New book explores inner demons of Flemish acting legend
In his new book, author Stan Lauryssens describes the psychological breakdown of Julien Schoenaerts, long one of Flanders’ greatest actors and father of breakout star Matthias Schoenaerts
“Not a biography but a period piece”
That actor was Julien Schoenaerts, and that performance was the beginning of his descent into madness.
In the audience that night was a young journalist, Stan Lauryssens, who worked for De Nieuwe Gazet. Over the next few years, Lauryssens went on to interview people who spent the last days of the Second World War in a bunker with Hitler.
Lauryssens then became a notorious art fraud who once tried to sell a statue in London to six different dealers at one time. He also became a successful fiction writer, winning the Hercule Poirot Prize for his first thriller Zwarte sneeuw (Black Snow) in 2002.
Lauryssens’ latest book is Schoenaerts, which he describes as “not a biography but a period piece”. It explores the four years that followed the actor’s decision to desert that Antwerp stage, the problems of which the book attributes to treatments in psychiatric institutions.
Today, Julien (pictured in 1955) is best known as the father of breakout actor Matthias Schoenaerts, one of a handful of Flemish actors to act in multiple languages in multiple countries, including the US and Britain. But in his day, Julien was regarded as one of the finest actors in the Dutch language, both on stage and screen. He was born in Eigenbilzen, Limburg, in 1925 and studied theatre in Antwerp under legendary playwright Herman Teirlinck at the institution that would later bear his name.
Silly songs
The consequences of Schoenaerts’ stage rebellion were swift. “You have to understand that at the time Belgium was a dead country; the coal miners were on strike, and, as a result, everything was closed down,” Lauryssens explains. “He left Antwerp and went to Limburg to join the striking coal miners.”
He came out of the psychiatric ward a full-blown psychotic
Schoenaerts took all his money with him and threw it away like confetti as a gift to the strikers. On one occasion, he also went up to a police officer and put a flower into the barrel of his gun. “It was the time of flower power, of course, and he’d seen that on the television,” the author explains. “Then he was arrested, and when he came before the judge, he started singing silly songs. They said he was mad, locked him up for three months and gave him electro-shocks.”
While he was in an institution, the city of Antwerp arranged for Schoenaerts to be honoured with his own theatre, the Ringtheater, now the workshop of artist Jan Fabre. When he got out, he returned to the stage, and in prose that reads more like a thriller than a biography, Lauryssens describes his increasingly erratic behaviour, including a mysterious fire that remains unexplained to this day, and about which it would be spoilerish to say more about here.
“He was a manic depressive, even before,” notes Lauryssens. “But he came out of the psychiatric ward a full-blown psychotic. He was in and out, three months here, six months there – long periods of time. And after that he never acted in plays again.”
Spellbound audiences
Schoenaerts’ illness made theatre performances increasingly difficult. “If you’re in a play by Shakespeare, you don’t know the whole play by heart,” Lauryssens explains. “You know your own lines, and you listen for cues from the other actors. But when he came out of the psychiatric ward, he didn’t do that anymore. He mixed up his lines and the lines of others; he changed his lines so nobody could pick up on their cues anymore.”
You didn’t understand a word of it, but you were spellbound
That led him into monologues instead, such as the Apology of Socrates, a two-hour one-man show by Plato, which Schoenaerts performed more than 2,500 times. Lauryssens saw the piece more than once. “You went into a sort of trance almost; you didn’t understand a word of it, but everyone in the audience was spellbound,” he says. “And if you asked him: ‘What is the play about?’, he said he didn’t know. People were happy just looking at him. In reality, they were looking madness in the eye. You’ve seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You remember Jack Nicholson. That was Schoenaerts.”
That was an observation also made by Bruno Schoenaerts, Julien’s eldest son, now a respected Antwerp lawyer and one of the many friends, relations and acquaintances Lauryssens interviewed for the book. He is Matthias’ older brother by 23 years. But when their father could no longer take care of himself in 2002, he moved in with the younger son, then an Antwerp acting student.
“I remember that period as being not the most pleasant of my life,” Bruno recently told the Gazet Van Antwerpen. “Of course I will read the book [but] it will be difficult, given the number of troubled memories associated with the period. For many people, my father is a mythical genius, but I was experiencing him as a human being from a front-row seat. He was indeed a genius as an actor, but manic-depressive as a man. The combination meant he was at times downright dangerous.”
Schoenaerts is published in Dutch by Manteau/WPG and will be released on 25 September
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