Christian Bale

by Harrison Cheung

  Because Treasure Island was a made-for-TV movie on America’s Turner Network, Christian didn’t need to do publicity. Additionally, David had negotiated top billing for Christian, second only to Charlton Heston—an amazing feat given the caliber of the cast (which included the previously mentioned Christopher Lee, as well as Oliver Reed and Julian Glover). Powered by a spirited Chieftains soundtrack, Fraser Heston’s gritty remake of Treasure Island earned strong reviews.

  Fraser was thrilled with the results: “I think that Christian filled that wonderful role admirably; you really got the feeling by the end of the film that Jim Hawkins had come through a crucible, had been transformed by his ordeal from a boy into a man. The classic Joseph Campbell heroic transformation; the coming-of-age-by-ordeal ritual practiced by many cultures from the Masai to our own. I think our film was also more true to the book, and the spirit of the book, than the other films. I like to think that Robert Louis Stevenson would have liked this version the best.”

  The reviews ultimately assured Christian (and David) that he still “had it” and that his impressive performance in Empire of the Sun wasn’t simply a fluke or solely due to Spielberg’s expert direction.

  David was delighted that Treasure Island’s confidence-boosting experience was bringing Christian back to making movies. His mind was made up.

  By 1991, Christian had dropped out of sixth-form college and prepared to head off to L.A. to fulfill David’s Hollywood dreams, but even though Christian was talented, he obviously wasn’t prepared to deal with fans or the press at that early age.

  Should David have realized his son was already close to the breaking point after Empire of the Sun rather than being more worried about Spielberg being embarrassed? Or did he simply believe that his own charm would somehow rub off on his painfully shy and inwardly angry son?

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  Father Figure

  “Christian’s profession became David’s obsession.”

  —Jenny Bale, Daily Mail, March 8, 2010

  “I was the first one to hold him, all wet and bloody from his mother. I was the one who cut the umbilical cord. When I saw that I finally had a son, I cried out with joy and told Jenny that we had a son. Thank you, God. We have a son!”

  —David Bale

  “No fate but what we make.”

  —Terminator Salvation

  Christian Bale’s acting career obviously began with his father, David. But don’t trust everything you may have read about David Bale. When you look up Christian’s name on the Internet, you might have read that his father was an environmentalist, a South African pilot flying food to the starving in Africa, a military pilot for the RAF, or a commercial pilot for British Airways or British Midland. David Bale created an elaborate autobiography after he, Christian, and his daughter Louise had moved to America in 1991. The truth is actually a lot simpler.

  Behind every child actor is at least one supportive and ambitious parent. There are scores of books for parents on how to get their child into show business, counseling the ins and outs of auditions, headshots, acting classes, finding an agent, landing a commercial, and so on. And most of those books recommend that in a two-parent family, one parent devotes the time and energy to cultivate their child’s career while the other parent stays employed, providing the stability and income for the family home. If you look up any former child actor who’s been in the news for bad behavior, I’ll bet you that they were raised by a single parent.

  Being the parent of a child in show business is incredibly time-consuming. Parents are chauffeurs, nutritionists, psychologists, dialogue coaches, babysitters, and security. They also must protect the best interests of their child. But there’s a thin line between the child’s interests and what a stage-parent might see as their collective interest. Some stage-parents live through their children, realizing their own childhood dreams of fame and fortune by proxy.

  Paul Peterson, president of A Minor Consideration—a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization, dedicated to providing aid to past, present, and future child actors—notes: “Far too many professional stage-parents say: ‘We did a movie last year,’ when the truth is that the child learned the lines, hit the marks, and has to deal with the consequences of their success or failure.”

  People tend to overlook the fact that Christian Bale was a former child actor because Empire of the Sun was a box office dud and regarded as one of Spielberg’s lesser known films. To understand Christian, you have to understand his father, David, who was the ultimate stage-parent. David loved to tell people about Christian’s birth with as much detail and reverence as the birth of Christ. It didn’t matter if it was at a dinner party, a Hollywood premiere, or in line for the bank teller—retelling the story gave David so much joy, and he never seemed to tire of telling it.

  And in many ways, Christian was indeed David’s savior, for it was Christian’s film career that would be the answer to David’s hopes and dreams of a life less ordinary, away from the drudgery of his years in England. It’s one thing to listen to the local schoolteacher praise your son; it’s an entirely different feeling to have Steven Spielberg do so. In David’s eyes, Christian was clearly on track to be the next Richard Burton or Anthony Hopkins, the next great Celtic actor—a confident prediction based on Christian’s glowing reviews for his performance in Empire of the Sun. Although the film tanked at the box office, it was enough for David to see the reviews and to encourage his son to pursue an acting career with a clear course plotted for Hollywood. He quit his job to manage Christian’s career. He wanted Christian to become a movie star in America. Christian explained his father’s fear of settling down as: “More because of a restlessness with Britain and an inability to leave it, than anything else.”

  Standing 6'4", David Charles Howard Bale always made a striking first impression. One evening at dinner at Cozymel’s, a Mexcian restaurant in El Segundo, David was talking about his family and that height ran in the Bale family. He said that he loved being tall as he could always look down at women’s tits! He was a big man with a big laugh and a hot temper. David’s father, Philip, and his uncle Rex were both over 6'3". To explain Christian’s acting talents, David often pointed to his family tree. He claimed that his father had doubled for John Wayne in the Duke’s 1962 African adventure movie Hatari. Uncle Rex, David asserted, was also an actor with more than twenty films to his credit. And Rex’s cousin, he said, was none other than Lillie Langtry, a famous Victorian actress from the Channel Islands.

  David himself was one of those men blessed with looks that, like a fine wine or Sean Connery, improved with age; he had silver-gray hair, character lines, sad eyes, and a tanned, open, and inviting face. David bore more than a slight resemblance to actor Adam West—television’s first Batman.

  Yet David’s most powerful asset wasn’t his physical presence. With a rumbling basso of a voice both theatrical and dramatic in delivery, David had a remarkable gift of gab. He could be undeniably charming, passionate, and insistent. His oratory skills combined with an uncanny ability to mimic different British and South African accents were the centerpiece of his charm. One wanted to applaud at the end of David’s magniloquent speeches and pontifications—duly impressed yet certainly relieved as he also had a tendency to be long-winded.

  David Bale was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on September 2, 1941. His father, he told me, a retired RAF officer and safari hunter, was a strict disciplinarian. His mother, he fondly described as exactly like the character Patsy Stone portrayed by Joanna Lumley in the British TV comedy Absolutely Fabulous. One of David’s earliest childhood memories was that of watching Disney’s Song of the South, which was released in 1946. He loved that movie and often whistled its theme song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” under his breath. In Los Angeles, another song he often liked to sing was “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Ha,” a quirky 1966 hit by Napoleon XIV.

  When his parents divorced, David followed his mother, attending boarding school to boarding school from Egypt to Eng
land and visiting with his maternal grandmother and cousins on tiny Guernsey—one of the Channel Islands between England and France. He spent much of his youth bumming around the beaches of Europe. Said Christian: “He did that for a lot of his life. But what he pointed out to me was that at the time he’d found nothing he was good at. He was quite happy wandering about.”

  At the age of seventeen, David’s mother put him back on a ship to South Africa to be reunited with his father and to pursue an education at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

  However, David was no scholar. He loved to drink, and he took the opportunity to party and enjoy student life, though he said that his left-leaning politics and anti-apartheid stance were formed during his years at UCT, which was then a hotbed of anti-apartheid student activism. The lanky David was extremely popular and amusingly garrulous, dominating dinner conversation with tales of his exotic, multinational upbringing. But something else was forming for David. In 1962, his girlfriend, Sandra Thompson, announced that she was pregnant. David was only twenty-one and the surprise pregnancy floored him. Footloose and fancy-free, he wasn’t exactly planning to settle down in South Africa with a wife and child, but he nevertheless married Sandra. His first child, Erin, was born that year.

  Six months later, David had had enough of playing father. He announced to Sandra that he was returning to England to visit his mother. Sandra Thompson Bale filed for divorce in 1964. Their daughter, Erin, didn’t use the name Bale, choosing instead the name of her stepfather, Plessis.

  Back in England, David’s prospects were decidedly grim. His mother suggested that he learn a trade and enter the workforce—perhaps drive a lorry, he recalled with bitterness. David, who had enjoyed the sunny climes of South Africa, didn’t like gray and sullen London, so he headed to Bournemouth to recapture some of the seaside life he preferred.

  Destiny found David sleeping at a 24-hour Wimpy restaurant in Bournemouth, one of the few places that would stay open in the conservative and picturesque beach town, about two hours from London by train. Named after the burger-eating character in the Popeye comic strip, Wimpy is a U.K. fast-food chain similar to Big Boy’s or Denny’s in the U.S. Charming the waitresses, David had settled in a comfortable booth at the back of the restaurant where he could read the newspapers, nurse a mug of tea, and nibble on a plate of chips. “He wouldn’t even say he was homeless,” Christian said of his father. “To him, it was just another thing he was doing.” But there at Wimpy, David met Jenny James, a strikingly beautiful young Joan Collins look-alike. Christian has her piercing eyes.

  Jenny James was a very passionate young woman, who was looking for adventure to take her away from quiet Bournemouth. She found it with the silver-tongued David, who was handsome, charming, and told tales of exotic places. She was smitten.

  By 1968, David and Jenny had their first daughter, Sharon. They married on February 26, 1972, at St. Laurence’s Church in the village of Combe in Oxfordshire. But David was unable to find full-time work. He disliked authority figures, was cheerfully irresponsible, and bristled at the conventional employer-employee relationship. Entrepreneurial in spirit, David attempted to start a number of businesses, all of which ended in disaster. He claimed to have introduced the skateboard to England, but a lack of attention to the distribution contract left David penniless.

  When British Midland Airways was actively recruiting for pilots, David borrowed money to attend the airline’s Airline Preparation Programme at Oxford Aviation Training, but he never completed it. Jenny gave birth to their second daughter, Louise, in 1972. The growing Bale family needed an immediate source of income.

  But instead David decided what the family needed was a return to nature. So the Bales loaded up their VW camper van and headed west to Wales where David planned to find work on a farm. The Bales found themselves in Haverfordwest, the largest town in Pembrokeshire. With its remote calm, beautiful scenery, rugged coasts, clean beaches, and majestic mountains, David felt that Pembrokeshire would be an ideal place to raise a family.

  Christian Charles Philip Bale was born on January 30, 1974, in Haverfordwest. To say that David was thrilled would be a gross understatement. After three daughters, he finally had a son. “Those extra couple of ounces make all the difference in the world!” David crowed. David told me that when Christian was born, he held up his new baby to the heavens and whispered a line from Alex Haley’s Roots:

  “Behold, the only thing greater than yourself!”

  It was vivid imagery, and I believed every word David told me until I later discovered that Roots was published in 1976, two years after Christian’s birth. But I didn’t doubt the sentiment and could imagine how thrilled David was to finally have a son.

  The Bale family continued to move around, avoiding creditors and looking for work wherever available as David tried to find something interesting to do that would pay him a wage. On a couple occasions, Christian told me that the family would find themselves on the streets, evicted from their flat when David missed paying the rent. Christian spent his childhood nomadically, moving to Portugal (as a “gesture of disgust toward England,” Christian recalled), then Reading, before the Bales returned to Bournemouth to be closer to Jenny’s family.

  Christian enjoyed the time the family spent in Portugal, recalling: “We got into a camper van and drove down to Portugal and lived there for a year, and I didn’t go to school at all. My parents figured it’s an education living in a farming community. All I wanted to do was stay there and work in the horse stables and travel around the mountains of Portugal. I would have been totally happy.”

  Though David had a disdain for organized religion, he was a spiritual man who was essentially Christian and he named his son accordingly.

  Christian recalled: “I always pictured Jesus as Neil Diamond when I was younger. My upbringing was not a religious one, but an inquisitive one. My father was best friends with the bishop and fascinated by religion. I would come back from church, and my dad would put on Neil Diamond. So, I would always picture Neil Diamond with a big white beard, standing in a tunic and preaching to masses of people.”

  David was also fascinated with nature and he delighted in waking his children up in the middle of the night to watch falling stars, comets, or eclipses.

  While David enjoyed being a father, he was still hard-pressed to make a stable living to support his growing family. David had not finished his university education in South Africa and he blamed conservative, class-conscious British society for his frustrations.

  Naturally it fell to Christian’s mother, Jenny Bale, to work to support their family. She worked a variety of jobs—as a receptionist, an office clerk at a real estate agency, and for one summer as a dancer in David Smart’s Super Circus in Battersea Park in London. During that season, Jenny commuted daily to take care of her children. And thanks to David and Jenny’s eventual bitter divorce on June 6, 1991, David would forever tar Jenny as a “circus clown” in Christian’s acting bio. It was David’s way of demeaning and ridiculing his ex-wife while elevating his own role in Christian’s life. She eventually became a therapist and reflexologist.

  David and Jenny decided to send Sharon, Louise, and Christian to various dance and acting workshops. Christian was in fact taking ballet lessons and about to enroll in the prestigious Royal Academy of Dance, but David decided against the Academy when he saw how the boys were not allowed to play football or any sport that risked injury.

  As Christian began to land TV commercials, David realized that the casting agents were only interested in his son, not his daughters. It looked like his son was going to achieve what he could not—success. David was optimistic and tremendously confident about Christian’s potential career. He saw Christian as a golden ticket out of Margaret Thatcher’s England, which, he believed, had stymied all of his past ambitions. English class warfare meant more rules about what you should or must do. David, who considered himself a proud Afrikaner, scoffed at English class divisions and the prevalent discriminat
ion by accent and origin—hence David’s delight in putting on posh, Cockney, and other accents, a gift of mimicry Christian would inherit.

  In 1987, with the money Christian earned from Empire of the Sun, David and Jenny bought a large, comfortable two-story brick home on 207 Capstone Road in Bournemouth. Today, the neighborhood is popular for university housing, but back then, it was a regular middle-class home on a broad residential street.

  But David was desperate to move to America. David became the ultimate stage-parent, coddling and encouraging Christian to become a Hollywood star. With a Spielberg movie on his résumé, he knew that his son’s future would be bright. But those plans hit a wall when Christian had his nervous breakdown in Paris on the press tour for Empire of the Sun. David had to treat his son extremely carefully because he could easily retreat into a reclusive shell and quit acting altogether.

  British labor laws limited the number of hours a minor could work before the age of sixteen. In fact, Christian would be restricted to making only one movie a year. So while David anxiously waited for Christian’s sixteenth birthday, he became obsessed with plans to move to America.

  David wanted Christian to pursue the kind of acting career that wasn’t possible in England. America was the land of megastardom, big contracts, and big money. To become a true A-list Hollywood star, the only place for Christian to fulfill David’s dream was logically in Los Angeles.

  However, Christian’s mother, Jenny, didn’t share David’s ambitions to move to L.A. It was one thing to live in Portugal. As British citizens, they could live and work legally anywhere in the European Union. But moving to America was an entirely different matter. To immigrate to the U.S., one generally required a skill or a university degree in an area of demand by the U.S. economy. Once an immigrant was granted permanent residence, they were awarded “green cards” for identification and employment authorization. Without a green card, David and Jenny would not be allowed to work or stay beyond their visa’s expiration date. How, Jenny wondered, could they take that chance?