Now recovered from a freezing stint of filming in the Wicklow Mountains, Jim Broadbent has the gentle, befuddled manner familiar from the character roles for which he is best known. But he didn't get where he is today by being cautious about his work, he tells DONALD CLARKE
A RUN-DOWN potting shed would, perhaps, be the best place for a conversation with Jim Broadbent. He’s a friendly bloke. His voice still characterised by a Lincolnshire burr, he enjoys musing about books, theatre, ancient holidays and his interest in sculpting “3ft-high eccentric caricatures”. But he delivers every sentence in the kind of befuddled, distracted murmur you’d expect from a man tending tomatoes or watering his geraniums. Sentences peter out. “Hums” and “haws” punctuate the anecdotes.
“I was in Ireland first, oh, 40 years ago,” he says, glancing at the distant ceiling of the Merrion Hotel in Dublin. “Hmm. Some friends had this island on a lough somewhere in the west. Lough . . . Lough . . .” Derg? Corrib? “Yes, no. Well, they commissioned my dad to bring this prefabricated house out to it. Yes . . .”
In short, Jim is not unlike the characters he plays. Now 60, he has been working steadily for the past four decades, but he only gained serious visibility in middle age. Long a collaborator with such spiky English treasures as Ken Campbell and Mike Leigh, Broadbent had to wait until 1990 – and Leigh's Life is Sweet– for his first significant cinema role. He immediately became one of the most sought-after character actors of the era. Woody Allen cast him in Bullets Over Broadway. He played Bridget Jones's dad. He won an Oscar for his role as John Bayley, Iris Murdoch's husband, in Richard Eyre's Iris.
Now, he plays Cillian Murphy's dad in the Irish crime comedy, Perrier's Bounty.
“Oh that was hard work, you know,” he says. “There was this bit where I had to stand out in the rain on a tree stump. I don’t think I have ever been so cold. Hmm. Much worse than it looks, I can tell you.”
What with all this getting rained on in the Wicklow Mountains for Perrier's Bounty, prancing around Australia for Moulin Rougeand scowling about Rome for Gangs of New York, Broadbent can't see too much of his home and beloved family. All successful actors are international actors these days, are they not?
“What? Oh, no, it’s not too bad. No, no, no,” he mutters, not actually reaching for the secateurs. “It takes something special to get me out of the British Isles or Europe. As you get older you don’t want to spend too much time away from home. People say, ‘Oh, you’re always in America’. I’m never there really.”
His wife, painter and theatre designer Anastasia Lewis, must miss him when he is away.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “She has her own things to do, I think. You know? Anyway, I would never complain about my lot.”
AS YOU MAYhave already gathered – all that stuff about the island – Jim comes from a decidedly interesting family. His father was a conscientious objector during the second World War. Shipped out to the Lincolnshire countryside, he set up a collective where other objectors could come and learn to be farmers. It sounds very much like the sort of enterprise you would have expected to encounter during the hippie years.
“I suppose so,” he says. “Yes, I suppose so. It didn’t ultimately work as a collective, but many of them set up their own farms in the area. So you had all these alternative lefties living in the heart of Tory Lincolnshire. There were all these like-minded people and about 25 or 30 kids in a wonderful rural playground.”
His parents met at art school in Leeds. Mum was a sculptor. Dad worked as an architect and eventually built a small theatre not far from the agricultural semi-commune. (The Broadbent Theatre still exists and next month you can enjoy a talk there by the former chair of the Lincolnshire Cottage Gardens Society.) Noting all that charming family baggage, it hardly seems surprising that young Jim drifted into a creative field. He first went to art school but rapidly realised that he “just wasn’t good enough”. Eventually he wound up at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. This being the late 1960s, one imagines that both art school and drama college were awash with drugs and beatniks.
“It wasn’t quite like that,” he says. “No, no. Art school didn’t quite live up to the black-polo-neck image. And there was quite a strong work ethic in drama school. I took it very seriously and actually got rid of any bad habits I might have had.”
When I say I can’t see Broadbent as the sort of fellow who would have crashed sports cars or flung petrol bombs at policemen, he suddenly perks up and becomes almost animated.
"What? You cansee me as that sort of person?" No, I can't.
“Ah yes. Well, no, not really,” he says returning to his virtual dahlias. “At school, I was a very irritating, rebellious joker. But I always knew how to toe the line. Later I put the risk into the work and went off to do those Ken Campbell things and so on. I was never cautious about the work. I don’t think I ever gave my parents a hard time. Maybe I did. Hmm?”
While contemporaries fell into situation comedies or Hollywood movies, Broadbent did, indeed, devote much of the 1970s to work with such immortal nutters as Ken Campbell. That singular director encouraged him to play a dozen parts in his nine-hour epic, Illuminatus!, and the actor's conspicuous virtuosity eventually attracted the attention of a good agent. He played the foolish Desmond Olivier Dingle in the two-man National Theatre of Brent, Patrick Barlow's vehicle for hilarious pastiches of historical drama. He was briefly considered for the role of Del Trotter in Only Fools and Horsesbut, after the part went to David Jason, had to settle for a recurring role as a bent copper.
So he did okay for himself. But he still wasn’t exactly a star. “It went all right after I got an agent,” he muses. “Yes. It went fine. I would do a bit of shop-fitting now and then. But I worked pretty frequently. That is the life of a character actor. You can’t complain.”
I am interested to hear him trot out the phrase “character actor”. People in his line of work are often cautious about acknowledging such distinctions. But Broadbent seems to have known from an early age that he was more likely to play the odd man in the funny hat rather than the gorgeous man who gets the girl in the last reel. “I remember saying to Ewan McGregor: ‘That’s what it’s like for a character actor.’ And he says: ‘We are all character actors.’ Heh, heh. Well, I suppose that’s true, but some of us take it a little further than others.”
It was his partnership with Mike Leigh that eventually secured him a degree of fame. The two men have worked together about a dozen times on film and television. Clearly, the partnership makes sense, but it’s hard not to wonder if it ever becomes exhausting. Everyone knows that Leigh’s plays and films are entirely improvised. I can imagine that an actor might, from time to time, yearn for Leigh to just tell him or her what to say.
“Very much so,” he says, somewhat unexpectedly. “That does happen to you. Look, we’ve been doing it in different ways since 1979. And the interest of how he actually does it sustains you for quite a while. Then it becomes a great deal less fascinating and becomes ever more painstaking. Sometime you do want to shout: ‘Let’s get on with it!’”
Yet, later this year, he appears in yet another Mike Leigh film, Another Year.
“I am not allowed to say anything about it,” he says, with an embarrassed shrug. “They said that to us specifically.”
IF LEIGH'S Life is Sweetconsolidated Broadbent's persona with British audiences, it was the best supporting actor Oscar for Iris that made Americans sit up and take notice. Though up against Ben Kingsley for Sexy Beast and Jon Voight for Ali, Broadbent sheepishly admits that, following his success at the Golden Globes, his victory was not an enormous surprise. A great deal more scripts came in, but the quality was not, he maintains, any higher than it had been before. Nonetheless, the Oscar did change things for him.
“Whenever I have seen the Oscars since, I wonder, ‘Was I ever really part of that? Was I part of that hype?’ I was, and it was a weird thing to think back on,” he says. “It was a terribly exciting thing. Also, I now don’t have that nagging thing that I have to prove something.
“There’s always something slightly competitive about this business. But now I can sit back and relax a bit.”
Good idea, Jim. Why not get yourself a potting shed?
Perrier's Bountyis on general release
