WHEN Michael Winterbottom and Andrew Eaton, the director and producer of Roddy Doyle's Family, set about making Jude, their film of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, they chose Christopher Eccleston to play the title role because, Winterbottom says, he had "the integrity and honesty we wanted for Jude". Eaton adds: "Christopher has not been seen as a classic, sexy leading man, but he's a revelation on camera with terrific intelligence, and when we cast him we just thought he is Jude."
Although Eccleston is familiar to cinema audiences for his leading roles in Let Him Have It and Shallow Grave, he is much better known to television viewers for his impressive work in the TV series, Cracker, Hearts and Minds and Our Friends in the North. Born in Salford in Manchester, he trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and began his stage career in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Bristol Old Vic.
On the London stage he acted in Bent and Ahingdon Square at the National Theatre, in Aids Memoire at the Royal Court and in Waiting at the Water's Edge at the Bush. "Some actors have mystified the process of acting so much and made it seem so rarefied," he said when we met this month at the Toronto Film Festival, where Jude had its North American premiere. "I realised after two years at drama school that it's just a craft like making a chair and something I'd like to be good at."
In 1991 Eccleston made his film debut in Let Him Have It, playing Derek Bentley, a backward young Englishman who was executed - wrongly, many believe - in the early 1950s. Although that film marked a notable breakthrough for him, he expresses strong reservations about it. "I'm not proud of Let Him Have It and it's not a performance I'm proud of," he said. "That film had such an important subject matter, but they took Bentley's epilepsy and learning disability and idealised and romanticised both of them in order to tell the audience why this man shouldn't hang. You should trust your audience - you don't lead them by the nose on issues like that.
"The real issue is why you shouldn't hang people in the first place because it's barbaric.
Let Him Have It should have been as brave a film on capital punishment as Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing, but then, the director, Peter Medak, was an odd choice for the film - he's a very nice man, but he's a Hungarian living in Hollywood. What the film did for me, and I don't know why because I can't stand my performance in it, is that it got me noticed. It also gave me a good insight into how cynical the film business could be - because basically, what we were doing was taking Derek Bentley and checking how much money could be made out of him."
Christopher Eccleston turned up in television series such as Casualty, Inspector Morse and Poirot before being cast in the recurring role of the hard nosed young Detective Chief Inspector Bilborough in Jimmy McGovern's creation, Cracker. "The best thing I heard said about Cracker," he says, "was that it was like a Trojan horse in the living room - it purported to be a police procedural television drama and actually was just a debating ground for Jimmy McGovern to deal with a whole range of social issues today."
Eccleston quit Cracker, making a blood soaked exit in a protracted death scene at the beginning of the second series. "I demanded that from Jimmy," he says. "I told him I was going. I had nothing to go to, but I'd had enough of Bilborough. It was very difficult to be close to such brilliant writing in Cracker and not to get a lot of it." He says he envied actors such as Robert Carlyle, Andrew Tiernan and Susan Lynch, who would be signed for a one off three part episode. "I wanted to be doing that kind of role rather than sitting behind a desk. But Jimmy gave me as much as he could.
Jimmy McGovern gave him substantially more when Eccleston was cast in the leading role of an idealistic schoolteacher struggling with inadequate education funding in the four part Hearts and Minds. "It was the best script I ever had," says the actor. "Jimmy really explored all the issues it raised and all the contradictions of the characters."
ECCLESTON followed with the pivotal role of Nicky Hutchinson, the radical Labour activist who becomes a campaigning photo journalist in Peter Flannery's riveting BBC series, Our Friends in the North, arguably the finest television drama seen this year. Over the course of nine episodes, the Nicky character ages from 19 to 52.
"I wanted to do it for two reasons," says Eccteston. "I felt it would make me a better actor to play a man through all those years of change, and because I want British television drama to evoke its past - the issue based television drama I was raised on in the 1970s."
Shooting Our Friends in the North occupied almost a full year of Eccleston's life. The series got off to a bad start when the first episode was scrapped, to be re shot after all the other episodes had been filmed, and the original director was fired. "The make up was a drag every morning," Eccleston says. "Two or three hours of it every day, and I'd never had to do that before, but it was extraordinary to explore all that and it helped with the physical movement of the character as well.
Does he feel fortunate to have worked in so much quality television at a time when there's so little of it in Britain? "No, I don't," he says. "I've made my own luck. I've worked for just four or five weeks this year because I don't want to do rubbish, and it's quite hard not working. I actively seek out writers like Peter Flannery and Jimmy McGovern because an actor's only as good as his writer and if I don't have an emotional connection with the subject, I'll be no good in it, no matter what it is."
The role of Jude Fawley, the stonemason with ambitions towards education, whom he plays in Jude, is, in some respects, not dissimilar from the idealistic Nicky in Our Friends in the North. "I've read some of Hardy's novels and I love his work," he says. "Of all the writers who are being plundered for films at the moment, he's the one. I had gone straight into Jude after playing Nicky and even though Jude has these great difficulties in his life, they were not self inflicted, which to a great extent with Nicky they were and that was a relief to me. I thought Jude had great resilience and optimism, pure optimism, and a strength of character which Nicky lacked, and it was very nice to play that."
Since completing Jude late last year Christopher Eccleston has turned down everything he has been offered - with one notable exception. He reunited with Jimmy McGovern for Hillsborough, a two hour Granada Television drama in which McGovern returns to the theme of Britain's worst football disaster, which claimed the lives of 96 spectators. McGovern dealt with the theme previously in one of the strongest episodes of Cracker.
In Hillsborough Eccleston plays Trevor Hicks, who lost two daughters, Victoria and Sarah, on the day, and who later became chairman of the Hillsborough Support Group. "Trevor's been very vocal and fronted their various campaigns," he says. "He was there on the day, but he was separated from his daughters because they didn't want their dad standing with them, if you know what I mean.
"It's going to be a fantastic film," Eccleston says. Jimmy says it's the best thing he's ever written. We had a great shoot even though Granada didn't give us a great deal of money and we had a very tight shooting schedule. But it worked very well nevertheless - we were determined not to let a subject as important as that be undermined by a lack of money or time."