Back at the cutting edge

Michael Owen, Evening Standard, 1997

NIGEL HAWTHORNE took a short cut on foot across Whitehall the other day, when the State Opening of Parliament brought the West End to a standstill, and every one of the many policemen on duty saluted him. "Yes" said the actor, with a slow grin, "they did seem to recognise me. They probably thought I was on my way to Downing Street with some essential advice."

The police, of course, were remembering Sir Humphrey Appleby, that suave source of political cunning from the cherishable TV series Yes, Minister, but it is a decade now since Hawthorne laid the character to rest.

Stage success, playing C S Lewis so movingly in Shadowlands, then his imperious and distracted essay in kingship in The Madness of George III, swept him in a different direction.

The film version of George III threw every door in Hollywood open to him and his diary is now full of a richly varied movie programme until beyond the end of next year.

He said. "After working in the theatre and television for 40 years I thought I'd be silly not to take advantage of these opportunities. My film work had consisted of very small roles in sporadic movies. After George III, there was a deluge of very interesting invitations. I've found a new excitement about making films now and I'm enjoying it"

But along the way a television script arrived that grabbed his attention so emphatically that he carved a gap in his schedule so he could take the leading role and it is this new serial which on Wednesday brings him back at last in front of the nation's television audience.

It is the latest starkly contemporary thriller from Paula Milne, author of the controversial The Politician's Wife last year. This time she has turned her attention to medicine and come up with an equally compelling three-part film called The Fragile Heart for Channel 4.

Hawthorne plays a heart surgeon, one of the high priests of the medical world, whose life goes into professional and personal crisis. His freefall into chaos raises a satisfying collection of issues ranging from ethical codes of practice to considerations of alternative medicine, spare-part surgery and patients' rights. "I read it and just knew I had to do it," he said. His tight schedule meant he had no time for research or preparation, which was probably just as well - though he is the son of a doctor he has always been scared of hospital environments.

"They used to make me very queasy. I'm not as bad as I used to be but a lot of it was very near the knuckle for me. In fact, I had to have a minor operation just recently on local anaesthetic. They were playing Pink Floyd and chattering away to each other. It hardly inspired confidence but I managed to get through it."

The sight of Hawthorne, masked, gowned and wrist-deep inside someone's chest with blood spurting all over the place during some particularly graphic open-heart surgery sequences is just one of the arresting images awaiting Wednesday's audience.

The actor recalled. "Before I began acting, I once worked in an insurance office where the manager's hobby was taking pictures of operations. He'd bring them back to show us and I would pass clean out on the floor. I had some difficulty sitting through a screening of the first episode myself when they previewed it."

Hawthorne returns to television now an international star rather than a cosily regarded national favourite but it remains a fact that for 20 years he suffered one of the most severe cases of career blight when he could not get arrested, let alone employed, until Joan Littlewood came to his rescue.

The classical theatre had denied him entry and it is a wonderful irony that the last man to show him the door at Stratford was Trevor Nunn after Hawthorne had auditioned with Malvolio's letter scene from Twelfth Night.

In Nunn's newly released film version of the same play, it is Hawthorne who carries off the acting honours with his love-loin and vulnerable version of Malvolio. He said. "No, I didn't remind Trevor of that audition. He's had a bit of a pasting from the critics, quite unwarranted in my view, and he's got enough on his plate. But it is true that in those days I would go round auditioning for everything and I never got anywhere. The response was always zilch."

A QUICK flip through the films currently occupying him demonstrates how dramatically his fortunes have turned around. Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) summoned him for a film in South Africa, Peter Brook has reserved a special project for him based on an Oliver Sacks casebook, the Orson Welles estate was opened up to provide a previously neglected screenplay the great man had written for himself and Nicholas Hytner, who directed George III, has a new film for him with Keanu Reeves.

Although born in Coventry, Hawthorne was brought up in South Africa and the Arthur Penn film that took him back for the first time in nearly 40 years has an up-to-the-minute significance. He plays an apartheid police colonel called up before the Truth Commission.

"Not a particularly nice gentleman, as you may suspect. I remember growing up knowing there were characters like that around, brutally loathsome people who caused such fear. I wanted to make this film as my act of revenge on them."

He also made contact with the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, where Athol Fugard premieres all his plays, and committed himself to the theatre's new development plans in the rainbow nation not just financially but with a promise to go out and work there. "And I will" he adds.

Now 67, he has put his theatrical work at home on hold since he starred in and directed a West End revival of The Clandestine Marriage, though Declan Donnellan has been discussing a tilt at the ultimate challenge of King Lear. In George III, the mentally disturbed king frequently mirrored the Lear character and even lapsed into quotations from the play.

"I'm steering myself away from that one, I'm afraid," he said. "I don't want to set myself up as a challenger to all the great actors who have played the part. I don't like to work competitively and for reasons I've just told you I never went through the years of Shakespeare at Stratford like the others. I'm happy to think of George III as my Lear."

But while his career prospers he has just suffered the most galling defeat on his own doorstep.

He spent £35,000 fighting a planning application by Texaco to build a service station within view of the Hertfordshire farmhouse he shared with his long-term partner, writer Trevor Bentham.

He lost the case, sold his home and moved 20 miles away only for Texaco to announce it had reviewed its financial state and had cancelled the service station project.

"I was absolutely furious. We had friends we saw every day round the farmhouse, dogs had been buried there, all those sort of personal things. But I decided I couldn't live the rest of my life in anger. Our new home is a happy home and I am content with that."

With that issue settled, this genial, gentle man can now look on the rest of his world with equal content.