Wednesday, May 5, 1999
Nigel Hawthorne is more than he seems
By LUAINE LEE, Scripps Howard News Service
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — British actor Nigel Hawthorne has spent a lifetime fooling people.
Though he was brought up in South Africa, Hawthorne is considered one of those definitive English actors from his roles in "Gandhi," "The Object of My Affection," "Amistad," "The Madness of King George" (which earned him an Oscar nomination.)
Terribly assured, urbane and sophisticated, that's what he seems in his latest role as the patriarch in David Mamet's reworking of "The Winslow Boy."
Nope, he's none of those he insists, sitting at a narrow maple table and looking assured, urbane and sophisticated.
Dressed in a navy blue suit, light blue dress shirt with French cuffs and blue cufflinks, he admits he's tonsorially correct but thinks he's personally eccentric.
"I have an odd pattern of behavior," he says with a grin. "I'm inclined to be very vague, not focused. One of the things I never like in theater — that's why I like movies — is the audience. The fact that people applaud you in the end. I don't like audiences to be anything more than body of people."
It's unusual when an actor doesn't dote on applause. And he is an unusual actor. He never went to drama school. He left Cape Town against his father's will with a measly 12 pounds in his pocket. He slugged it out in England for six years, but made little headway.
"I had no regional background that English directors could draw on," he sighs. "I wasn't good looking, didn't have a handsome demeanor. I wasn't useful."
He decided to return to Cape Town for four years before he braved Britain again.
Hawthorne was first drawn to acting because it was a good place to hide. "I was able to bury myself and not have to be me. It was an escape, really. I was a very self-conscious young man, very shy and awkward. I was quite good at getting under the skin of people and finding odd things people did and putting them into a performance."
But Hawthorne never fully blossomed until he was middle aged. At 34 he was encouraged by theater diva Joan Littlewood to push himself.
"She was somebody that saw in me something nobody else had seen," says the star of the comedy series, "Yes, Minister."
"I became the blue-eyed boy for a while. She could be very heartless, very cruel, very demanding. But she taught me there was a diving board which was way up there and there was no point in stepping in off the edge, you had to go up; climb the steps, go up to the high diving board and dive off. There was no point in doing it if you couldn't."
What Hawthorne discovered in that heady dive changed his life.
"Instead of putting on funny noses and funny voices and 'acting,' the more I was myself, the more I understood who I was and the more I presented this fallible absurd being that we all are, the more successful I would be."
Hawthorne likes to improvise when he can. "A lot of actors like to work out what they're going to do. I don't. It's very much like a tennis match. You don't know what you're going to do until the other person suggests things. That's the way I work in the theater. It drives people mad," he says.
Off stage it never occurs to Hawthorne that he might be famous. He rides the subway, walks all over London. "I live in the country, don't go to restaurants and parties and all that." He has dogs, likes to garden and play tennis.
Hawthorne sees a big difference between British and American actors. "Our background is almost invariably theater, so we get used to roughing it," he says. "I think American actors have it almost too easy too soon. So they don't get the experience, the humility of working in unsympathetic conditions, so they start to make demands.
"They want this and want that. We're very unused to that, maybe stupidly unused to that. But it's not important to most British actors to have that sort of attention. We don't need personal trainers and dialogue coaches; all that paraphernalia. We get up and do it ourselves and get on with it and go home."
"The Winslow Boy" opens April 30 in Los Angeles and New York and wider in mid-May
