Richie Havens

He is the first performer on stage in Woodstock (1970), and Wadleigh's split screen holds his boot and his face at once while he hammers at the guitar, soaked through, until he has nothing left to sing and has to invent something. It is not acting. It is a man deciding not to stop, in front of a field and a camera, and we found it more stirring than anything else in the film's 224 minutes, because there is no trick to it: the sweat is real and so is the panic. He was meant to go on fifth. He went on first, and that set, with the improvised song that became Freedom, is the picture of him everything afterwards had to live with.

The acting came after and never came first. Havens started in the Greenwich Village folk clubs in the mid-1960s, self-taught, and the festival made him. He took a stage part in The Who's Tommy in 1972, then his first film, Catch My Soul (1974), a rock musical version of Othello with him in the title role. After that the parts are small and spaced out: Woodrow in Greased Lightning (1977), opposite Richard Pryor in a film about the racing driver Wendell Scott; Pepper Ward in Hearts of Fire (1987); and, a long gap later, Old Man Arvin in Todd Haynes's I'm Not There (2007). In between he sang, which was the job, until he stopped around 2012.

Directors used him for what he was. He plays musicians, old men who have seen things, narrators and himself, and the reason is plain from Woodstock: the voice is a low, heavy baritone that fills a frame without effort, and the guitar playing, all open tunings and thrash, tells you who the man is before he speaks. The late scene people remember is the porch in I'm Not There, where he sits down with a guitar and sings Dylan's Tombstone Blues, and Haynes has the sense to leave him to it. Catch My Soul asked more of him, a full lead, and the word on it has always been that he carried the singing and the film did not carry him. We have not reviewed it and will not pretend to.

The honest verdict is that he was not much of an actor because he was not much interested in being one. The screen career is a scatter of supporting parts and documentary appearances around a life spent on stage, and nothing in the fiction roles has displaced the festival footage as the way people picture him. He said as much himself: "I really sing songs that move me. I'm not in show business. I'm in the communications business." If you want Havens on film, start with the first reel of Woodstock, where he is not asked to be anyone but the man pushed on early who stayed until he had nothing left. Nothing he did with a script comes close.