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| Actors and Actresses For discussion on screen stars. |
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17-10-2006, 07:52 AM
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julian_craster
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Jim Broadbent
Jim Broadbent Profile Wednesday October 11, 2006 The Guardian Jim Broadbent has made a career out of playing the grotesque and the silly. So is he really the man to portray Lord Longford in a serious drama? By Aida Edemariam Jim Broadbent likes eavesdropping, picking through the textures of class and voice like a benign detective. "My favourite was when I was walking along the coastal path in the Gower in South Wales," he says, sitting in the Union Club in Soho, somehow greyer and taller and leaner than expected. After all, I knew he was bulked up prosthetically as the impresario in Moulin Rouge, and that he wore a fat suit in Woody Allen's Bullets over Broadway; in Iris, as John Bayley, he curved into himself like a persecuted woodlouse. "There was a family coming along," he continues, "and, as we passed, the mother of the family was saying, 'But the Burnetts themselves weren't actually at the reception'. And for some reason I have always remembered that sentence. Because it's so complicated. Every word of it. But the Burnetts. But the Burnetts. There is the fact that they are only referring to them as a surname. Then, the Burnetts themselves - there you've got another dimension going - weren't actually at the reception. It's so complicated. I love it as an example of how rich and ambiguous the language is. Try to create a scenario in which that sentence would make sense. It would be a really difficult task." Very Jane Austen, I say. "It is quite Jane Austen. It's a very middle-class sentence. It was a middle-class family that wasn't actually at the reception." Broadbent is occasionally asked to work in America, he says. (This is self-deprecation; the people who have asked, in the past few years, include Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, for Gangs of New York.) "But," he says, "I'm more fascinated by the English. I love that whole class thing - it's so interesting. It's a blight, in a way, but for an actor, it's a godsend. There's so much to plunder." Broadbent does not sound very piratical as he says this - in fact, none of his enthusiasms registers in his voice, which is low, halting and Eeyore-ish, or on his face, which has a troubled air, despite the wide blue eyes. But in spite of this blankness, he is a very present interviewee, trying to answer questions honestly. You soon hear the laughter burbling beneath the funereal tone. These are contradictions Broadbent uses to good effect in Longford, the Channel 4 dramatisation of the relationship between Lord Longford and Myra Hindley which screens later this month. His Longford is gentle, blinking, lisping - and completely implacable. The tabloids, of course, are already interested. "But the tabloids just think, 'Oh, more about Myra Hindley? Good. We can get that photo out, fill a couple of pages, get everyone's blood boiling yet again. We can whip up a bit of hatred.' Unlike Longford, who believed we ought to hate the sin and love the sinner, they seem to love the sin and hate the sinner. The film isn't about loving the sin or getting into that; it's about how a very complicated and passionate man deals with a complicated woman and a notorious murderer, and how, given his belief, and faith, he deals with that relationship." It is true that Peter Morgan, who wrote the TV script (he also wrote The Deal and The Queen), has identified a pure dramatic structure: a meeting between what looks like complete good and complete evil; the question of whether redemption is possible; and, most interestingly, the point at which goodness and charity become egotism and wilful blindness. Broadbent, who is not religious, found the depth of Longford's Catholic faith difficult to fathom. "But actually his moral certainty was very, very attractive, and admirable, and at the same time frustrating. And what was interesting, really, was wondering how can anyone be so sure? I thought it would be great to investigate that, and find out what it entailed." This is ground he has ventured onto before, in A Sense of History, a 1992 TV drama he wrote and starred in. Although Broadbent has appeared in more than 90 films, countless plays and won an Oscar (for Iris), he discusses this film - directed by Mike Leigh, with whom he has been friends for nearly 30 years - in most interviews. It seems to be an acme of achievement for him, a test he loved passing - and a sly test, too, of his interviewer: Did I see it? What did I think of it? But no DVD or tape is commercially available, so even the keenest swot won't have seen it unless they were around first time. A Sense of History is a study of aristocracy, of a sense of what is right being taken to an uncomfortable conclusion, as in Longford. "I was walking on my own in the country," says Broadbent, "and I found a voice. A voice of ineffable superiority and privilege. So I kept him talking, really, to find out" (he adopts an old, immensely posh voice) "about this man who had an absolute certainty about why he was on this earth, and what his duty was. Keeping him talking revealed a version of what it could mean to be born into that world. The 23rd Earl he was, in the 23rd generation of privilege. It's a kind of madness in some ways." Broadbent has always been prepared to play grotesques himself, to risk looking silly. "I always think you should be totally frivolous as much as you can, and then take the work seriously when it has to be taken seriously. As long as you can keep that balance going, it's good fun. If it's only frivolous it's not fun - it would drive me potty. On Iris, I'd never worked with Judi Dench before, but it was wonderful to realise that we worked in exactly the same way. Foolish for most of the time, then focusing on the work, clicking into it very quickly and naturally. There were a lot of laughs. Otherwise it could have been torture. Two months of being gruelled." Particularly for him, as his mother had died of Alzheimer's a few years previously. He has spoken before of how his mother's decline in some ways mirrored Murdoch's - of the dainty, meaningless arabesques she would trace in the air, the warmth and love that remained after reason had gone. She was a sculptor, his father a furniture maker, and both were conscientious objectors. He grew up liberal and middle-class and, eventually, rebellious (he was expelled from his Quaker boarding school) in rural Lincolnshire. He had a twin who died at birth, in 1949, and he once said, "I've read that when one twin dies, the survivor takes on the other's qualities. It might explain why I'm introverted and extroverted, anxious and a risk-taker, strong and vulnerable." You can see the truth in this. Although the young Jim was obviously a performer early on, he tried art school first. The story goes that he was sitting with his father in a London cafe, next to some students from Rada, when his father said, "Why don't you do that?" So he did. "It was like going home," he says. "I just loved it." He was a bit nervous, initially, because in those days it was the only really "perilous profession". But this, it turns out, is one of the things he now likes about it. "The risk is what stimulates you. Whether it's the risk of the actual job, whether it's something you don't think you're right for, whether it's the risk of the moment. If you're doing a possibly foolish thing and you might fall flat on your face - risk is fundamental, really, to sustain it all." He subsisted on the usual array of resting-actor jobs: dishwashing in the Bank of England canteen, labouring, domestic cleaning. His break came in 1976 with Ken Campbell's Illuminatus!, a five-play, eight-hour cycle in which he played a dozen different parts. He worked steadily in theatre until the late 80s, and then, a couple of years after he married costume designer-turned-artist Anastasia Lewis and acquired two stepsons, he switched to film. Twelve years ago, he told journalist Andrew Billen that this was because he was tired, finding it hard to keep going in good shows that were physically exhausting but never properly supplied with audiences. Leigh's Life is Sweet was, in comparison, "like a holiday with a nice family". He says now that he was finding theatre too easy and needed a challenge. Whatever the reason, he has met that challenge, and then some - his filmography is full of powerful work: The Crying Game, Vera Drake, Little Voice, Topsy-Turvy. He observes this late flowering with a grateful equanimity, and this is perhaps why he feels no hesitation in criticising the British film industry. When we met he was working on a new film, Hot Fuzz, with Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, who made Shaun of the Dead. "They're clever young men. Really thorough approach - very refreshing. Making Brit films as they should be, really. Because generally people are too lazy, and think it's easier than it is." This, he says, is the problem with the British film industry. "The producers and directors are happy to settle for the third draft when really they should hack it around and get to the sixth or seventh draft, really get it right. Get the money necessary. Because a few films have been quite successful, fortuitously, I think there's a belief that we can throw up a Full Monty or a whatever. That without making too much effort we can have our big hit. But these things generally take time and work." He continues: "I love French films, and European films. They're not any bigger, but there's just a sort of definition, and a confidence, and strength to them. I'd always, given the option, go and see a French drama. Obviously, we probably get the better ones. But they're just sophisticated on many levels, and grown up, and quite profound - and we don't make films like that." When Broadbent is not working, he is "thinking about writing and pursuing writing ideas". He plays golf, does woodcarving, shops for food, cooks. He might inhabit idiosyncratic characters on screen and stage, but "I'm fairly conservative with a small c. It gives me a chance to be eccentric elsewhere." When is he most happy? "I think I'm always fairly happy, really," he says, lugubriously. "You know, what's not to be happy about? I'm doing what I like doing, and I can pick and choose." And the rest of the time? "We love getting out on the beach. On the salt marshes [in Lincolnshire, where he and Lewis own a cottage]. On the flat sand - it's always a delight for us, when there's no one there and it just goes on for miles and miles." To walk in clean air and perhaps stumble across some phrase, even a character or two, which might catch his imagination and take root. · Longford is on Channel 4 at 9pm on October 26 |
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17-10-2006, 11:10 AM
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Steve Crook
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Moderator
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Quote:
He also does pathetic characters very well and that should be useful for Longford. Steve |
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20-10-2006, 10:18 AM
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Jack_the_Lad
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Junior Member
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Jack the Lad |
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21-10-2006, 04:52 AM
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David Brent
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Senior Member
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Quote:
 A very fine actor in both comedy and drama. I think he'll combine the two beautifully to play Longford. Dave. |
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