"From Breeches To Briefs"
written by John
Hiscock
For someone who has made
a name with his darkly romantic, damsel-winning
roles, Jeremy Northam is surprisingly and unashamedly
rumpled, in both his appearance and his personal life.
He is, he confesses, "knackered", as he slumps into
a chair in the Hotel Nikko in Los Angeles and
appears to gird himself mentally for the unwelcome task
of parrying questions. He seems more at home in his
crumpled white shirt and jeans than the tight breeches and
morning coats that have virtually become his on-screen
uniform in recent films, and that may be partly to blame
for diverting him from his fast-track to major
Hollywood stardom.
After starring with Sandra
Bullock in The Net and Mira Sorvino in the
science-fiction thriller Mimic - both big-budget studio
productions - he appeared to be following Ralph Fiennes as a
British actor who has cracked the Hollywood star system.
Steven Spielberg cast him as the judge in Amistad, but
then things started to drift sideways.
Possibly because neither The Net nor Mimic was a great
success at the box office and perhaps because of his
choice of material, Northam has faded on the Hollywood
star meter, while at the same time consolidating his
reputation as a first-class actor. Since Amistad, his
American films have been of the low-budget, little-seen
variety. Misadventures of Margaret, made more than two
years ago, has still not been released; Gloria, a
remake of the John Cassavetes classic, came and went
with little trace and Happy, Texas, shot in 26 days on
a budget of £1 million, is released in America this
month.
Northam is better known now as the chiselled
British hunk who fills out a neat pair of breeches in
oh-so-English 18th- and 19th-century dramas: Hindley in
Wuthering Heights, the doughty Mr Knightley in Emma and Sir
Robert Chiltern MP in An Ideal Husband.
Whether
his choices were right or wrong, he is defiantly
unrepentant about them. "I've been working 13 years as an
actor now and only about four years on films. Some work
and some don't," he says. "You luck out or you don't.
Some choices you make seem quite bizarre in
retrospect, but I've never wanted to be typecast or put in a
pigeonhole." Northam, the man whose Emma co-star, Gwyneth
Paltrow, once described as "incredibly driven", added:
"Success for me is not money or fame. I want to improve as
an actor."
Northam first came to the
attention of the public in 1989 when, while he was serving
as Daniel Day-Lewis's understudy in Hamlet at the
National Theatre, Day-Lewis suffered an emotional
breakdown and left the stage, leaving a stunned Northam to
finish the performance and take over until a more
permanent replacement could be found. The following year he
starred in the West End production of The Voysey
Inheritance. He later appeared in the films Wuthering Heights
and Carrington before startling American audiences as
the cyber-stalker who terrorised Sandra Bullock in
The Net. With his latest film, The Winslow Boy,
Northam has returned to the top-hat-and-tails roles with
which he has become most associated.
After
seeing Northam in Emma, the American playwright-director
David Mamet cast him as the celebrated defence lawyer
Sir Robert Morton in his adaptation of Terence
Rattigan's 1946 play, based on the true story of a young
naval cadet who, in 1910, was accused of stealing a
five-shilling postal order. When Morton takes over the boy's
defence, the case becomes a cause célèbre, eventually
reaching the House of Lords and taking a heavy toll on the
family. Mamet has opened up the action of Rattigan's
play, which took place entirely in one room of the
Winslow house, to embrace numerous locations. He has also
played up a romance between the Winslow boy's sister,
Catherine, an ardent suffragette played by Mamet's wife,
Rebecca Pidgeon, and Northam's coldly reserved Morton.
"I was surprised when David Mamet asked me to do the
role," says Northam. "I was intrigued to see what it was
that he saw in the play and what it was that he was
fond of in this old warhorse of the theatre. It was a
much loved play but I don't think it was... regarded.
Not in the same light as, say, a Chekhov is. But it's
not surprising in the least that a playwright of
David's acuity and precision should admire the writing of
it and actually manage to draw such interesting
themes from it."
Northam decided not to see
Anthony Asquith's 1948 film of The Winslow Boy, which
starred Robert Donat in the role of Morton. "It would be
too scary," he says. "It's scary enough to know that
it was a popular play with a famous role and that
there was a famous film version with a great
performance in it. "I think all one can do is trust to the
combination of personalities and skills involved to do
something new. One of the pleasures of seeing it - and it's
not usually a pleasure for me to see myself in
anything - is that it is not just the story of this child
and his protestation of innocence, but it is
something in which you examine everybody's motives." The
character Northam plays, according to Mamet, is quite
reserved. "No one knows really what he is thinking about,"
says the playwright. "He plays his cards very close to
his chest and he has a way of watching and
interpreting what people say and do to a very refined level,
and I think that keeps him separate. I think he's
probably a very lonely man." Is there anything there that
Northam can relate to?
The 38-year-old actor, who
has a reputation for occasionally being
uncommunicative during interviews, appears to be in a
confessional mood and for a brief moment is anything but
reserved. "I can safely say my personal life is a total
mess," he moans. His long romance with an Australian
girlfriend has ended and for the first time in several years
he is on his own, he confides. "I think for the
moment I've kind of given up on dating. I can't be
bothered and I don't have time. I'm not in one place for
long enough. I'm a bit dismayed about that, quite
honestly." When he is in England he passes what little free
time he has amiably enough. "At the moment there's
this thing called 'new laddism' and things are so
postmodern that I can drink my beer and watch my soccer and
watch my video of Pamela Anderson and that's fine," he
says. Then he pauses. "But I don't know. I would love
to be in love again."
The actor known for
zealously guarding the details of his personal life
suddenly looks horrified. "I've probably said far too
much," he says.
