BRITISH RULE: THEY'RE BETTER ACTORS, SO WHY AREN'T THEY BIGGER STARS?

By Michael Kilian

(Chicago Tribune, April 28, 1996)

It's hard to think of a time when so many British actors have lent their estimable presences and considerable talents and not inconsiderable egos to the American screen, stage and television set.

There's an Oscar-clutching Emma Thompson here, and an Oscar-nominated Sir Anthony Hopkins there. Ralph ("It's 'Rafe,' actually") Fiennes and Liam Neeson have become Hollywood leading men, and Julia "Sabrina" Ormond a leading lady.

There's Kenneth Branagh, Nigel Hawthorne, Helen Mirren, Joan Plowright, Diana Rigg and the touring Royal Shakespeare Company's leading light, Lindsay Duncan. There's Jeremy Irons and Sir Ian McKellen. And, stealing scenes no matter what he's in--"Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves." "Die Hard" or "Sense and Sensibility"--there's Alan Rickman.

Instead of a red-blooded American John Wayne type, an Englishman, Daniel Day-Lewis, was cast as a quintessential American hero--the frontiersman Hawkeye in "The Last of the Mohicans"--by producer-director Michael Mann.

Why an Englishman? "He's one of the top five actors in the world and I could think of no one as capable of doing the role," says Mann, who was born in Chicago.

Indeed, by and large, the English are better actors. They come here for the money--which can be 10 times better or more in Hollywood than back home in Britain. But they get hired for their talent.

"I have very strong opinions about it," says American playwright and screenwriter Ken Ludwig, who is author of the Broadway hits "Moon Over Buffalo," "Crazy for You" and "Lend Me a Tenor" and has staged plays in both London and New York. "I think the British actors are definitely superior.

"I'm on the board of Michael Kahn's Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, and I think they do a terrific job. But when I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company do 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' I thought they were absolutely fabulous. I went to see them a second time."

In classical roles, British performances tend to be beyond the reach of most Americans. Imagine Brad Pitt or Tom Hanks attempting Olivier's "Hamlet" and "Richard III," or even Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V."

Their range can be breathtaking. Consider how brilliantly and completely Day-Lewis submerged himself in the roles of an Irish street kid ("In the Name of the Father"), a cerebral Czech philanderer ("The Incredible Lightness of Being") and a daft, itinerant Argentinian dental hygienist ("Patagonia").

They can do accents. Compare Anthony Hopkins' American in "Nixon" and "The Silence of the Lambs" to Kevin Costner's English in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" or Nick Nolte's Italian in "Lorenzo's Oil."

Though this is certainly true of some Americans--Steppenwolf Theatre grads John Malkovich or Laurie Metcalf, for example--the British are comfortable in almost any medium and can step from the stage to television to movies with ease, all in a given day if necessary.

It's an old debate

Yet, unless you count British-born Elizabeth Taylor when she was much, much, much, much,much younger, very few of them ever become genuine movie stars.

In "Mohicans," Day-Lewis was able to run up mountains non-stop carrying an actual 20-pound musket. Judging by box office receipts, audiences prefer to see Sylvester Stallone doing that sort of thing, even if the .50 machine gun he's cradling is prop room plastic.

The British vs. American theatrical argument is hardly new. Some 20 theatergoers were killed and many more injured in an 1849 riot that broke out at New York's Astor Place Opera House over a performance by famed British actor William Macready, who had sneered at the talents of American thespians and the vulgarity of American culture in general. But, if less violently, the dispute continues.

The definitive anecdote concerning supposed British acting superiority is the tale of Britain's Lord Laurence Olivier, god of all actors, when he was working with American movie star Dustin Hoffman in the 1976 thriller "Marathon Man."

One scene they were to shoot one morning called for Hoffman to look frantic and desperate and as if he had been up all night. Something of a method actor, Hoffman prepared for this scene by, yes, staying up all night. "My dear boy," Olivier was reported to have witheringly remarked, "why go to all that trouble? Why not act?"

Then, as now, Hoffman has had his defenders. "No, I wouldn't stay up all night if I had to shoot something and had to look as if I'd stayed up all night," says Kelly McGillis, a classical actress turned movie star turned classical actress again. "But with acting, everyone has his or her own technique. It's not laid out on a map for you. You gain what you need from all different sources and resources."

Maybe so, but can you imagine a Hoffman "method" attempt at replicating Olivier's "Richard III"--or one from Marlon Brando or Rod Steiger?

It comes down to training

"The pivotal difference is training--classical training," said Ludwig. "They just do it better."

Kyle Donnelly, the Chicago acting guru now directing plays in Washington and New York, agrees to a point. "I think English training in general gives their actors more language skills and technique," she said. "But Americans bring a vitality and genuineness to their acting. . . . One thing that I think the English share with Chicago, but not Washington or New York, is a respect for the theater. I've yet to find that respect anywhere but England and Chicago."

"It's a matter of education," said McGillis. "There are American actors with a theatrical education who research their roles and can be equally capable in a multiplicity of media, but there are many who don't and aren't. What you don't find in England are people who just wander in and make a lot of money being themselves on screen."

American audiences may appreciate excellent movies with splendid acting. But they go to films mostly to be entertained--by stars: actors and actresses who are physically appealing and have magnetic personalities.

Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock are immensely likeable. We enjoy seeing them get into exciting jams and then getting out of them again. Sharon Stone and Demi Moore, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise are sexy. We enjoy seeing them--period.

This is not something at which the often cold and overmannered--and decidedly un-American--British actor excels.

Or really wants to. As McGillis observed, the classically trained actor is put off by the notion of earning his or her handsome living simply being himself or herself. The impulse is to portray the character.

Irish-born but London-trained stage actress Roma Downey, remembered for Somerset Maugham's "The Circle" on Broadway but no "star," beat out three top-name American actresses for the part of Jackie Kennedy in the NBC mini-series "A Woman Named Jackie," because, according to the producers, she surpassed them so in subordinating herself and becoming the former first lady.

Now the star of her own CBS series, "Touched by an Angel," Downey is still acting a part--though she's allowed her natural Irish accent.

Britain does every so often produce "stars" on the order of Jacqueline Bisset and Charlotte Rampling (not to speak of Joan Collins), but they've never been in a league with Moore, Roberts, Michelle Pfeiffer or Meg Ryan.

Trying to 'make' a star

Consider the disastrous and financially costly attempts by the powerhouse Creative Artists Agency to make a superstar out of British actress Julia Ormond. A graduate of the Webber Douglas Academy in London and a winner of the London Drama Critics Award, Ormond had some brilliant successes as heroines in historical films--1991's "The Young Catherine" and 1994's "Nostradamus," in which she dies, half-naked and grotesquely, of the plague.

But hyped and pushed into supposed American starmaker roles--opposite Brad Pitt in "Legends of the Fall," and Harrison Ford in "Sabrina"--she failed miserably.

In "The Young Catherine," Julia Ormond was the young Catherine the Great. In "The Scarlet Letter," Demi Moore was Demi Moore in 17th Century dress.

However superior, British actors as a rule cannot "open" a movie--which is to say, draw huge crowds to the theaters on opening weekend no matter what or how unpromising the film might be or what bummers their last ones were. That's why the average British stage actor might make between $600 and $800 a week. A celebrated one like Duncan could earn $100,000 or more a year with television work.

Only five Brits made Entertainment Weekly's recently list of the 80 top paid stars: Hopkins, paid between $3 million and $4 million a picture; Emma Thompson, paid $3 million; Liam Neeson, paid $3 million; Daniel Day-Lewis, $8 million; and Hugh Grant, thanks to some career enhancing notoriety, between $7 million and $8 million.

Jim Carrey and Harrison Ford are getting $20 million a picture each. Bruce Willis earns $16.5 million and Pitt receives $10 million. Keanu Reeves is getting between $7 million and $9 million and Kevin Costner, despite a string of bow-wows, $12 million a picture.

Demi Moore's "Letter" barked, but she still gets $12.5 million. Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone have both starred in a series of non-hits, but are being paid $12 million and $6 million a picture, respectively, anyway.

But money isn't everything--at least to a British actor. "I'm very grateful that I'm treated with an enormous amount of respect," said Britian's Duncan. "I warmly accept that. I'm glad there's that appreciation. . . . I want to earn a living. I want to have a life. I want to have freedom. But the thing that gives me nightmares is losing peoples' respect. If I've done something I'm a little bit ashamed of--losing that place with people who always think well of you--that's the most precious thing, that's the thing you have to have. If you lose that, that's a real no man's land. That's frightening."

It would take considerably more talent than either possesses to hear Demi Moore or Sharon Stone utter those words with a straight face.

 

 

Originally on KelClancy's Page - now not accessable