It's all in a day's work for David Kelly, who plays Grandpa Joe in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but it could lead the still-sprightly 76-year-old Dubliner to Oscar glory, writes Donald Clarke
'I remember, six years ago, on my 70th birthday, some journalist writing: 'David Kelly is 70 today. But what I want to know is how come he's been 70 for the past 40 years'." The veteran actor - spiffy in pressed slacks and colourful bowtie - smiles benignly. "And it's perfectly true. It's a very strange thing."
David Kelly has always given off a lively, impish energy. He uses his hands as precisely as a mime artist and is as nimble on his feet as a ballet dancer. Nothing about him - even now - suggests an inclination towards decrepitude. But, for some reason, he has been asked to play old men throughout his career. As long ago as 1959, he delivered a legendary performance in the title role of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. When he played the ancient Rashers in the RTÉ adaptation of James Plunkett's Strumpet City he was barely 50. What gives? "Oh you get one part and that leads to another and you are stuck with it," he laughs.
A lifetime of playing older gentlemen helped secure him a major role in one of the biggest films of the year. Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, though largely faithful to Roald Dahl's much-loved novel, is layered with the creeping unease we have come to expect from its imaginative director. Johnny Depp is camp and sinister as the mysterious candy magnate, Willy Wonka. Young Freddie Highmore is charming as Charlie, the boy who wins a tour of Wonka's factory. And Kelly is quite magnificent as the lad's Grandpa Joe. No other actor in the world can cast his eyes to one side - the look suggests fear, suspicion or scepticism - with the conviction of the trim Dubliner. That talent alone should be enough to secure him an Oscar nomination next year.
"To be in a room with so many gifted people was extraordinary," he says. "Tim Burton is the best film-maker in the world I think. Johnny Depp was born to play Willy Wonka. It was a treat to watch him. Every flicker of an eyelash is correct. My son would ask what I did that day. And I would say: 'I rowed down a chocolate river in a giant pink boat with 55 Oompa Loompas.' And he would say: 'And they paid you for that?'"
Burton was always insistent that Kelly was the only man for the role. It is easy to see why. As always, the actor, despite that outward vivacity, brings a certain sadness to his performance. This suggestion of gloomy depths - honed, perhaps, performing Beckett - fits in nicely with Burton's gothic sensibilities. But the main pleasure in Kelly's turn comes from the easy relationship he establishes with Highmore, who is already a star after memorable appearances in Finding Neverland and Five Children and It.
"People ask if I enjoy working with children," he says. "But he is already a veteran actor. He was so sweet and helpful. When you see him taking my hand, that was Freddie half acting and half actually minding this old bugger who might fall over. He whispered: 'Any time you want to lean on me, that's fine.' I'm a little bit wobbly on my pins, so I did take him up on that. Freddie Highmore carried me through this movie."
Kelly likes to see Joe as an archetypal grandfather and was thus delighted when Burton and Helena Bonham Carter - the director's girlfriend plays Charlie's mother - asked him to be an "official pretendy granddad" to their son, Billy. Both David's own grandfathers died before he was born, but he felt bits of his father leaking through his performance.
"I adored my father. He was the lovliest man," he says sweetly. "He was the most placid man you could ever meet and I do like to think that there is some of him in Grandpa Joe."
The elder Kelly worked in publishing and, though tolerant of his son's theatrical ambitions, manoeuvred the young man into a job as a calligrapher and artist. David still paints today and claims that he began wearing bowties as part of an attempt to take on the aspect of a bohemian artist. Then somebody told him that the only people who wore such garments were architects and bookies. "So I've looked like an architect or a bookie all my life."
HAVING DEVELOPED A talent for comedy and playacting as a way of distracting the bullies at Synge Street School - the same institution that gave us Eamonn Andrews, Gay Byrne and his great mate Milo O'Shea - Kelly was never likely to stay long in the day job. By the early 1950s he was working with Michael MacLiammoir at The Gate. Scraping together a living as an actor must have been difficult in those rough times.
"You didn't live the life of Riley, but you never stopped working," he says. "There weren't very many of us, because only an idiot would do it. This is long before it seemed possible to be rich and famous. The idea that any of us would be rich and famous was ridiculous. It never arose."
Surely fame has always been a spur for actors? "Well, we liked to see our names bigger in the programme than the other fellow," he laughs. " 'Could I have my name bigger?' That sort of thing. But there was only a small select band of lunatics acting then - people like me and Milo - so you were never really out of work. Actually, I have never been out of work, except of my own volition."
Kelly established a formidable reputation as a stage actor over the following two decades, but it was television that brought him real fame. In the 1960s and 1970s he played the plucky, Irish (prematurely aged) eccentric in sitcoms such as Oh Father, On the Buses and Never Mind the Quality Feel the Width. He performed in a staggering 50 episodes of the Richard O'Sullivan vehicle, Robin's Nest.
"That did change things," he says. "I then got to the signing autographs stage. If somebody is nice enough to ask you to sign then you do and you are very happy. But, like a lot of actors, I think I am quite a private person."
When he is approached in the street, which of his roles do people mention most often? "Living in Dublin it still mostly tends to be: 'Howya Rashers!' And that probably is my own favourite part. The dignity of the man was so impressive. If it's not Rashers it's Orelly, which, of course, was just nine minutes' work." "Orelly" was the closest Manuel, Fawlty Towers's Spanish waiter, could get to pronouncing the name of the appalling (prematurely aged) Irish builder his employer insisted on hiring in defiance of his wife's firmly stated edicts. The mere thought of O'Reilly foolishly trying to charm Sybill - "I like a woman with spirit, Mrs Fawlty" - can still make me splutter. But, at the time of recording, John Cleese feared the episode would not work.
"We thought we were going to die," Kelly explains. "The BBC weren't great at getting a cross-section of people into the audience. You would have a group of Conservative farmers from Wiltshire sitting next to a bunch of Chinese waiters. On this evening John came in and said: 'You won't believe it, but there are three coachloads of tourists from Iceland out there smelling of fish, thawing out and wanting to be anywhere else but the BBC.' We really thought we were going to die. But we didn't."
THROUGHOUT ALL THE years of commuting across the Irish Sea, Kelly and his wife, the actress Laurie Morton, stubbornly refused to move from Dublin. As late as 1998, following David's appearance in the hit film Waking Ned, the moguls were still trying to lure him away.
"No, I never lived anywhere else," he says. "I couldn't ever leave Dublin. I would be away in the States or in London for six months, but I have never moved far away from Goatstown Road, where I grew up. I couldn't bear the idea of living in London. But after Waking Ned I became a real sex symbol as a result of being naked on that motorbike. And they offered me a seven-year contract in Hollywood. But, you know, once you take that you're trapped." But he was tempted? "No. Not for a moment."
Kelly is currently filming a sciencefiction drama with Timothy Hutton and - despite a lifetime acting elderly - appears wittier, sharper and more energised than most people half his age. It seems positively rude to ask if he has ever considered retiring.
"Oh God no. Ah no. Absolutely not," he splutters, before adopting the tone of Charlton Heston at the National Rifle Association. "I will continue hanging on to the script until they pry it from my cold, dead hands. From my cold, dead hands! If I get the Oscar that's what I'll say."
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is on general release