Keith Baxter’s Memories of Chimes at Midnight

We were proud to announce earlier this week that Orson Welles’s legendary masterpiece Chimes at Midnight will be joining the collection come August. Back in January—while the Shakespearean epic was enjoying a theatrical run at Film Forum and we were preparing our disc release—actor Keith Baxter visited us in New York, half a century after he first starred opposite Welles’s Sir John Falstaff. Stopping by our kitchen for lunch, Baxter shared his memories of working with the venerated director, who cast him on the spot during his audition for Chimes’s original theatrical production.

Fortunately, we had a camera on hand to capture some of Baxter’s many wonderful stories about Welles and the film. In the clip above, Baxter discusses the end of Chimes’s ill-fated run onstage in Belfast and Dublin and the moment when Welles approached him about starring in a film adaptation and explained that he could never make it without his original Prince Hal.