Stuart Husband February 25, 2012
KENNETH Branagh is approaching the status of, if not a British national treasure, then at least an heirloom whose value is appreciating.
A large part of the reason for this is his casting as Kurt Wallander, Henning Mankell's rumpled, melancholy Swedish detective. He's filming his third season of what has been an Australian television summer staple and we're sitting in the house he rents on the Swedish coast during filming, a capacious, onion-domed affair that, he says, as he feeds a wood-burner, used to be a meeting house for alcoholics.
Ystad, the town Wallander calls home, is a few kilometres down the road and Branagh's house looks over the pristine waters of the Baltic; a perfect spot for the ruminative cast of mind that comes with playing Wallander but which, since turning 50 in December, seems also to be Branagh's default setting.
''It's definitely the age where a kind of mental stocktaking kicks in,'' he says, taking a sip of tea. In person, Branagh is slighter than he appears onscreen but his voice has a commanding presence, something he exploits to the full in his new film My Week with Marilyn, an Oscar contender at next week's awards.
In a direct engagement with his past, the one-time new Olivier plays the old Olivier in a comedy that follows the on-set battles between Sir Laurence and Marilyn Monroe (played to the sexy-sassy-vulnerable hilt by Michelle Williams) during the making of the 1957 confection The Prince and the Showgirl.
The film is based on a memoir by Colin Clark who, despite his lowly status on set, became Monroe's confidant as the clash between her method style and Olivier's theatrical technique risked derailing the production. Branagh, all crisp lisp and camp grandstanding, plays it like screwball comedy, while suggesting Olivier's fear of being outmoded by the wave of naturalistic acting of which Monroe was a harbinger.
But did he have concerns about rekindling the Olivier thing? ''I suppose I did but in the end what it came down to was, is it a good part? And will it be fun?'' he says. ''One thing that struck me about the screenplay was that, in our world today, not many people have actually seen a Monroe film. She's just an iconic figure, like Chaplin, that you can summon in three strokes of a pen. And Olivier is even further removed.
''I came into the business 30 years ago, when he was still alive and still the world's greatest actor. My generation was very aware of his work and part of the excitement of doing this was to draw attention to him. The film captures him at a watershed moment; after it wrapped, he went and did John Osborne's The Entertainer at the Royal Court, which transformed him from a stuffed shirt to something renewed and relevant, which he was very keen to be.''
Read further: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/movies/stepping-out-in-oliviers-shoes-20120224-1tsks.html
No comments:
Post a Comment