Pete Postlethwaite has the sort of face - physog is probably a better word for
it - that has both writers and cartoonists sharpening their pencils.
“Chiselled as if by a Cubist sculptor,” observed one. “Like a small
burrowing animal which rarely sees daylight... or a noble ancient god,”
suggested another, hedging her bets. The principal of his alma mater, the
Bristol Old Vic theatre school, told him he'd got a face “like a f***ing
stone archway”, and a critic thought he looked as if he had swallowed a
pelvis. While his may not be a household name, the features are instantly
recognisable whether he's playing a priest, a janitor or a scary monster.
Which is why I am momentarily confused when a hand taps me on the shoulder in
the canteen queue at the Jerwood Art Space and I turn to find myself looking
up into the face of an Old Testament prophet, or possibly a reasonably
well-dressed tramp. But then, poking out above the foot-long, grizzled beard
there are the unmistakeably angular Postlethwaite cheekbones. “Shall we see
if we can find a spot of sunlight?” he says, ushering me into the Jerwood's
back yard, where we find a nicely warmed bench to sit on.
He is here to rehearse for the title role in King Lear - a long-cherished
ambition - and the beard comes with the territory: all that old-man ranting
and stumbling about on a storm-blasted heath. It was nine months in the
growing, he says, and he hates it: “But I didn't want to be sticking one on.
It's a bit sackcloth and ashes - the price for the privilege of saying some
of the finest lines ever written; you have to live up to them.”
He is accustomed, as one reviewer noted, to playing “proud men, difficult men,
flawed fathers” - Giuseppe Conlon in In the Name of the Father, the
bandleader Danny in Brassed Off, the violent dad in Distant Voices, Still
Lives - and Lear must be the ne plus ultra, a man who gets his daughters to
compete for their inheritance by protesting filial love. “Oh yes, certainly
he brings it all on himself,” Postlethwaite says, “he is the cause of all
the chaos.” Kingship, we agree, is generally bad for people: “‘To say aye,
or no, to everything I said,'” he quotes. “Power corrupts - look at Tony
Blair.” He pulls a packet of Benson & Hedges from his jeans pocket
and stretches his long legs.
Lear is first bad, then mad, then sad: is there a defining passage for the
actor? He chuckles: “Bad, mad, sad - that is it, isn't it? Anyway it all
comes down to sex.” Really? “Well, that's my theory. Lear is fixated - look
at his description of the vagina: ‘There's hell, there's darkness, there is
the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption...'” He frowns:
“He can't bear the feminine side of himself for some reason and I wonder if
his madness partly comes from his lack of self-knowledge. Goneril and Regan
are on to him: he has ‘ever slenderly but known himself,' one of them says.”
It's unlikely that anyone would accuse Postlethwaite of the same; I don't
think I've ever met an actor so comfortable in his skin, so relaxed and
content to sift through his thoughts, apparently unconcerned about
impressing anyone. He is the kind of self-effacing actor who dissolves
completely into the character he is inhabiting. He studied under the
legendary Rudi Shelley at Bristol and recalls an afternoon rehearsing
Othello. “‘What are you doing Pete?'” (Postlethwaite mimics a heavy Eastern
European accent). “I'm rehearsing, Rudi,” he replied. “I can see that but
what is it?” “Othello.” “Yes, but what is it?” “It's a play,” pleaded the
young actor. “Well, f***ing play it then,” Shelley said. Postlethwaite
grins: “‘By the doing of it you learn,' is what he meant,” he says, quoting
again. “You can analyse till the cows come home, but until you put yourself
in that situation, who knows what it will pump up in you?”
Unpredictability was always part of Postlethwaite's stock-in-trade, according
to Julie Walters; the two were youthful colleagues at the Liverpool
Everyman, together with Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce and Antony Sher, and also
lovers for the latter half of the Seventies, living a ramshackle bedsit life
in Soho. Walters tells of watching him in Brecht's Coriolanus when two girls
in the audience started to giggle. “He leapt from the stage,” she writes,
“and aimed a good portion of his monologue at these poor girls, as if they
were part of the crowd in the play. They screamed as he approached them and
then sat there in petrified silence.”
He was the third child - the baby - of working-class Roman Catholics in
Warrington and briefly studied for the priesthood before being encouraged to
fulfil his acting ambitions by his enlightened father, a barrel-maker. His
mother would later be an important barometer for how well he did in a role:
after she'd watched him in The Duchess of Malfi, she said she hadn't
understood every word, “but I knew what you all meant”. It stuck in his
mind, he has said: “If we're not recognisable people, then we are failing.”
His was a happy, secure childhood, which is why, he says, he didn't identify
at all with the riveting, terrifying role of the violent father in Terence
Davies's portrait of wartime, northern, working-class society, Distant
Voices, Still Lives. “I hated it,” he says, “I couldn't bear myself in it.”
There was a scene in which he had to hit his young daughter with a broom and
Davies urged him to do it harder. “He had a cage put round the camera so I
could hit it with all my force. It would have killed a child and I didn't
believe in it, but he was insistent. He was reliving scenes he had
witnessed; it was very personal. Sometimes, during a break, he would come
and sit on my knee for comfort.”
In a career spanning 40 years, Postlethwaite has never been out of work,
“never on the dole” - a matter of some satisfaction to a boy from the once
beleaguered North West - and there are far more solid performances than a
few forgettable doozies. He says he doesn't mind which medium he works in -
TV, film or stage - as long as the script is worthwhile. His one-man show,
Scaramouche, directed by Rupert Goold, who is also directing his Lear,
toured Canada and Australia as well as Britain to great acclaim. “It was a
phenomenal piece of writing; I played every character,” Postlethwaite says.
Few profiles omit to mention that Steven Spielberg once said that he was the
best actor in the world - and they generally add Postlethwaite's
self-deprecating response: “What he actually said was that Pete thinks he's
the best actor in the world.”
He crouches over to light another cigarette; he is still comfortably a career
smoker, and seemingly undeterred by the recent sudden death of his brother -
which upset him greatly - or his own skirmish with prostate cancer. “Oh,
that was long ago; I'm well over it,” he says. He had an orchidectomy, and
we reflect briefly on the poignancy of the name given to the surgical
removal of a testicle.
He has been with his partner Jackie, a former BBC producer, for more than 20
years. They have two children, Will, studying drama at LAMDA, and Lily, at
boarding school, and they live in Shropshire in a house that they have
rebuilt “from the floor upwards”. It is very green, he says: “Solar panels,
windmill, woodchip boiler; a farmer grazes his sheep in our field, there are
a couple of horses.”
The family and the house are his anchor, he says. “I couldn't do what I do
without that kind of stability.” He lived in LA for three months in the
1990s, making The Usual Suspects. “People would say: ‘Hey, so Pete, where do
you live? Beverly Hills? The beach?' You'd be burnished by all that hype,
then come home to Shropshire and your shoulders drop. It's very reassuring.”
He needs to go. “I've got to pick up Cordelia this afternoon,” he says.
“Luckily she's a fit girl, so she'll take care of some of the weight.”
And he lopes off through the fire doors, out of the sunshine.
King Lear runs at the Everyman, Liverpool (0151-709 4776), from Thur to Nov 29
King Lear at the Young Vic, London (0207 922 2922, www.youngvic.org):
29 January – 28 March 2009
LET ME BE NOT MAD - Five great Lears
Laurence Olivier first played Lear at the Old Vic in 1946 with limited
success, but for the TV version, with Diana Rigg and John Hurt in 1983, he
won his last Best Actor Emmy.
Paul Scofield's raw, powerful Lear in Peter Brook's 1962 production is
known for desentimentalising the character. He returned to the role on Radio
3 in 2002.
Donald Sinden, previously thought of as a comic actor, won his
reputation as a heavyweight actor in his majestic performance in a much
underrated production in 1977.
Anthony Hopkins played Lear in David Hare's production at the National
in 1987. He is to reprise the role in a film version, with Kiera Knightley,
Gwyneth Paltrow and Naomi Watts as his daughters.
Ian McKellen was acclaimed for his performance in Trevor Nunn's
production last year, combining grandeur and rage with tenderness.
