Saturday 28 November 1998

Snob of stage no more

Sir Derek Jacobi admits to having had a serious contempt for film actors. Now his film career is taking off, thanks to his work in Hamlet and his latest film, Love Is The Devil, writes Jamie Portman.

 

Sir Derek Jacobi portrays sadistic painter Francis Bacon in Love is the Devil.

BEVERLY HILLS, California - Sir Derek Jacobi shudders at the thought of having to admit the fact, but he prides himself on being an honest man. "So yes, it is true," he sighs. "I used to be a terrible snob about television and film."

That may come as a surprise to his devoted fans who keep watch on PBS schedules for the latest instalments of the enormously popular Brother Cadfael series, in which he plays a monastic detective back in the Middle Ages. Admirers are also on the alert for reruns of I Claudius, the monumental 13-part serial about the turbulent life and times of the nervous, stuttering introvert who became a remarkable Roman emperor. Jacobi was still in his thirties when he shot that series in 1976; it made him an international celebrity.

A couple of years back, Jacobi scored a further personal triumph as a different Claudius -- this one Shakespeare's murderous Danish king -- in Kenneth Branagh's four-hour version of Hamlet, which came out recently on video.

But Jacobi, now 59, says that for much of his career he considered himself a stage actor first and foremost and had the mistaken notion that theatre was the only truly valid artistic medium. He knows better now, and is receiving critical raves for his latest film, Love Is The Devil, in which he plays the alcoholic, sado-masochistic painter, Francis Bacon. It opens Friday.

Jacobi said in an interview shortly before starting work on this film that it was the influence of people like Branagh and Julie Christie that made it possible for him to portray a turbulent man considered by many critics to be the 20th century's greatest painter.

"Because I'd been a stage actor for so many years, I'd had this healthy contempt for film actors. I felt it wasn't proper acting. But now I realize that I couldn't be more wrong. It is just as hard as stage acting -- but it is different and the techniques that are required are different."

He found it a revelation to work with Julie Christie, who played Queen Gertrude to his king in Hamlet. He now finds it ironic that at the beginning, Christie was worried by the prospect of sharing the film with so many classically trained stage actors.

"She was very frightened because she was conscious of the fact that she was surrounded by people who had all this experience of Shakespeare, whereas she had none.

"But she had spent more time on the screen than any of us, including Ken, and she had more experience of cinema. So there was so much we could learn from working with her in terms of technique and doing close-ups. She helped make me understand that in movies less can be more."

The courtly, grey-haired Jacobi is one of the giants of British theatre. He has played most of the great Shakespearean parts -- in Richard II, Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing. He has also played Hamlet 379 times -- an achievement matched only by Sir John Gielgud. But despite his TV triumph in I Claudius, he still shunned a movie career.

It was Branagh who first convinced Jacobi that there was no real chasm between stage and film when he persuaded him to play a debonair villain in the 1991 mystery thriller, Dead Again.

It was a role Jacobi was reluctant to do because both the character and medium seemed so alien to him. Now, he realizes how important it was to have the younger actor's trust and support.

After his film work on Hamlet, Jacobi returned to the London stage to play the title role in an enthusiastically reviewed production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Then came Love Is The Devil, which chronicles in harrowing detail Francis Bacon's homosexual relationship with a petty criminal named George Dyer. Dyer, who committed suicide in 1971, became the subject of some of Bacon's finest paintings.

Bacon was a troubled, turbulent human being who brushed his teeth with ammonia cleanser and blackened his hair with boot polish. In an interview last month with The Los Angeles Times, Jacobi said that to understand Bacon one had to understand that he endured a "horrendous childhood" in which he was physically and mentally abused by his father. But he also said there was an element of the monster in Bacon.

"Francis was a masochist who needed to be hurt sexually, but on an emotional level he was quite sadistic. He had to know he was destroying George Dyer."

Meanwhile, it's I Claudius which continues to give him his highest profile internationally -- and that astonishes Jacobi because the series is now 22 years old. He looks at the phenomenon of endless TV reruns and continuing video sales and simply marvels.

"We never thought Claudius would continue to enjoy such wide circulation in the 1990s. No. No. No. We had no idea. We thought it was just another BBC classic serial based on Roman history and two wonderful novels by Robert Graves."

He remembers the cast had completed seven of the 13 scheduled episodes when the first one started airing on the BBC. "The critics were very iffy about it at the time, and that was spooky for us because we had another six episodes still to do and we were wondering what was the point. And then gradually people started coming around and suddenly we found we had this incredible hit."

Two years ago, cast members reassembled for a 20th anniversary reunion in London.

"Patrick Stewart, John Hurt, myself -- we all flew in. They had compiled an hour's worth of clips and we all sat around and watched -- all of us now these aging emperors and empresses watching our younger selves dying all over the place. And yes, it may have been done for television but it is just about my favourite role!"