Michael, My Michael

He turned 73 on March 27. My first screen love. My only love, really. I’ve had brief infatuations and short term affairs over the past forty years, but he has been my one and only movie star, my enduring romance, my sentimental favourite.

Who knows why? Because I was fourteen when he played D’Artagnan. Because I was newly in pain and looking to escape. Because I loved a good story and he was the passionate if inept hero of a dandy. I wanted to write my own swashbuckler and The Four Musketeers got me started—but he’s played more than one character. He was busy in the 70s, too, playing everything from Shakespeare to science fiction, sometimes a bit of a miscast and other times a perfect fit, but always blond, handsome, and gifted with that golden syrup voice.

I could listen to him speak forever.

It was during something like the sixth or seventh viewing, in the scene where D’Artagnan finds Constance dead and sets out to avenge her, when all the requisite factors combined to awaken the giant. He was the catalyst that kicked my imagination into gear and started me writing in earnest. I wrote about heroes who looked just like him, but I started reading, too. Dumas and the Bard, and George Clayton Johnson—if his film was based on a book, I read the book as well. I saw every movie, staying up late on weekends to catch his earlier work in The Strange Affair and Something for Everyone on TV (the days before video tapes and DVDs). I went to the university for the Franco Zeffirelli double-header of The Taming of the Shrew with Romeo and Juliet. I kept a scrapbook of promo pics and articles and “seen around Hollywood” snapshots. I guess I was a little obsessed with him, with the movies, with the stories, with the fantasies of all three combining to ignite my true passion for the written word.

It was a magical time of intense contrast. Every day was a fight to get mobile, of physio treatments and medical appointments, but every day was also a revelation of new ideas, of literary discovery and expanding imagination. It was truly the best of times and the worst of times, and Michael York was in the middle of it.

I did all the stupid teenaged stuff, but four decades later, despite the aforementioned flings and affairs and rock stars notwithstanding, my heart yet leaps when I hear his voice or see his face. It’s more than the remnant of a schoolgirl crush. It is a comfy blend of respect, admiration and gratitude.

It is also—definitely—love.