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The
Unofficial Chronology of Dame Judi Dench's Career
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Actors
go mad for the Oscars |
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Playing a character having a mental breakdown wins awards Mark
Lawson Saturday February 16, 2002 After
a performance of the creaky American comedy The Royal Family, I followed
out of the theatre one of those couples who seem to keep the West End
box-offices solvent: a 60ish wife with a fur stole and laugh that
suggested a desperation to get value for money, a 70ish husband with a
deaf-aid and an expression which indicated that the outing had been her
idea.
"Everyone says Judi
Dench is a great actress," he sulked. "You tell me why that
was great acting. She didn't even do an American accent."
"I'll tell you why
Judi Dench is a great actress," his wife bellowed with the volume
of someone with a hard-of-hearing partner. "She's exactly the same
in everything and so you know exactly where you are."
Many will disagree with
this definition but we'd find it harder to decide on an alternative
formula. The alchemy of a performance is notoriously hard to understand.
There's a popular actors' anecdote of Laurence Olivier being visited in
his dressing room. The friend is surprised to find him depressed because
Olivier, as the chum now gushes, has just given the greatest performance
of Othello he's ever seen. "I know," says the lord of the
boards, "but I don't fucking know why."
If great acting is so hard
to define from the inside, then it's not surprising that it's difficult
to make an exterior assessment. To the theatregoer in the fur stole,
thespian excellence was absolute reliability every time: a Volvo
approach to role-playing. Others prefer their performances custom-built,
the chassis and engine adapted to a particular track. Even so, this
week's nominations for the 2002 Oscars offer clues to what the popular
definition of a star performance is.
Three of the five nominees
for best actor (Russell Crowe, Sean Penn, Tom Wilkinson) are playing
characters who undergo some kind of mental breakdown. The same applies
to Judi Dench, Sissy Spacek and Marisa Tomei in the actress categories.
In fact, of the 20 acting nominations, nine have plots involving
neurological tragedies of some kind, while two of the others (Will Smith
and Jon Voigt) are for a movie - Ali - about a man who develops
Parkinson's.
Given the recent award of
acting Oscars to Geoffrey Rush (mad pianist), Tom Hanks (idiot savant),
Jack Nicholson (obsessive-compulsive disorder), some have accused the
Academy Awards of medical sentimentality: treating the Oscars as if they
were a charity tin.
An alternative
interpretation is that academy voters are responding to the kind of
acting which is easiest to spot: substantial physical transformation.
Shakespeare - writing before make-up became a great theatrical art - is
usually careful to give his major players a moment (a mad-scene in the
tragedies, cross-dressing in the comedies) which makes clear that they
have become someone else.
When she appears as a
genius with Alzheimer's - two large strides away from her own mind -
Judi Dench's craft is more apparent than if she were playing a
sixtysomething Englishwoman living in Hampstead, although the latter
might be a more technically challenging task. Formerly prized for brawn
(Gladiator), Crowe now turns up as a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician
with schizophrenia in A Beautiful Mind. As Crowe's only public
connection with big sums is the fee he commands to appear in films, he
really must be acting here, right?
Just as the Oscar for best
costume design is once again contested this year by a quintet of period
pieces - in present-day pieces, how can you tell what the wardrobe
department has done? - so reviewers and prize panels tend to be drawn to
acting in which the emotions and mannerisms are fancy-dress.
But - before all quiet and
well-adjusted actors rush to secure a role as loud lunatics - they
should remember that there's a catch in the acclamation of great acting
which is that it is generally only seen in those who have previously
been declared Great Actors. For example, Oliver Ford Davies, a top-rank
character actor, opened this week as King Lear in London. Before the
production opened - and without seeing it - I bet a colleague that the
critical consensus on him would be almost-but-not-quite. It was.
This was because Ford
Davies is best-known for playing dons and vicars (capturing brilliantly
the liberal impotence of an inner-city cleric in David Hare's Racing
Demon), rather than Richard III, Hamlet, Othello and the other favoured
base-camps on the way to the blasted heath. Appearance and curriculum
vitae designated him a Chekhovian rather than a Shakespearean tragedian
and so virtually predestined the reception of his Lear.
It's also clear that, in
America now, a key part of the definition of great acting seems to be
that it's non-American. Six of the 10 contenders for best supporting
awards this year are British while four of the 10 in the higher class
are British or Antipodean.
This is the only known
example of modern America developing an inferiority complex about
another culture. This is probably because theatre-trained performers
possess a greater range than recent generations of Americans raised on
the instinctive school of Method acting, but it may also be because the
Brits, Aussies and Kiwis - Dench, Kidman, Crowe - really sound as if
they're acting. To an American, someone who doesn't talk like your
mother or your dentist is more likely to appear transformed. Here, in
much the same way, we revere Nicholson, Pacino and Spacey. Thanks to Jan M.
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