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Letter: Alan Arkin obituary

Over lunch one day at Pinewood Studios in the mid-1970s – where he was playing Sigmund Freud in the all-star comedy-thriller The Seven-Per-Cent Solution – Alan Arkin told me, in that familiar nasal deadpan, he found acting “difficult. It makes me nervous and jumpy.” Directing instead was, for him, usually a “release”, especially in the theatre. However, he only ever directed two features, the first of which Little Murders (1971), was, for me, a neglected gem of violent urban decay.

“The night before I started, I walked around the block very fast saying the lines and found the only way I could get them out was by stammering and having fits of not being able to speak. By Christ, I thought, that’s the way to play it!”