"The nicest thing that happened was when I was doing The Madness of King George and we were in Stamford, Connecticut. We were in previews and my accountant and his family had been to see the show. It was raining out, really quite a persistent rain. As I got out the stage door, Christopher Reeve was standing in the rain and I said, ‘Have you been waiting all this time?' He said, ‘Yes.' And I said, ‘Why didn't you come in?' And he said, ‘Because I knew you had guests.' He's an amazing man. (reflects) Isn't that fantastic? He was in the rain, soaking wet! Those are the good people in the world. I wish him well." A king gone mad was Nigel Hawthorne's passport to a more fruitful film career. Yes, he'd appeared in films before -- Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, Clint Eastwood's Firefox, a Sylvester Stallone vehicle called Demolition Man -- but it wasn't until he was 65 years old and recreating his award-winning stage role as George III in Nicholas Hytner's The Madness of King George that Hollywood and American audiences paid homage to one of Britain's esteemed stage actors.
From one mad king to another: Hawthorne is not set to take on the title role of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of King Lear, which will premiere in Japan and play in its homeland in the dawn of the millenium. Though Hawthorne is excited about his new project, he is also decidedly reluctant about returning to the theater. "For many years," he explains, "I wanted to be a film actor but was never given the opportunity. I think film acting suits me rather more than stage work does."
Hawthorne, also known for his work in the BBC series Yes, Minister, fairly admits to be making up for lost time. "Time is sort of running out. Without being too morbid about it, I don't have much time left." Having appeared in Hytner's The Object of My Affection and Steven Spielberg's Amistad, the unflappably serene Englishman will hit the screens in a flurry of films: as one of the voices in the animated feature Tarzan, At Sachem Farm with Minnie Driver and, currently, The Winslow Boy, David Mamet's elegant and muted film adaptation of Terrence Rattigan's play, itself inspired by a genuine incident of a young cadet accused of stealing a five shilling postal note. Hawthorne portrays the patriarch who invests all his monies and efforts into bringing his son justice. It is, quite simply, a performance of remarkable subtlety.
Hawthorne, who'd done the play in a repertory company initially scoffed when his agent proposed the role. "I just said, ‘Oh God, no. Hoary old thing,'" he recalls with a smile. "And I said, ‘Who's directing it?' ‘David Mamet.' So I said, ‘Right. Book me.'" Hawthorne, who had initially played the father as more austere took a different approach after a lady friend commented on how monstrous and self-centered the character was. "He's not, you know," he defends. "He's a man who loves his family and who'd do anything [so] that this right be done. [He] assumes that everybody would go along with him and when people falter, as they do in the film, he says, ‘No, no, you mustn't doubt. You must continue with this resolve that he shall be cleared.'"
Hawthorne first encountered Mamet in 1985, when he was appearing in The Shawl, a television play of Mamet's produced for the BBC. "David had come in unexpectedly from Chicago and wanted to see a run-through of the play when we were singularly unprepared. I was very badly thrown by this Harold Pinter-like figure. He came in and was very kind but said he'd totally rewritten it. It'd taken me a month to learn the fucking thing. Anyway. . ." Anyway, Hawthorne decided not to pull out, the show went on and Mamet began a correspondence with him. Years passed, scripts and copies of plays were sent without explanation -- "I have them at home in a drawer" -- and the last bit of contact he had with Mamet was in 1990 when Hawthorne was portraying C.S. Lewis on Broadway in Shadowlands. (The performance brought him a Tony Award.) He received a card from Mamet and eight years would pass before this strange courtship produced a union.
"I know him to be an uncompromising man," Hawthorne assesses of the Chicago-born playwright, screenwriter, director and essayist. "He is a rigorous follower of his own theories. He's like a schoolteacher, really. He likes to tell you how best to work. Once you've got over that barrier of student-teacher, it's plain sailing. The warmth that he exudes is quite remarkable, the affection that he has for each and every member of the crew, for each and every actor, is something I've not experienced."
Except perhaps in the theater where a family atmosphere rules, despite whatever creative differences may arise. Hawthorne recently joined the ranks of Ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins by being granted a knighthood, a distinction of which he is both proud and modest. "It's a very difficult situation," he explains in that soothing, gentle tone of his, "because in the theater you have a very democratic group of people. Everybody treats everybody exactly the same. [Whatever] people think theater people are up to -- the bitchiness and the this and the that -- most of it is no different from civil servants or journalists or anybody else. You have a quite ordinary group of people that happen to have a job that we love doing. We're probably very privileged in that respect. So to have somebody singled out or elevated to a knighthood or damehood, as Judi Dench has been, it makes one uncomfortable with one's peers because you all like to be the same. Similarly, it's an honor because I was the only actor in that particular honors list. So it was an honor for the profession as much as it is for the individual."
- Nigel Hawthorne
