Acting in Film

just let his life go wrong all around him without doing anything about it. He was a rich novelist who lived in the plush stockbroker belt, mixed with pseudo-intellectuals, and did absolutely nothing to stop his wife from going off on a romantic adventure. The character was completely non-chemical; everything about the part was against my nature.

    But once you have reached that kind of conclusion about a character, you have to put it out of your mind. In real life, each person is always in sympathy with his own motives; and I had to find the reasons for this man's behavior. I ended by thoroughly enjoying the part because I submerged my own personality entirely and invented everything: if I would have gone north, I made this character go south; if some piece of behavior was alien to me, I figured it was probably right for him.
    In historical pictures, research can sometimes be a valuable guide in finding what's real for a character. Often we have stereotyped views of how people behaved in other periods and places, and research often disproves a stereotype and makes life more interesting for the actor. For example, in Zulu I was cast as a wishy-washy upper-crust Victorian officer. Now, I wasn't in a very strong position to make radical suggestions about interpretation. I had got the part by the skin of my teeth. Originally I'd gone to audition for the part of a Cockney private, but they'd already cast that role. I Iowever, since I was tall and fair, I apparently looked like a posh Englishman, and the director, Cy Endfield, asked if I could do an upper-class accent. I switched quickly to Etonian and said, "Why, Mr. Endfield, I've been doing it for years." Ile had me do a screen test, during which I showed my absolute terror. He came up to me at a party the following night, after ignoring me most of the evening, and said, "That was the worst damn screen test I ever saw in my life." I thought, okay, so I haven't got it. "But," he continued, "you've got the part because we're leaving on Monday and we can't find anybody else."

    Cy Endfield and Stanley Baker (who was the producer and also the star) both saw my character, Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead, as a chinless wonder who treated war as though it were a game on the playing fields of Eton. Stanley wanted the character played like a weedy Hooray I lenry what-ho type, as a contrast to the character he was playing. But I had found a history book in a secondhand bookshop in Charing Cross Road with a photograph of the real Lieutenant Bromhead. He was 5"6' tall, had a black beard, and in no way corresponded to this vacillating upper-class twit they were envisaging. I showed the picture to Baker, saying, "Listen, Stan, I know your character has to overpower my character in the end because that's the story. But wouldn't it be better to overpower a man who is strong and believes in himself, rather than the kind of fellow who says `Hullo, chaps, and all that'? The kind of fellow everyone knows immediately Stanley Baker could make mincemeat of? There's no clash of personality unless my character has some strength."

    BLAME IT ON RIO
    Directed by Stanley Donen. 20th Century-Fox, 1983.
    Picaaed with Michelk johncon.

    Baker and Endfield thought it over and agreed with me. So I was allowed to play Lieutenant Bromhead as something quite different than the way he was written. And that part was my first big break. If nothing else, we put the record straight about the stereotyped view of Victorian officers as upper-class caricatures.
    The Man Who Would Be King, which was adapted from a story written in 1888 by Rudyard Kipling, was another film in which background knowledge proved indispensable. The director, John Huston, had been trying to get this film off the ground for years. In fact, it was a bit daunting to learn that he had originally wanted to cast Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart in the parts that Sean Connery and I played. I was cast as Peachy and Sean played Danny: we were a couple of rogues, formerly sergeants in the army of Queen Victoria, now gunrunners in India planning to set ourselves up as kings in a remote Himalayan stronghold.

    We all spent days talking about the script before we even shot a foot because Huston wanted us to achieve a Victorian view of society. For example, Peachy had to throw an Indian off of a moving train, for no real reason. From a contemporary perspective, that seems inexplicable and barbaric. But from the standpoint of Victorian values, this