By George, he's got it

Alan Franks, The Times Magazine, December 3 1994

THEY LOOKED THE MOST implausible pair of Englishmen ever to have led a foray into the Hollywood Hills: the writer Alan Bennett, donnish and private, and the Yes. Minister actor Nigel Hawthorne, as untransportable from his environment as Whitehall itself The Americans would surely see them coming a mile off, these two dear old bits of heritage, and it would be no contest; the Dormouse and the Cheshire Cat versus Robocop.

It has not quite turned out that way. The two men have ruthlessly dumped their stereotypes, with Bennett seeing off the moguls who would not back his own team, and Hawthorne emerging as a movie star in the making. The result is The Madness of King George, from Bennett's play of a similar name, produced by Sam Goldwyn Jr and considered such a strong Oscar contender that it is being rushed into a pre-Christmas release in New York and Los Angeles. It is expected here next spring.

The play, which ran at the National Theatre three years ago, was called The Madness of George III, but this had to be changed for the film since the American audiences would not only wonder who George was, but would also want to know why they had missed The Madness of George I and II. "I think they were rather shamefaced about altering the title," Bennett says, "hut they seemed to be quite serious when they explained that the Henry V film brought a number of inquiries about what had become of one to four."

Even if it fails, the unheard-of has already happened; an English stage play transferring to the American screen with its key personnel still in place - the writer, the star and the young director Nicholas Hytner. What makes it all the more remarkable is that none of these has any profile in the American cinema. Hytner had not even directed a film.

Yet Bennett would not so much as discuss the possibility of a movie with a studio unless his two associates were retained. As well as being good news for Hawthorne and Hytner, this is fortunate for cinema-goers, who might otherwise have been asked to accept at best Walter Matthau and at worst Richard Gere as the afflicted monarch. Haying lost his nation's colonies and his own marbles, it would have been too cruel to have George forfeit his accent as well.

"I know Nigel feels it was an act of great self-sacrifice on my part," Bennett says, "but this is not so. The fact is, I couldn't imagine doing it with anyone else except him. He made it all such a happy experience. People may say I'm being luvvie-dove, but I'm not. I am sure we could have sold it to a big studio, but then we would have ended up by losing control and getting something we didn't want. So there would have been no point."

Just as Bennett has been more obdurate than his image suggests, so Hawthorne has been far more dogged than might be imagined in pursuit of Hollywood credibility. It was this particular ambition, rather than a lapse in taste or a lust for money, that brought him together with Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man last year. He considers the word "together" too strong, even for the stars themselves, and remembers a bizarre war of egos between the men: Stallone, determined to look the more impressive of the two in a sleeveless jerkin, overpumped his muscles in the gym and blackened his whole arm by bursting the veins. Apart from a little earlier work with Clint Eastwood � "a very good actor, but who simply laughed when you suggested a run-through of the lines" - this was the extent of Hawthorne's Hollywood, as isolated in its own way as the English provincial digs of the Fifties.

HAWTHORNE WAS PREPARED TO TRADE with this alien world last year since he believed, as many others now do, that George is his part before it is anybody else's, whether on the stage or the screen. At that point he did not know he would receive such uncompromising backing from Bennett. George III is, so to speak, the crowning achievement of a renowned but late-developing career. Already he had seen his other great stage role, C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands, go to Anthony Hopkins for the cinema version, and even now he feels so intensely about the part's associations that he prefers not to see the film. To have lost George would have been as severe as a king losing his colonies.

So, far from being listed follies in a hostile New World, Bennett and Hawthorne turn out to be the driven, focused characters in a story with its beginnings in the desire for independence � that is, English independence from the tyranny of an insensitive Hollywood and its end in the need for transatlantic co-operation. This came in the figure of a committed Anglophile, Sam Goldwyn Jr, the son of his late namesake and the producer who financed the successful Kenneth Branagh films Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V.

Bennett's terms, Goldwyn says, were not an obstacle. "Nigel Hawthorne will be a discovery in America through this movie," he proclaimed from his Los Angeles office. "Here is a man who has waited all his life for this performance. It is his Lear. I think he has to he a very strong candidate in the Academy Awards. Him and Tom Hanks for Forrest Gump, I would say."

Well, he would, wouldn't he? But the sample audiences at four screenings in New York and two in Los Angeles have been similarly optimistic, returning consistently high marks on their detailed questionnaire sheets. "The point is that the audiences are getting it," Goldwyn contends. "They are not being confused by the Englishness of it. Quite the opposite. They are intrigued by the royal family, and it's no matter that this one is 200 years ago. There is a great demand for good films here right now. The Crying Game, Four Weddings and a Funeral and some of the Merchant Ivory movies have done very well. The lesson is that if a film is allowed tO be itself, and not some mid-Atlantic concoction, then it is respected. This is true also with the acting, and that is why the Americans are going to be so impressed by Nigel Hawthorne."

At the prospect of this, Hawthorne, touring the shires with a Restoration comedy, gives an expression of alarm straight from Sir Humphrey's repertoire. It is not that he doesn't welcome it; more that he has no idea how he will react to it. "I suppose we shall just have to wait and see," he says. Hytner, Bennett's other sine qua non, observes that the English believe themselves to have a monopoly on irony, but are badly mistaken: witty America is more than a match for witty England. while witty New York is in a different league altogether. He also makes the point that there are a number of Americas. The America which saw Demolition Man is not the same one that will want to see King George (a very affordable irony for Hawthorne). Hollywood is keen on this second, more literate audience, not least because the films are so cheap. At $8 million, the Hawthorne movie cost ten times less than the Stallone. "In terms of its Englishness." Hytner says, "this is less Chariots of Fire than The Ladykillers. lt looks as if it's going to be Anne of the Thousand Days and then turns out to be the opposite."

Two Americas, two Bennetts and two Hawthornes. To take Bennett first: to see him as a straightforward national monument is to mistake the view. (The same happens to he true of Hawthorne, but for different reasons.) As Bennett says in his introduction to An Englishman Abroad. "an ironic attitude towards one's country and a scepticism about one's heritage is a part of that heritage. And so, by extension, is the decision to betray it. It is irony activated." Which is why he is at his best on themes of allegiance when coming at them through the persons of natural outsiders or official traitors. The riven court of George III is made foreign by the passage of time, and there is yet one more apt irony in the United States now handling the story of an English king whose "betrayal" of national interests was a defining moment in the American condition.

In addition to all this, there is, of course, the enduring American interest in the present royals, and not merely when its errant members are caught with Texan oil magnates. There may be huge differences between then and now - most notably in the crown's present struggle with public opinion rather than with parliamentary compliance - but there are also similarities, for it was, above all, at war with itself, both as family and institution.

GEORGE, PRINCE OF WALES may not have complained to Grub Street that his father had been a bullying parent, yet in the absence of a party system he was effectively opposition leader to his own father. He also had to wait an eternity before taking over, a predicament which is handled with great humanity by Bennett in an otherwise unlovely portrait. "I wrote him this speech," says Bennett, "in which he complains about his whole life being a wait, and becoming a figure of ridicule. I think it must have been a terribly hard position to fulfil... As the the parallels in general, I don't know. I'm afraid my history is so rusty. It all happened at a time when the Prime Minister's power was increasing greatly, and the period marked a big decline in the influence of the monarchy." As well as portraying the king's decline, Bennett's story shows the affect it has on those around him: the vying doctors, the courtiers clamouring for preferment.

After the press screening on Monday, Goldwyn, Bennett, Hawthorne and the rest will know more of their film's chances, critical and commercial. Goldwyn's declared

aim is to reach a "crossover" market, which means a mixture of the art-house and mainstream cinema audiences. 'There is nothing hotter in Hollywood," says Hytner, "than a film which is said to be good and which has not yet been released." Here, at the story's point of origin, the waiting English will be more than usually intrigued to see the shape in which it docks after its return crossing.

While this strange stardom is waiting to break across the States, Hawthorne himself has remained in the heart of the old country, and in the centre of the 18th century. On Monday, even as Madness previews in New York, he opens in the West End in The Clandestine Marriage, a lighthearted comedy of morals by David Garrick and George Colman the elder. It was first performed in 1766, when George III was 28 and not yet stricken with porphyria. One of the reasons he chose to do this play was its inconsequential nature. It is a break, an antidote to the exacting roles of George and C.S. Lewis that have occupied him for the past five years in London and on Broadway. He is not letting himself off entirely, as this is also his debut as a director. He insists this is an accident, as the one originally sought by the producer Thelma Holt was busy in Germany at the time. He says something similar of his great career break 15 years ago with the part of Sir Humphrey: "Paul Eddington later told me that he had been offered Sir Humphrey but had turned it down because he wanted to play the title role of the minister, which he assumed was the main part."

When he considers the implications of being an American movie star, his features fall into the familiar set of Sir Humphrey when faced with some fresh crisis in the corridors of Whitehall. But then he says that expression is not really Sir Humphrey's at all, but his own: "What you think you see in Sir Humphrey's eyes is not me acting at all. It is my own terror of having to look at the camera and be looked at by it. So all I can say is that if that terror seems real, that's because it is."

He is now talking in the lounge of a genteel hotel in Malvern, where The Clandestine Marriage has been playing at the town's little Festival Theatre. This, on the face of it, is classic Hawthorne country. In the streets beneath the sudden hills middle-aged women pass him and smile automatically. It is not until they are ten yards further on that they pause and turn in recognition. He looks more familiar than distinguished, possibly the occupant of a small if vivid life, a talking head rather than a monarch or a mandarin.

For him to be passed off as an archetypal Englishman, as he is by default, is quite as ironic as for Alan Bennett. Like Bennett, he has come to this status from an angle, and is a good example of someone who is more English than the English. For Hawthorne grew up in South Africa and did not come to England until he was in his twenties. Be honest, he has fooled you completely.

HE WAS FOUR when his father, a "rather elderly and very Victorian" doctor, emigrated. His elder sister and his younger twin brother and sister are still there. It was at university in Cape Town that he discovered acting as a means of escape. "We were shy. lonely and self-conscious children," he recalls. "We felt very set apart from the others, and I don't think any of us has altogether grown out of those feelings."

He had two attempts at England. The first lasted for six years, which is an astonishingly long time considering what he was going through. It was 1951 and he had saved up �100. The fare was �70 and by the time he got to Waterloo he had just �12 left. A friend from South Africa arranged an interview for him and he landed a job as assistant stage-manager in Buxton. He then moved to Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage, north London, and became demoralised by the large number of visiting companies playing there.

"So off I went and did the agents, which is what all the young hopefuls were doing. It meant going up and down Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane from one agent to the next, asking if there was any work. To have that constant rejection at an early age was harder to take than I can describe, and I think it was only pride that kept me going."

He went back to South Africa defeated, but only temporarily. There he managed to get a substantial amount of work, including enough large parts to rekindle his self-belief. Four years on, this time with �1,000, he set off for England again. By now it was the London of the Royal Court and Joan Littlewood. The founder of the Theatre Workshop may be a strange name to hear in connection with the Hawthorne who is now public property, but she was crucial to his development.

"As a matter of fact, I dreamt of her last night. She does enter dreams. I can't remember very much of it, I'm afraid, but I think she was kindly in it. Or at least, not as angry with me as I believe she is at present. We fell out over a broadcast in which I described her as being a monster on occasions.

"In 1965 my agent told me to go along and audition for her. She expected people to improvise and be free and all that, which I found rather intimidating. I had to get drunk very early in the morning in order to survive the interview. I managed to get six bottles of Guinness down me before 11am, went along and tried to impersonate my agent. they used to like to get people to do that to show how free they were. Joan Littlewood wasn't there in the end. but I did get myself taken on.

"I was her blue-eyed boy from then on, but a few years later it turned sour. She got it in for me with Mrs Wilson's Diary at the Criterion. Absolutely lambasted me. She would be giving out notes (director's comments) to the cast, and when she came to me she would say, 'Nigel, I don't think there's any point talking about you', and just dismiss me. I think she felt that if you were starting to give a performance in which you knew what you were doing, rather than with everything coming afresh, then she would try and break that down and destroy you. A lot of directors do that, and it is a cruel process. Eventually, I stood up to her. I said, 'If you are trying to break me down, you won't succeed.'"

As he tells the story, the bile rises from 25 years back. The last trace of Quaint Heritage has gone, and in its place sits Tough Old So-And-So. If you must have adversaries, go for Stallone and Snipes, not Hawthorne and Bennett. "I said, 'Just tell me what it is you want me to do. It's me who has to go on and do it every night."'

And on he goes. Here he is in Malvern, as Lord Ogleby, applauded on to the stage before he has spoken a word. As he concedes, it is Sir Humphrey whom most have come to see, no matter that he is wigged and stockinged. The past may be a foreign country, but television has penetrated. Even policemen at the House of Commons ask for his autograph and speed him through barriers like a real minister. When development threatens the peace of the Hertfordshire home that he shares with a close male friend, it is reported as though Sir Humphrey himself is objecting. That is the boundary-hopping nature of television fame.

Yet his class is unmistakable. In The Clandestine Marriage, as in Moliere's Tartuffe and, above all, in George III, there is a hapless, horse-faced quality which seems to give him direct access to the pain at the core of the comedy. As a result, he treads most tellingly on the line where hilarity butts against something that is simply too grim for words. Of course, there are laughs in lunacy, even in our post-Bedlam times, but when its seat is in the monarch, the state is sick, both literally and by traditional poetic association. No wonder directors are mentioning Hawthorne as a potential Lear. That king promises, "I shall go mad", but does not have to deliver as fully as Bennett's George. Now Hollywood has noted the pathos, and knows how well this calibre of facial humour is amplified by close shots. That is one reason for Goldwyn's present optimism.

However fickle, bad-mannered and generally unEnglish Hollywood may be, it seems our actors can induce fear as well as suffer from it. This emerges as Hawthorne returns to the subject of the Clint Eastwood film Firefox. in which he appeared. "He is embarrassed about acting, as Stallone is, as a lot of them are. Being faced by an actor with an English background scares the pants off them, and they don't know quite how to respond.

"I said to Clint, 'Er, well, would you like to rehearse this scene?', and he practically browned his trousers and said. 'Reherrrsse?' He did come into the trailer and we went through some lines, and he didn't know any of them, and just giggled instead. Still, I had all the lines, as you do in a Clint Eastwood film, and he had very little to say."

What a Clint Eastwood film does have in large measure, and what a Nigel Hawthorne one (at the moment) lacks, is money. Bennett talks about a level below which you simply can't go, and believes they were just about on it. "At one point," he says, "we did need another �200,000, which was quite difficult to get." Now, as a novice stage-director, Hawthorne is coming up against the same problem. and tackling it with improvisations that even Sir Humphrey might approve of. "We had a production meeting and they agreed to give me everything I had asked for, until there was a sticking point over a costume. I said the character needed two. They said they could only afford one. I offered to pay for the extra one out of my own pocket.

"I meant it. because I thought they were necessary. Afterwards, Thelma (the producer) came op to me and said she thought I had pulled off a masterstroke because it set such an example of commitment."

And who ended up paying for the costume?

"Oh. they did."

I ask whether this was professionalism dressed up as something cosier and he says definitely not, or at least not consciously. But then, he would say that, wouldn't he? As would Sir Humphrey, or Alan Bennett, or anybody who knows exactly what he is doing and no longer bothers too much about how he is perceived.

The Clandestine Marriage opens at the Queen's Theatre, 51 Shaftesbury Avenue, W1 (071-494 5040), on Monday.