“If you’re travelling in the north country fair, where the winds hit heavy on the borderline, remember me to one who lives there, for she once was a true love of mine.”
That, of course, is Bob Dylan, perhaps channelling an episode from his Minnesota past for his track, Girl From The North Country.
But these are words which could also have been written by William B Davis, the Canadian actor who found fame in The X-Files, and, before that, love in Dundee.
The ex-Dundee Rep director, who would become a household name as the Cigarette Smoking Man, learned to smoke in his childhood but learned to drink in Scotland.
He also married a local girl and said of his time in the city: “Situated on the east coast of Scotland at the frontier of the Scottish Highlands, Dundee was another world.”
Davis earned global fame in 1993 as the arch-nemesis of FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder yet says it was his time in Dundee that gave him his “vision of what acting should be”.
Davis started acting as a child, working with The Straw Hat Players in Ontario and doing radio drama in the CBC’s golden age, the early 1950s.
In September 1962 he arrived in Chesterfield to begin a stint as associate director of the Civic Theatre, where he worked with Donald Sutherland.
Davis moved to Dundee Rep, on Nicoll Street, the next season and was hired to direct eight of the nine productions that would take the company up to Christmas.
“Eventually I found a charming two-bedroom flat in the upper storey of a house in Broughty Ferry, about four miles east of the city,” Davis recalled in his memoir.
“As the days grew shorter, and they grow very short in this northern city, the flat’s charm abated somewhat. Why was my bed so cold? Pretty simple, really.
“It was damp.
“And the temperature in the room was below freezing.
“Nothing like snuggling up to two slabs of ice.
“I bought an electric blanket. Heating in the theatre was no better and we often rehearsed wearing five or six layers of clothes.
“We had a pretty amazing company of actors. Oh yes, and there was a 15-year-old apprentice to whom we gradually gave larger and larger acting roles, Brian Cox.
“I was doing what I wanted to do: direct plays, lots of them. And I was on a mission, to change the style of production from nice representations to a dynamic reality.
“And over the year I was there we had some success with that, and some failure.”
William B Davis found his own girl from the north country
Romance blossomed off stage when Davis fell for “dark-haired beauty” Veronica Caird, who was the daughter of a local business owner and member of the theatre’s board.
Davis said the cast used to drink at lunchtime because the pubs in Dundee shut at 9pm but he made up for it during visits to Veronica and her parents’ home in Monifieth.
He said: “Invited to Sunday lunch after a brief conversation in the theatre bar with Veronica and her parents, the die was cast. We were married a year later.
“I was good friends with her parents as well. While playing a lot of bridge, I learned drinking habits that have stayed with me to this day.
“Drink gin, a light drink, before dinner, and Scotch, a heavier drink, after dinner.
“I spent many happy hours in their warm, inviting home — Sunday lunches of roast mutton in the renovated kitchen, walks on the beach along the Tay, endless games of
bridge, tea in the afternoon, gin early evening, Scotch after dinner — and all of us
smoking except Bill, who had to quit because of circulation issues.”
Life was good before everything came tumbling down.
Literally.
Davis and some of the cast went for lunch at the Chrome Rail in Seagate on June 1 1963, before the matinee performance of The Rehearsal.
He said: “After lunch, I started the drive back to the theatre, but the roads were blocked.
“One of the actresses saw my car and, tears streaming down her face, called out: ‘The theatre is on fire!’ And so it was. Smoke and fire engines were everywhere.”
Flames shot 30 feet into the air at the height of the fire.
The roof collapsed at 3.15pm under the intense heat — sending sparks, broken glass, slates and burning embers showering down on the surrounding streets.
Davis said: “Fortunately, no one was hurt, the company being on lunch, and being Saturday the building underneath was unoccupied.
“When the smoke settled the building was completely destroyed, save for the pictures of the acting company which were somehow, ironically and heroically, still standing in the wreckage of the foyer.”
But, as the old showbiz adage says, the show must go on.
The Palace Theatre had already been fixed up by the Rep’s board of directors to stage its next production before the firefighters had left the smouldering £50,000 blaze.
London, Laurence Olivier and the long trip north…
So what happened after the stint at the Palace Theatre?
The cast mounted two productions in a tent in Camperdown Park in the summer, before an outdoor production of Macbeth at Glamis Castle was cancelled.
And then they cancelled Davis.
The board decided they needed someone with more experience.
He returned to London and spent two years at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and started to teach at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
“Now that I was in London and Veronica still in Scotland, the overnight train from
London to Dundee became a regular part of my life,” said Davis.
“I’m still haunted by the sound of trains at night, the rolling of the wheels, the
creaking of the cars, and the long forlorn whistle.”
Davis and Veronica got married in 1964 and lived in Notting Hill before taking up the role of assistant director at the National Theatre of Britain under Laurence Olivier.
Davis returned to Canada in 1965 and began working for the National Theatre School of Canada, where he took the role of artistic director.
Sadly, the marriage didn’t last.
Who was the Cigarette Smoking Man?
He later founded his own acting school in Vancouver – The William Davis Centre For Acting Study – before he picked up his career-defining role in The X-Files in 1993.
The X-Files was always about more than little green men and spaceships and quickly became a global phenomenon, making its previously unknown stars household names.
When Davis first took the role, the character was written as an extra for the pilot episode where he stands in the background, smoking, while FBI agents are talking.
Yet, once the pilot episode was released and phrases such as “the truth is out there” and “I want to believe” were picked up by others, word spread from the minority into the mainstream.
Davis returned for small cameo slots during the first series, making more appearances in the seasons that followed alongside David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.
The will-they-won’t-they sexual chemistry between Duchovny’s Mulder and Anderson’s Scully, as they investigated cases the rest of the bureau ignored, only added to the mystique while The X-Files gained an international audience.
The Cigarette Smoking Man was involved in the Syndicate, a shadow organisation including members of the US Government that exists to hide from the public the fact that aliens were planning to colonise Earth.
The original series aired on September 10 1993 and eventually ran for nine years and 202 episodes.
A short 10th season consisting of six episodes premiered on January 24 2016 and, following its ratings success, it returned for an 11th season of 10 instalments.
Two feature films were also released: the 1998 movie The X-Files, which took place as part of the TV series; and the stand-alone production The X-Files: I Want to Believe, a lower-budget release from 2008 featuring Billy Connolly as a paedophile priest.
The Cigarette Smoking Man was the only character in the series, in addition to Mulder and Scully, to appear in both the first and last episodes.
He will always be known as the Darth Vader of The X-Files.
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