Grit and stupidity and pride

Catherine Milner, Sunday Telegraph, March 20 1995

TOMORROW night more than seven million people in Britain will cram into their living-rooms to watch the Oscar Awards ceremony beamed live from Los Angeles. Around 1,600 actors, actresses, luvvies and moguls will be seen billing and cooing while the saccharine strains of film soundtracks and songs like The Shadow of Your Smile schmaltzes away in the background.

Tables will groan under the weight of smoked sturgeon, foie gras, "duck sausage pizza" and "Oscar chocolate coffee crunch cake". But among the spangled bosoms and the sea of smiles will be a 65-year-old man with a pained expression, his eyes blinking in the flash guns like a startled marmoset.

"I'll just be glad when it's all over," sighs Nigel Hawthorne, who with Paul Newman, Tom Hanks, John Travolta and Morgan Freeman is one of five nominees for Best Actor. "I know that's an ungracious thing to say. But the kind of hype that I'm involved in now is totally foreign to me."

Last week the hype took an unexpected turn with the disclosure that the demure pillar of the establishment has had a homosexual lover for 17 years, the writer Trevor Bentham. But it is characteristic that Hawthorne should respond to his would-be "outers" by making light of it. "I never said I was 'in'," he flips. "Anyway, I never read things written about me - it's the best way."

Being famous is something that Hawthorne is particularly unused to. For almost 25 years his life looked firmly set on the superhighway towards a theatrical black hole. He turned up to audition after audition only to be cruelly shot down by the stentorian tones of directors shouting, "That will be enough, thank you!"

Like T. S. Eliot's character Alfred Prufrock, his "deferential, politic, cautious and meticulous" manner won him few star roles. But in 1979 the television programme Yes, Minister decided to make a virtue out of his relentless ordinariness. Playing the part of Sir Humphrey Appleby, the suave Permanent Secretary to Paul Eddington's Minister, he stole the show. But the part also typecast him. "Nobody had ever really trusted me with an emotional role - so I got into that genre of playing urbane, collar-and-tie types," he says.

But things started to look up. He got the part of C.S. Lewis in the play Shadowlands, a late flowerer like Hawthorne himself, who got married for the first time aged 50. He was overlooked for the screen version of the play because, he says, "I wasn't a big name." It went to Anthony Hopkins, who was.

But when the film came to be made of Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George IIi, there was no danger of Bennett letting anyone else take on a role that Hawthorne had turned into an astonishing tour de force. The part offered the opportunity for this Englishman to unbutton himself, both metaphorically and physically.

He is seen urinating, crying, spluttering obscenities, as he portrays the befuddled old king, whose mind is subject to the eerie forces of the disease porphyria. The searing poignancy of the king, so barbarically treated by those who should have understood and protected him, dovetails neatly with the suffering that Hawthorne underwent as a struggling actor.

"I think it is the most wonderful role for any actor," says Hawthorne. "The fact that he goes into such overdrive makes it very cathartic. It's not depressing. It's exhilarating - you feel so relieved when the king gets better at the end." So impassioned is his performance that it makes one wonder whether Hawthorne has experienced mental breakdown first-hand. "Oh yes, I am prone to depression but not as much as I used to be," he concedes. "It's awfully difficult, you know, when you're being constantly rejected in anything - be it love or work. If you can't find the right person, or if you can't find the right job, you eventually begin to feel very despondent."

But he says that his previous acting roles helped him as much as his own experience to give such a sympathetic portrayal of the benighted king. "Even Sir Humphrey had moments of total panic, total disintegration, which are all my doing. I try to become the characters I play."

NURSING a cup of cold coffee and wearing a charcoal grey suit in the offices of the Soho film company where we meet, Hawthorne wears an expression that is a mixture of concern and embarrassment. Perched uneasily on the edge of a chair, he speaks hesitantly, bending shyly forward to catch everything one says. His eyes are like raisins. His voice has the weary timbre of one just emerging from a long period of mourning.

Born in the Midlands in 1930, his father uprooted the family when Nigel was five to emigrate to South Africa, where he practised as a doctor. Hawthorne has often said that memories of his much-loved father inspired the way he played his roles. He admired his mother, but says his relationship with her was fond but limited. At 19 he returned alone to England, and embarked on his great odyssey of failure.

How did he survive all those years in the wilderness? "It was sheer grit that kept me going. Grit and stupidity... and pride, I suppose, as much as anything else. I knew I had an imagination and a sense of humour; those two things were my constant allies. And I was foolish enough to believe that sooner or later those would pull me through and find me some sort of future.

Eventually, of course, they did - just at the age when most of his contemporaries have found their careers slipping away. " It's how the coin falls, really," he says, "but I've always believed that you have to be ready for when an opportunity presents itself; if you're not, then you might be throwing your whole life away."

Hawthorne didn't learn to drive until he was 50, and hand-in-hand with his new found mobility came a loosening-up of his emotions. "Curiously enough, learning to drive gave me the courage to face my sexuality, accept it and enjoy it rather than keep running away and pretending it wasn't there. Love set me free, liberated me. It was vital to me as a young man and I never had it. In fact, love didn't really happen to me until I was 50."

Half a lifetime spent reinforcing spirits against disappointment has meant that he spots glimmers of humour even in moments of the darkest tragedy.

"Tragedy and comedy are intertwined," he says. "Not many people agree with me, but I believe if I were to play Macbeth for instance I would get a lot of laughs."

He is probably right. Hawthorne has a face which, like Rowan Atkinson's or John Cleese's, is amusing even when in repose.

"It is a funny face I have," he agrees. "My mother saw the clown there even when I was a tiny kid. She said that I just had to bend over and look through my legs to make people laugh."

His stiff-upper-lip jollity may come in useful if he fails to get an Oscar. With endearing humility he says that he doesn't expect to get one. "I'm the outsider, obviously, because I'm an Englishman and the Oscars are very American-orientated."

But his resignation is tempered by pride. "Anyway, who's to say who's best, or what is best? How can you possibly pick out one name and say, 'Right, you're better than the others'? Everybody works in different styles."

He comforts himself with the knowledge that he wouldn't want to be part of the Hollywood circus, anyway. "Hollywood doesn't suit me at all," he says. "I'm very much an Englishman. I love England. I love my home. When you get to a certain age, the idea of blazing sun 12 hours a day is something you rather dread. Anyway, even if I did move there I think my accent would be a problem. I'd spend my whole time playing English butlers."

His barbed observations may in part be due to an unfortunate foray he made into Hollywood glitz two years ago. Cast in the unlikely role of the governor of the Los Angeles penitentiary, he starred with Sylvester Stallone in a brainthumpingly violent film called Demolition Man.

Like an unhappy schoolboy bullied in the playground, he says, "Sly hardly regarded me at all. I'd sometimes be on the set for half an hour and he wouldn't even say 'hello'. He struts about, and okay, he wisecracks all the time and he's amusing, but you have to drag him to work."

To this day he has never seen Demolition Man. "I felt my contribution had been diminished. The texture was taken out of the role and it became glib and superficial."

So as Hawthorne wends his way back to his rose-covered home in Hertfordshire, he will not feel that he is missing much.

On his doorstep will probably be a new flush of letters from his adoring fans - "elderly matrons" from the Home Counties who beleaguer him with offers of marriage.

"Most of them are hangers-on from Shadowlands," he explains. In the play Lewis's wife dies from cancer. "'You poor thing,' they write, ' you lost your wife - let me take over.'"

"They don't ask for my underpants, though," he says with satisfaction, "and I can still travel on the buses." Long may it last.