Taki Taki

How to break your leg in style

‘I once fell out of my bedroom window – dead drunk and in magnificent style – and broke my right arm and left leg’. [kirilllutz] 
issue 18 March 2023

Gstaad

Tom Sizemore, the American character actor who recently died near-penniless at 61, was one hell of a thespian. In films such as Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down and Heat, he played tough soldiers and gangsters whose actions obscured a soft heart. Acting is not mugging à la Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino. It’s conveying things subliminally, which is what Sizemore did. I never met him but he once rang me from LA with a question.

It was back in the mid-1990s, the Cadogan Square days, and I had had a late one. The telephone rang at about 6 a.m. and an American voice came on.

‘Taki, this is Tom Sizemore.’

‘Good morning, Mr Sizemore. Do you know what time it is?’

‘Ah, it’s around ten in the evening.’

The reason my sudden NBF Tom Sizemore was ringing was that he had recently become engaged to one Linda Evans – no, not the actress but a much younger Brit blonde whom I had previously taken out rather a lot.

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