There are some other fantastic performances, like Pasolini's in 1964, but for every person who says what a great performance you'll have ten thousand who say "that's not my Jesus, thats not how I imagined it and therefore I cant watch it." By presenting them with something where they do all the work then you can be Jesus for everybody. I think that role and film has had such a hold on culture because we managed to reach such a big audience and because we were so non-specific in our approach to Jesus. I get stopped in the street now in Greece, even with short hair, glasses and no beard. I always try and play it down but I've been gobsmacked over the years.
That was the last image she had before she died." Wow, you suddenly realise the power of something like this, it's phenomenal. When it came to the crucifixion I looked at her and she was sitting there with tears running down her face and a huge smile, she died two days later. She said "I showed the film to the people at the home, and I sat next to an unwell woman in her eighties. I once had a letter from someone who worked in an old people's home in South Africa.
Read more about: Religion Things you didn’t know about early Christianity: 8 surprising facts I found a way of doing it that was counter to the actor's normal approach. To try and play a god and get the idea of it is a shortcut to a nervous breakdown. So from that moment on, I played it objectively without any recourse to giving him any particular idiosyncrasies, quite deliberately avoiding the normal human things. This is a selection of remarkable set of messages which chronicle many of. With this story, the most important element that this character has to be is extraordinary. The real Jesus of Nazareth - what do we know about his life - his biography. You go as an actor and work subjectively but the moment you start to try and play him as a real person you lose the divinity completely. Franco Zeffirelli and I originally thought that we could combine the divine Christ with the human one and that we would be able to show the human side of him, but we discovered that it was just not possible. Originally, forty years ago, I was avoiding Jesus completely. This was one of the reasons I wanted to do the series. "It's been very different returning to the story of Jesus because I was returning in a completely different way.