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Amid the hustle of midtown Manhattan on one spring day in May 2022, James Cromwell walked into a Starbucks, affixed his hand to a counter, and protested about the extra fees on vegan milks. “When will you stop making excessive earnings while customers, creatures, and the planet endure harm?” Cromwell boomed as fellow activists streamed the demonstration online.

However, the unconcerned customers of the coffee shop paid scant attention. Perhaps they didn’t realise they were in the company of the most statuesque person ever recognized for an acting Oscar, deliverer of one of the most memorable monologues in Succession, and the only actor to say the words “space adventure” in a Star Trek film. Law enforcement arrived to shut down the store.

“No one listened to me,” Cromwell muses three years later. “Customers entered, listen to me at the full volume talking about what they were doing with these non-dairy creamers, and then they would go around to the far corner, place their request and wait looking at their devices. ‘We’re facing doom of the world, folks! It’s going to end! We have very little time!’”

Undeterred, Cromwell remains one of the industry’s greatest actor-activists – or maybe activist-actors is more accurate. He protested against the Vietnam war, supported the Black Panthers, and took part in civil disobedience actions over animal rights and the environmental emergency. He has forgotten the number of how many times he has been arrested, and has even served time in prison.

Currently, at eighty-five, he could be seen as the symbol of a disillusioned generation that marched for peace abroad and social advances at home, only to see, in their later life, a former president turn back the clock on reproductive rights and many other achievements.

Cromwell certainly looks and sounds the part of an old lefty who might have a revolutionary poster in the attic and consider a political figure to be not radical enough on the economic system. When visited at his home – a log cabin in the farming town of a New York town, where he lives with his third wife, the actor his partner – he stands up from a seat at the fireplace with a warm greeting and outstretched hand.

Cromwell stands at over two meters tall like a ancient tree. “Probably 10 years ago, I heard somebody intelligent say we’re already a fascist state,” he says. “We have ready-made oppression. The key is in the door. All they have to do is the one thing to turn it and open Pandora’s box. Out will come every loophole, every loophole that the legislature has written so assiduously into their legislation.”

Cromwell has seen this movie before. His father a family member, a famous Hollywood filmmaker and actor, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era of anti-communist witch-hunts merely for making remarks at a party complimenting aspects of the Russian theatre system for nurturing young talent and comparing it with the “exhausted” culture of Hollywood.

This apparently harmless comment, coupled with his presidency of the “Hollywood Democrats” which later “shifted somewhat to the left”, led to John Cromwell being called to testify to the House Committee on alleged subversion. He had little of importance to say but a committee representative still demanded an expression of regret.

John Cromwell refused and, with a generous cheque from a wealthy businessman for an unrealised project, moved to New York, where he performed in a play with a fellow actor and won a theater honor. James reflects: “My father was not touched except for the fact that his closest companions – a lot of them – cut him out and wouldn’t talk to him because he had been called to testify. They didn’t care whether the person was at fault or not – sort of like today.”

Cromwell’s mother, a relative, and his father’s wife, Ruth Nelson, were also accomplished actors. Despite this strong background, he was initially hesitant to follow in their footsteps. “I avoided for as long as possible. I was going to be a technical professional.”

However, a visit to a Scandinavian country, where his father was making a picture with Ingmar Bergman’s crew, proved to be a turning point. “They were producing art and my father was involved and was working things out. It was very heady stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I gotta do this.’”

Creativity and ideology intersected again when he joined a theatre company founded by African American performers, and toured an playwright’s play a classic work for mainly African American audiences in a southern state, Alabama, Tennessee, and an area. Some shows took place under security protection in case white supremacists tried to firebomb the theatre.

Godot struck a chord. At one performance in a location, the social advocate Fannie Lou Hamer urged the audience: “I want you to pay attention to this, because we’re not like these two men. We’re not sitting idle for anything. Nobody’s giving us anything – we’re taking what we need!”

Cromwell says: “I didn’t know anything about the deep south. I went down and the rooming house had a sign on the outside, ‘Coloreds only’. I thought: ‘That’s a historical marker, obviously, back from the 1860s conflict.’ A wonderful Black lady took us to our rooms.

“We went out to have dinner, and the proprietor of the restaurant came over and said: ‘You’ll have to leave.’ I’d never been thrown out of a restaurant before, so I immediately stood up with my fist balled. I would have done something rash. John O’Neal informed the man that he was infringing upon our civil rights and that they would investigate fully of it.”

However, mid-anecdote, Cromwell stops himself and breaks the fourth wall. “I’m listening to myself,” he says. “These are not just tales about an actor doing his thing maturing, trying to get the girl, trying to keep his nose clean, trying not to get hurt. People were dying, people were being beaten, people were being fired upon, people had crosses burned on their lawns.

“I feel uncomfortable recounting it always with the points that I think an interviewer would be interested in: ‘Personal narrative’. People ask if I should write a memoir because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of different things as well as acting.”

Subsequently, his wife will confide that she is among those lobbying Cromwell to write a autobiography. But he has minimal interest for such a project, he insists, since he fears it would be predictable and “because my father tried it and it was so bad even his wife, who loved him, said: ‘That’s really stinky, John.’”

The conversation continues with his story all the same. Cromwell had been notching up film and TV roles for decades when, at the age of 55, his career took off thanks to his role as a agriculturalist in Babe, a 1995 film about a pig that yearns to be a sheepdog. It was a surprise hit, earning more than $250 million worldwide.

Cromwell funded his own campaign for an Oscar for best supporting actor in the film, spending $sixty thousand to hire a publicist and buy trade press ads to promote his performance after the production company declined to fund it. The gamble paid off when he received the nomination, the kind of recognition that means an actor is given roles rather than having to go through tryouts.

“I wouldn’t be here if I had not gotten a nomination,” he says, “because I was so tired of the routine that had to be done when you did an audition. I finally asked a filmmaker: ‘What was it about the audition that made you give me the part? I did it no differently than I’ve done anything.’ He said: ‘James, it has nothing to do with your performance; we just want to see that you’re the kind of guy we want to spend a month with.’

“It was the chip on my shoulder which, because I knew him, didn’t show as much as it did when I went in to audition with a unknown person who I identified as my father. I had the thing from my father – there he is again in me, telling me I’m not worthy, I’ll fail in the reading. I was just fucking sick of it.”

The acclaim for the movie led to roles including leaders, popes and a royal in Stephen Frears’ The Queen, as the industry tried to categorise him. In a sci-fi installment he played the interstellar pioneer a character, who observes of the Starship Enterprise crew: “And you people, you’re all astronauts on … some kind of star trek.”

Cromwell views Hollywood as a “unsavory” business driven by “avarice” and “the profit motive”. He criticises the focus on “attendance numbers”, the lack of genuine debate on issues such as racial diversity and the increasing influence of online followings on hiring choices. He has “disinterest in the parties” and sees the “industry” as secondary to “the deal”. He also admits that he can be a difficult on set: “I do a lot of disputing. I do too much shouting.”

He offers the example of a film, which he describes as a “brilliant piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s intimidating his character asks Kevin Spacey’s Jack Vincennes, “Have you a parting word, boyo?” before shooting him dead. Spacey, by then an Oscar winner, disagreed with filmmaker and co-writer a creative over what Vincennes should reply. A subtly resistant Spacey won their battle of wills.

This spurred Cromwell to try a line change of his own. Hanson disapproved. “Sure enough, he stands behind me and says: ‘Jamie, I want you to say the line the way it was written.’ But not having Kevin’s background and his propensities, I said: ‘You motherfucker, fuck you, you piece of shit! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive