionary tale – but a woman, vivid and vulnerable, stepping out from the smoke, fully alive. 'Opera is a high-wire act,' she says. 'Every choice matters. But the most important one is this: tell the story like it's happening for the first time. Make it real.' Opera Australia's Carmen runs until 19 September at Sydney Opera House; and from 15-25 November at Regent Theatre, Melbourne
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Telegraph
Why Seville is the greatest city in Europe
Like a smug, doting mother whose highly gifted child has just won a major prize – to her delight but not necessarily her surprise – I was thrilled to hear that Seville has been voted the Greatest City in Europe by Telegraph readers. Having lived here for 22 years, it feels fully justified. As anyone who has visited the city will already know, Seville is a holiday destination that you should explore in fragrant spring, or wander during the warmth of autumn, but avoid throughout the stiflingly hot summer months. It is a magical microcosm of everything you could want in a weekend destination. Airport nearby? Check. Characterful hotels aplenty? Check. History at every turn? Check. Tasty, affordable food? Check. Easily walkable? Check. Blue skies whatever the month? Check. What's not to love? There are tiny, medieval alleyways, narrow enough to touch both sides with outstretched arms; unexpected doorways leading to cool, arcaded patios filled with ferns; and jaw-dropping contemporary structures such as Las Setas, the world's largest wooden structure that winds 30 metres up. There are also endless bars for an unhurried caña de Cruzcampo bien fria (small glass of ice-cold beer), and when the last inch gets warm, do like the locals do and just order another. Yes, as in many well-visited cities, there are concerns about the rise of holiday lets and their impact on residents. And yes, they are justified, but laws have been passed to address the issue. Yet you can expect that most Sevillanos will be delighted to meet you, help you, and charm you with their warmth. They're infinitely proud of their beautiful city, and they love that you appreciate it too. They're passionate about everything: football teams (Seville versus Betis); Semana Santa (Holy Week); the seven-day hedonistic glory of drinking, eating and dancing that is the Feria de Abril; and debating which bar serves the coldest beer. One of the main reasons people choose Spain for their holiday is the food. Seville is known as the capital of tapas, and small dishes reign supreme. It doesn't do any harm that Andalucia grows superb fruit and veg: when British visitors taste a tomato salad – juicy, deep red slices of heaven dressed simply with EVOO, garlic and salt – they weep. Add a few slices of tangy Payoyo cheese, some slivers of nutty Iberian ham, tartare of tender (sustainably caught) bluefin tuna and cumin-scented spinach with chickpeas, a traditional dish originating from Sephardic Jews, and you're in heaven. And I haven't even touched on the glories of the city's dizzying romp through architectural styles. Stone pillars in a church courtyard? Probably Roman or Visigothic. A tower that looks reminiscent of a Moroccan mosque? That's because it used to be a minaret; now it's a belltower with a Renaissance crown. Spanish and Arabic script on the same building? Built by Islamic stonemasons for a Christian king, known as Mudéjar. A glazed tile with geometric design? Made in Triana, with Arabic origins. I feel privileged to live here, and I like nothing more than to convey the city's enduring allure to visitors. As the saying goes, 'Quien no ha visto Sevilla no ha visto maravilla' – 'If you haven't seen Seville, you haven't seen a wonder'.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Carmen review - feminist take on opera's notorious femme fatale has swagger and style
Opera's most notorious femme fatale makes a helluva entrance: the moment we meet Carmen in Georges Bizet's 1875 opera, we know she's a bad girl headed for a worse end. The downward chromatic slide of her opening aria tells us she's a woman at odds with the system; the swaying habanera rhythm says she's a seductress – a crime punishable by death in the operatic canon. But in Opera Australia's new production, Carmen is not the sultry vixen we know from the past 150 years: the soprano Danielle de Niese arrives dressed in a factory boiler suit, with a swagger usually reserved for opera's men. It is present-day Seville and Carmen has finished her shift; De Niese moves through the crowd of female co-workers and male onlookers with the bravado of someone who has experienced the best and worst of being the centre of attention, and decided to square up rather than shy away. She stretches out the tension of a day on the factory line and hustles for a ciggie. The Habanera aria is usually played tits first, with swaying hips and lots of leg; De Niese's take, both weary and wary, is a signal that things are different this time. It's an early parry in a three-hour duel between the director, Anne-Louise Sarks, and not only Bizet's opera but opera itself – its codes, its norms, its way of punishing and killing women. Sarks, who won acclaim for feminist takes on Medea and A Doll's House, is tasked with bringing Carmen – an opera about a strong-willed and sexually liberated woman who is killed by a jilted and jealous lover – into a post #MeToo era in which sexual violence is still rampant and, on average, one woman is killed every nine days by a current or former partner. It's also an era in which Opera Australia needs to capture new and younger audiences to survive – so Sarks is also tasked with making it a fun night out. Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning She has her work cut out for her. Even though the original libretto is fairly sympathetic to Carmen, given the social norms and operatic conventions of its era, the framework is unequivocally patriarchal. Carmen's story is framed by that of her murderous lover Don José: we meet him first, a good guy and honest worker who loves his mother. We watch him succumb, protesting, to Carmen's sexual spell; we follow his descent into despair and depravity, corrupted by her influence. And then there's the music, its tonal harmonies telling us that he is the hero and its chromatic tensions telling us she's the baddie Sarks and her creative team put up a good fight and make smart choices – particularly in the first and final acts, where it most counts. The present-day setting emphasises the urgent reality of the violence at the centre of the story. They costume and choreograph early crowd scenes to emphasise the gender, class and social dimensions of this violence; the way a group of men can transform into an attentive pack in the presence of a female body. Pushing back against the bright, jaunty tone of the music, Sarks threads in hints of the violence from the get-go, when José manhandles a female factory worker. In its middle stretch, the show leans into the spectacle required from opera – and this is where Horwell, coming off the back of Tony and Olivier awards for her work on The Picture of Dorian Gray, comes into her own, deploying flamboyant sequin-sparkled Eurotrash outfits, bright bunches of flowers, jewel-toned string lights, and lashings of Catholic iconography. It's gorgeous, seductive stuff. More gorgeous still is the music, beautifully sung and beautifully played by the orchestra – although De Niese, stepping into the role of Carmen for the first time, was underwhelming on opening night, seeming to sacrifice vocals for a more behaviourally authentic performance. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Her version of the character – the first of four Carmens presented in this season, each by a different performer – feels unsatisfying, too. While she brilliantly captures Carmen's combative side – as much a toreador, in her own way, as her lover Escamillo – she is less convincing as a seductress and a rebel striving for freedom. You don't get a sense of what she is fighting for, which makes it harder to fight alongside her. De Niese brought it in for the kill in the final act, however, transmitting the heroic courage and conviction of Carmen: a woman who would rather face death than abandon her values. Sarks and her team close their feminist take on Bizet's femicidal fantasy by showing a realistic and prolonged struggle culminating in strangulation; a grimly quotidian act of violence when compared with the ways Carmen is usually dispatched – most commonly in a high-drama stabbing. This production feels caught between the demands of a dramatic spectacle and the desire to show something more raw and ugly – but Bizet's music, the text and the operatic form are powerfully seductive. Opera Australia's Carmen runs until 19 September at Sydney Opera House; and from 15 to 25 November at Regent Theatre, Melbourne
Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
James Ellroy: ‘I have been obsessed with crime since my mother's murder'
James Ellroy is prowling a tiny hat shop in a side street in Seville, Spain. His angular 6ft 3in frame, loud bark and garish Hawaiian shirt draw attention. Everyone watches as he reaches for a khaki green cashmere fedora and tries it on. 'Does it look big?' he drawls, squinting at himself in a mirror. 'Shake your head and see if it moves,' I suggest. He waggles his head: the hat fits but he is still not sure. 'It does not vibrate my vindaloo,' he bellows. 'Let's broom on outta here.' Ellroy, 77, has been vibrating the vindaloo of millions of crime fiction readers for decades, and he is part of his own myth-generating machine. 'I am the greatest popular novelist that America has ever produced,' he declares. 'The author of 24 books, masterpieces all, which precede all my future masterpieces.' He repeats variations of this self-praise multiple times during the week I spend with him in Spain, where he has come to speak at a literary festival. When I ask how he feels about the author Joyce Carol Oates describing him as the American Dostoyevsky, he snorts derisively: 'Dostoyevsky is the Russian Ellroy.' His densely plotted novels, which include 1995's American Tabloid and 2023's The Enchanters, focus on the criminal underbelly of postwar America, especially Los Angeles, and have sold millions of copies. Several, including The Black Dahlia (1987) and most notably LA Confidential (1990), have been adapted into movies. His writing style is a sort of staccato cop rap from a bygone era, sometimes echoed in his own speech. And he has a truly shocking origin story for a crime writer: when he was ten years old his mother was murdered, her body found in shrubs beside a California high school with one of her stockings tied around her neck. 'I have been obsessed with crime since the hot Sunday afternoon of June 22, 1958, when a policeman named Ward Hallinen squatted down to my little kid level and said, 'Son, your mother has been killed,' ' he says. • James Ellroy calls LA Confidential film 'a 'turkey of the highest form' Ellroy's own life inspires much of his work, which often blurs fact and fiction. At times it seems as though he has walked out of one of his novels. And it's no wonder he wants a convincing hat to wear: the Hat Squad in his books, as any self-respecting Ellroy fan will tell you, comprises four inseparable fedora-wearing robbery detectives who are based on real LAPD officers, known for their tough veneer and compassionate hearts. Which sums up Ellroy too. Despite the braggadocio, he is not insufferable — he veers between extreme self-confidence and a touching unworldliness. 'The world bewilders me,' he says in a moment of self-doubt when we are trying to find our seats on a busy high-speed train to Madrid. He cannot stand crowded places. 'I am only comfortable around a few people.' However, when I interview Ellroy in front of an audience at the Hay Festival Forum in Seville he is more than comfortable, bounding on to the stage and roaring like a lion. Literally. The audience is aghast. 'Good evening, peepers, prowlers, pederasts, pedants, panty sniffers, punks and pimps,' he snarls in full performance mode. 'I'm James Ellroy, the death dog with the hog log, the foul owl with the death growl and the slick trick with the donkey dick…' On stage it is all swagger and stonewalling. 'I have no view on Donald Trump,' he declares when I ask for his take on the American president. He adds primly: 'I rigorously abstain from moral judgment on the current times.' Yet away from the crowd, one on one, he is much more candid. 'If you want to stray to Trump, I realised very early on that he was, at the very least, a career criminal, mobbed up and very probably a serial sexual harasser. So that should exclude him from the presidency. My cop friends like Trump because Americans have a tough-guy complex. They don't realise how weak and craven he is,' he says. Lee Earle Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948, the only child of 'a great-looking, cheap couple'. His mother, Jean Hilliker, was a nurse and his father, Armand Ellroy, an accountant and, as Ellroy describes him, 'a Hollywood bottom-feeder'. He had no idea how to parent. 'He once said to me, 'Hey kid, I f***ed Rita Hayworth.' I said, 'F*** you, Dad, you did not f*** Rita Hayworth.' Ten years after his death a man who was writing her biography looked me up — my father was her business manager. Did they ever have sexual congress? I'd like to believe they did but my father was a notorious bullshit artist.' Ellroy's parents split up when he was five, and he later moved with his mother to El Monte, just outside LA, spending weekends with his father. Both parents were promiscuous. 'I realised there was a secret adult world out there and that sex is at the heart of it. I saw my mother in bed with men. And later on I came home and found my dad in bed with my sixth-grade teacher. I heard the grunting and groaning as I walked up the steps. What was funny was the dog was trying to take a nap on the bed while all those legs were kicking around.' With the encouragement of his father he grew to hate his mother. When he told her he would prefer to live with his dad, she slapped him. 'I fell and whacked my head on a glass coffee table. She didn't hit me again. She was nothing but solicitous [But] from that point on it was over. It was him and me against her. She was the bad guy.' His mother was murdered on the night of Saturday, June 21, 1958, while Ellroy was staying with his father. Sixty-seven years on, the murder remains unsolved. Only Ellroy could make it even more shocking by saying he was grateful to the killer. 'What I recall most prevalently is forcing myself to cry on the bus going back to LA,' he says. 'I cranked the tears out. I remember waking up the next morning, looking out at a bright blue sky and thinking I had a whole new life. This is not a retrospective,' he insists. 'I'm not concocting this.' In fact his feelings towards his mother are more complex. 'I admired her tremendously. She was capable and competent in a way my father was not.' In his 1996 memoir My Dark Places he admits to having had sexual thoughts about her both before and after her death. Many years later he spent 15 months and a lot of money trying to solve her murder with Bill Stoner, a retired homicide detective. Stoner later said he thought Ellroy was 'falling in love with his mother'. Not quite, Ellroy says today, but 'I am of her'. Living with his permissive father was not all he had hoped it might be. The apartment was filthy and meals were erratic. It was a 'horrible, horrible childhood', he says, but he cautions against pity. 'I'm not some crack baby butt-f***ed in his crib by his Uncle Charlie.' A voracious reader, he gravitated towards crime books after his mother's murder. He was expelled from school for fighting and truancy as a teenager, then stayed at home to care for his father, who had suffered a stroke. Eventually he could stand it no more and in 1965 he briefly joined the army to escape — something for which he has never quite forgiven himself. 'I used to dream about the abandonment of my father when he was dying,' he says. He returned from the army just before his father's death later that year. 'His final words to me were, 'Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.' ' Ellroy — who adopted the name James because he hated the 'tongue-tripping l's and e's' of Lee Earle Ellroy — hit a precarious decade. Often homeless, he would sleep in parks, could not hold down a job and sank into alcoholism. He was arrested multiple times: 'I used to shoplift. I used to break into houses and sniff women's undergarments, I stole a few cars — Mickey Mouse misdemeanours. I probably got arrested forty times but [on] aggregate I served no more than four or five months of county jail time.' His determination to write lifted him out of this spiral. In 1977 he took a job as a golf caddie at the Bel-Air Country Club outside LA and started his first novel, Brown's Requiem, about a caddy who hires a detective to spy on his sister. Murder and mayhem ensue, interwoven with a love story. 'All my books are love stories set against violent backdrops,' he says. 'If there are two great themes in my books it's history as a state of yearning and bad men in love with strong women.' His most recent book, The Enchanters, published in 2023, features a real-life Hollywood private eye, Freddy Otash, spying on Marilyn Monroe to get dirt on the Kennedys. Describing Monroe as 'talentless and usurious', Ellroy conjures a murky world of corrupt politicians and craven stars and looks on with his readers, enthralled and titillated, as they tear each other apart. 'Absolute factual reality means nothing to me,' he stresses. 'What I do is I slander the dead.' • The Enchanters by James Ellroy review — he's a one-off The police in his novels are often as corrupt as the criminals. 'I love the cops. It started when a policeman put a nickel in a vending machine and handed me a candy bar the afternoon [after] my mother was killed. He gave me a little pat on the head and I have given my heart to cops ever since. I don't care what kind of outré illegal shit they pull, I take gleeful joy in describing police misconduct. Rogue cops are my guys.' Would he ever have contemplated becoming a cop himself? 'Naaah,' he growls. What about a criminal? Has he ever fantasised about murdering someone? He narrows his eyes and for a moment I wonder if I have overstepped the mark. But his face softens into a smile: 'No, I never have.' Ellroy has been married and divorced twice — first to Mary Doherty, a phone company executive, from 1988 to 1991. These days he lives in Denver with his second ex-wife, the Canadian author Helen Knode, whom he met in 1990 when his marriage to Doherty was crumbling. 'She's the single most brilliant human being I've ever met,' he says of Knode. They married in October 1991, but their relationship became tumultuous: Ellroy was tackling addiction and mental health problems. They now live in the same building but in different apartments. 'I have a key to hers, she has a key to mine. It's not monogamy that's the problem, it's cohabitation. We can fight a fight. She gets shrill real quick. Helen would believe she is remarkably more open-minded than me. I would say I'm remarkably more open-minded than her… Tell her I said that. She will bray like a horse.' A few days later I speak to Knode on the phone. She splutters indignantly when I tell her what Ellroy said. How does she put up with him? 'It's breathtakingly exhausting to be him and to be around him,' she says affectionately. 'There are several James Ellroys and they all cohabit sometimes.' He has never had children, saying in the past he feared he would be a 'bad father'. 'I have absolutely no feeling for families,' he tells me. He and Knode experimented with an open marriage but by 2005 they had agreed to split. 'It was the best day of my life when I realised I could divorce him,' Knode says with a laugh. Ellroy then had a series of relationships with, as Knode puts it, 'parasitical women' — but they remained close. During his last relationship, more than a decade ago, his girlfriend complained about the amount of time he spent talking to Knode on the phone. 'She said, 'Her or me?' I said, 'Her.' We've been together ever since,' Ellroy says. They usually spend the late afternoon together at Knode's apartment, have 'dinch' (lunch/dinner) and watch a documentary or an old movie. 'I've had to put my foot down,' she says. 'I told him we're not watching any movies with guns.' 'Then we say goodnight,' Ellroy says, 'and I go back to my apartment. I have insomnia, so I'm padding around.' Ellroy's flat is austere with grey walls, overlooking a railway track. 'It's reassuring. Trains going by at two and three o'clock in the morning.' The bookshelves are filled with copies of his own books. He rarely goes out. 'Helen has friends, I don't. I actually have panic attacks if Helen stays out too late.' He spends most of the day at home, writing and listening to classical music, especially Beethoven. 'I write by hand, I've never logged on to a computer. I believe the internet, computers, cell phones, apps, electronic devices are the most pernicious version of Satan on earth. Get a gun and shoot your computer through its evil digital heart. In its guise of convenience it has destroyed civility and turned younger people into uncivil, brusque, rude, low-attention-span, shithead kids and we have to rescue future generations from this evil.' He will never write a novel set in the present — or even in the last half century: 'In 1972 Watergate eats up the political scenery. There's no place to go after that.' He knows his political history but very little about the world today. He admired Margaret Thatcher as 'the saviour of Britain' (he even named a dog after her), but when I ask what he thinks of Keir Starmer, he replies, 'Who?' Ellroy has almost finished writing his next novel, set in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis but spanning back to include the bombing of Guernica. He has never seen Picasso's Guernica painting of 1937, so we arrange to meet one afternoon at the Reina Sofia art museum in Madrid. He stands silently in front of the huge monochrome oil painting for a full ten minutes, scanning every detail, before making the sign of the cross. 'It's horrifying,' he says quietly. In the next room, though, he is back in ebullient mode. Catching sight of Salvador Dalí's 1929 painting The Great Masturbator, he chuckles. 'Wanker!' he says loudly. There is something restless about Ellroy, both physically — loping around, fidgeting — and in spirit. 'I want to get lost,' he says repeatedly. 'I gotta get outside of myself. I wrestle with it all the time.' What does he mean? 'I'm always thinking. I can't sleep for shit. I just want to go to a place where nobody knows me and have one double Manhattan, or eat a marijuana cookie, and just see what happens.' But he won't let himself. He has been teetotal for years and during his sleepless nights he worries about everything, death above all. 'Horror of death is the tremor that lies beneath everything. And 77 will get you there.' He has thought carefully about how he would like to be buried. 'I want to have my briefcase and my three stuffed alligators.' He's not joking — but they are fluffy toys rather than taxidermy. 'Sometimes I'll put the gators under the covers with me, they're a family. Al is the alligator, of course. Wife is named Clara and they have a daughter named Gertie. They're going in the hole with me.' Not that he is winding down. 'I'm not checking out of here any time soon.' Indeed he often says that he will live until he's 101. 'I've got a lot of books left in me. I'm going to have a strong third act. Not to labour a point, but I am a genius.' Hay Festival Segovia runs Sep 11-14 and Hay Forum Seville Feb 11-14, 2026;
