Darling Dickie
Interview | Alistair Duncan Like his own life, Richard Attenborough’s latest film touches on the themes he thinks are most important – “human joy, loss and relationships”. No wonder he is beloved among British audiences LORD RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH’S reputation for brimming with emotion is legendary. The 84- year-old veteran film director and actor, who has [...]
Interview | Alistair Duncan
Like his own life, Richard Attenborough’s latest film touches on
the themes he thinks are most important – “human joy, loss and
relationships”. No wonder he is beloved among British audiences
LORD RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH’S reputation
for brimming with emotion is legendary. The 84-
year-old veteran film director and actor, who has
racked up more than 80 movie credits during his
prodigious career, is famous not only for this, but
also for calling everyone “darling” and for being an
effusive individual who is almost always on the brink of tears.
However, upon meeting the grandee of British cinema
one wintry afternoon at his sprawling Surrey mansion, Lord
Attenborough, whose endearing nickname of Dickie has stuck,
doesn’t cry or call me “darling” once – rather disappointingly
he seems to prefer “dear boy”. However, his warmth and
emotional candour are plain to see. When we meet, he
grasps my hand in a way that feels almost meaningful and
throughout our conversation, he engages me with those
great big watery eyes of his, reminiscing about sadly departed
friends in tones as warm as a summer evening, while at other
times seeming a touch melancholy about the past. He is
known for being a great raconteur but best of all is his great
laughter. Questions he deems faintly ridiculous prompt the
noisiest guffaws.
For example, when I put the question to him: “Do you ever
re-watch your movies, Lord Attenborough?” he replies: “My
God, no, never!” He leans back in his chair and regains his
composure after a huge belly laugh.
“There was one day in the Christmas holiday,” he recalls,
“when Miracle On 34th Street was directly followed by The
Great Escape. Can you imagine anything more tragic? My
grandchildren were forbidden from watching them.”
src="http://www.bmivoyager.com/images/2008/mar/voyager_mar_045.jpg"
alt="A flick through the films of Lord Attenborough – with Peter Sellers in Only Two Can Play, 1962">
Wincing at previous acting performances is one thing
(in the 1994 version of Miracle On 34th Street he played Santa
Claus and in The Great Escape, 1963, he played chief tunnel
schemer Roger Bartlett). But what about films he has directed,
like Gandhi? Surely he doesn’t baulk at revisiting a career
highlight such as that – a film that collected eight Oscars in
1983, a widely praised cinematic classic?
“Actually, I did see Gandhi recently,” he admits, scratching
his snow-white beard. “We had a celebration at Bafta recently
for the 25th anniversary of the film, which they screened
on 70mm.” A cheeky smile broadens his face as he adds:
“I thought it was a bit long.”
This may seem like false modesty – the film was being
celebrated by the most august film club in the country, for
heaven’s sake, its stature confirmed after two-and-a-half
decades. However, Attenborough’s finely-tuned sensitivity
about his own work is grounded in pragmatism. Asked
whether he is affected personally by what the critics say
about his films, his response is surprising.
src="http://www.bmivoyager.com/images/2008/mar/voyager_mar_046.jpg"
alt="in 1993’s Jurassic Park">
“Yes, absolutely. You are only really as good, in terms of
availability or potential in your career as a filmmaker, as your
last movie,” he explains. “And if your last movie gets terribly
panned and doesn’t do good business, then it’s certainly
harder to set up the next one.”
Shouldering the responsibility for a film, however, suits
Lord Attenborough just fine – he much prefers the director’s
chair to an acting role these days.
src="http://www.bmivoyager.com/images/2008/mar/voyager_mar_044.jpg"
alt="at the 1983 Oscars with Ben Kingsley when Gandhi swept the boar">
“Acting can be very rewarding but you are always working
for somebody else,” he says. “If you are somebody who has
something you want to say – and I’m not in any sense an
academic – but if you want to make a statement, then you
want to produce and direct. Then you can put your name on
the bottom of the poster and say: ‘That’s what I believe’.”
Not much could tempt him back to a part in a film.
Looking wistfully out of his window at the lush, leafy
meadows that envelope his home, he says: “I don’t want to
act any more. I couldn’t remember the lines, to be honest.”
In his eighth decade, Lord Attenborough can sleep easily
in the knowledge that he has made his mark on not just the
acting profession but on the cinematic art as a whole. He is
the President of Bafta, Rada and the British National Film and
Television School in addition to a heap of other posts. The
son of the principal of University College Leicester, and the
older brother of naturalist Sir David Attenborough, Richard
Attenborough can pinpoint the moment he decided he
wanted to be part of the world of moving images at age 13.
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alt="In Miracle On 34th Street">
“My father took me to a cinema off Piccadilly which was
then called the London Pavilion. We watched the Charlie
Chaplin classic, The Gold Rush. After seeing that film, there
was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I wanted to be an
actor – someone who could have you in fits of laughter, then
on the point of tears. I thought that took incredible genius. It
seemed a great thing to strive for.” His debt to Chaplin was,
of course, repaid 56 years later, when Attenborough directed
a biopic of him, starring Robert Downey Jr.
On finishing school, Lord Attenborough won a scholarship
to the prestigious London drama college Rada, where he
studied during the war and met the young actress Sheila Sim,
to whom he has been married since 1945. During this time he
also met the celebrated Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw
– whom he calls GBS and credits with having safeguarded
his chosen career. “He came to Rada after the hall had been
bombed out,” Attenborough recalls. “There was uncertainty
as to whether Rada was going to open again. He reassured us
that it would. So, if it wasn’t for GBS, I guess I might not have
become an actor.”
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alt="on the set of Closing The Ring with Christopher Plummer and Shirley MacLaine">
In 1942, the young Attenborough played a coward in the
war film In Which We Serve and suffered the fate of being
typecast after this, only graduating to a darker, more nuanced
role in the form of angel-faced psychopath Pinkie Brown in
the thriller Brighton Rock in 1947.
“The satisfaction I derived from a role like Pinkie was
in attempting to convey the various factors that were in
his make-up,” he states, “that he was not completely evil.
There was something in the psychological, environmental
upbringing that made him what he was.”
Yet Attenborough’s gentlemanly demeanour always
made him ideal for officer roles in war films, of which he did
many in the 1950s. Then 1963 saw him in his most famous
war film to date, The Great Escape, the action adventure film
based on the true story of a doomed escape from a German
prisoner of war camp. This film, a huge box office success,
prompted Attenborough to consider a move to Los Angeles
to capitalise on the subsequent deluge of work offers, but he
says that he never truly gave it much serious thought.
“It was after this film and after Jurassic Park [in which he
played quixotic dinosaur resurrector John Hammond] that I
could have moved to LA, but it was never for me. I simply love
Britain too much. I would never have wanted my children or
grandchildren to grow up anywhere else.”
src="http://www.bmivoyager.com/images/2008/mar/voyager_mar_047.jpg"
alt="with his famous brother, the naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough">
f
Jurassic Park was a return to acting for Attenborough, who
throughout the 1980s concentrated on directing. Gandhi,
his eponymous biopic of the pacifist hero who led India
to independence from British rule, was a huge triumph,
paving the way for his similarly conceived and well-received
portrayal of the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko (played by
Denzel Washington) in Cry Freedom five years later in 1987.
Attenborough’s latest directorial offering, Closing The
Ring, has a real-life story as its starting point, about an
American woman whose boyfriend was killed during World
War II near Belfast. It then fictionalises a tale based around
the discovery of a gold ring near the site where he died.
The ring is brought back to the dead man’s now elderly
sweetheart who, after much soul-searching, finally comes
to terms with the past. The film, starring Hollywood starlet
Mischa Barton as the young girlfriend and the legendary
Shirley MacLaine as her older self, was filmed in Canada
and Northern Ireland.
I ask Lord Attenborough about the experience of filming
in Belfast and he leaps from his chair to fetch a framed
photograph – he seems pretty sprightly in spite of his
advanced years, apart from being slightly hard of hearing. It
is a picture of him sitting with MacLaine, alongside Unionist
politician Ian Paisley and Republican politician Martin
McGuinness, the respective First Minister and Deputy First
Minister in the power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly –
a remarkable image for anyone to have on one’s mantelpiece.
“Oh, I think they are enormously proud of the fact that we
shot the film there,” says Lord Attenborough.
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alt="Lord Attenborough oversees the filming of Closing The Ring in Northern Ireland and Canada">
What drew him to the story? “Well, I don’t really enjoy
gentlemen wearing breastplates and waving swords about
and I don’t really enjoy science fiction,” he explains. “I enjoy
stories about human joy, loss and relationships. That’s what
has always interested me as a director.” In light of the tragic
death in the 2004 South Asian tsunami of his eldest daughter
Jane, her mother-in-law and his 14-year-old granddaughter
Lucy, who were holidaying in Thailand at the time, this
response has particular poignancy.
Over the next few months, Lord Attenborough will be
concentrating on a film about Rolls-Royce called The Silver
Ghost. At this stage of his career it must feel as though he
has worked his way through every project that he has ever
wanted to make, but apparently that’s not the case. He
says that above everything else he wants to realise a longstanding
dream of making a film about the 18th-century
English political radical and essayist Thomas Paine,
he says, whose most famous work was The Rights Of Man.
“Everything we now aspire to, whether it be rights for
women or a just education or health system, he wrote
about it. He’s probably the greatest writer we’ve ever had
– after Shakespeare, I hasten to add. But it would be very
expensive – I don’t know whether it will happen.”
This is a lofty ambition, especially for an octogenarian. Has
he ever thought of retiring? “Anathema to me, retirement,”
Lord Attenborough says, spitting out the word. “I’m not good
at that. I’d like to finish a shot at the end of a movie, shout
‘cut’ and drop dead.”
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alt="Hollywood star Mischa Barton got in touch with her family roots for her part in the romantic drama – her mother is Irish">
One final question. As a filmmaker, he is famous for
sketching the lives of illustrious individuals, from Gandhi
to Steve Biko to Charlie Chaplin to – fingers crossed – Tom
Paine. Who would he be happy to have playing him in a
biopic about Richard Attenborough?
“Oh no, how awful – what a terrible thought. No, no, no,
I’d hate that. Nobody, for God’s sake,” he exclaims, emanating
another raucous laugh. “The only person who could would be
my baby grandson and he’s a bit young at the moment. He
has another 10 or 15 years to go.”
In spite of his long, distinguished film career, there’s
no thought more unpalatable to Lord Attenborough than
being in the spotlight. Or so he says, with a benevolent grin,
seeming simultaneously self-conscious and lavishly theatrical
in the way that is pure Dickie.
