The secret agent

Gary Oldman is on the road to old master status with his latest role as George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. DONALD CLARKEmeets the south Londoner (and endures a few long silences)

WHEN NEWS emerged that Gary Oldman was to play George Smiley in Tomas Alfredson's upcoming version of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spymore than a few of us began examining our hairlines and checking that all life assurance policies were in order. The realisation that the lean, sharp-featured Oldman looked so unlike the character described in the book – fat, owlish, forgettable – could be processed and dismissed fairly rapidly. Oldman is a sufficiently brilliant actor to make it work.

The issue was time. Emerging above ground in the late 1980s, Oldman was rapidly marked down as one the world's great young actors. Think of his turns as Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears, as Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy, as Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK. With his sad, occasionally tremulous voice and his collapsed, rough features, he cornered the market in doomed young maniacs.

But George Smiley?

The actor most associated with the role was, of course, Alec Guinness. When he played the retired deputy chief of British intelligence – dragged back to uncover a Russian mole – in the classic BBC TV version of Tinker, Tailor, the theatrical knight was 65 years old. Has Gary already achieved similar old master status?

Well, he still looks pretty trim. Greying at the temples, dressed in expensively scruffy afternoon wear, he saunters slowly into the drawing room of a Soho hotel and plonks himself on a groaning sofa.

First things first. Did he worry about the fact that he looks so unlike le Carré's version of Smiley? The author (real name David Cornwell) once said, before Guinness came along, he imagined the spy master looking like Arthur Lowe. Gary doesn't have all that much in common with Captain Mainwaring from Dad's Army.

A long silence. A really, really long silence. For the first time, I am aware that my watch makes a ticking sound. Distant traffic becomes absurdly audible. Oh, lord. Is he offended? Have I just suggested that he has been miscast?

“Well, if I did think about that I did so for no more than five minutes,” he says. “I think Smiley can be Everyman. Guinness and James Mason, and both played him. You can be anyone in that respect. And David Cornwell thought it was a good idea. I knew the filmmakers wanted me. But what does the governor want? He gave me his blessing, which was reassuring.”

It turns out this is how Oldman talks. After lengthy pauses for consideration, he delivers answers in halting, achingly slow sentences still seasoned by flat south London vowels. Reassured, I raise the issue of age. Oldman is, in fact, still a relatively youthful 53. Many of the other cast members – Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch – seem notably younger than their characters in the book (and corresponding actors in the series). Le Carré enthusiasts, such as your current correspondent, are insanely protective of the source material. What are all these whippersnappers doing in the film?

“Yeah. There isn’t a word for le Carré fans like there is for Trekkies,” he laughs. “There should be. I think people just seemed older then. We have moved Smiley’s birthday a little. But le Carré did that too. It’s a movable feast. Tomas wanted us in our early 50s rather than mid-60s. He just wanted to shave 10 years off it.”

He’s right, of course. When you do the maths you realise that – Oldman apart – the actors in the film are, despite seeming so much fresher and glossier, about the same age as their equivalents were in 1979. Heartthrob Colin Firth, playing the suave Bill Haydon, is younger than the greying clubbable Ian Richardson was at that time. Living through the 1970s really took it out of you.

“Yeah. It seemed grey and wet,” he agrees. “A lot of care was taken to get that look. We went through a lot of magazines and books. We used a lot of special filters. We wanted all those smoke-filled rooms to look right.”

If you’ve seen the brilliant Nil by Mouth, Oldman’s only film as director, you may think you have an understanding of the actor’s early life. Raised in a tough part of south London, he is the son of a hardworking housewife and a somewhat less responsible sailor and occasional welder. That fine 1997 film features Ray Winstone as a drunken dad from hell. To what extent are we looking at a version of Oldman’s early life?

“Not so much,” he says. “It could be pretty grim. It was somewhat autobiographical. But, at the same time, people wanted it to be more true than it actually was. I would keep saying that was not my dad. But they went with it anyway.”

His father was a difficult sort, though. The story goes that he left the family when Oldman was just seven. “He was a bit of a boozer. But he was not a violent man. But, however much I said it, people still wanted to believe the other story. I had a relatively good upbringing. My mum is still going at 92. And she lives with me in LA. I moved her out. Mind you, her bags were packed long before she got there. She’s got a whole new social life now.”

As a teenager, Oldman dabbled with singing and playing the piano. But, after seeing Malcolm McDowell in the 1970 drama The Raging Moon,he developed a taste for acting. He left school at 16 and went on to study performance at the Rose Bruford College in sunny Sidcup. Radiating dangerous energy from every pore, he immediately secured work in the theatre.

“I was always one of those kids who wanted to do rather than just watch,” he ponders. “If I heard music, it wasn’t enough to listen. I wanted to learn how to do it. If I heard the guitar I’d want to learn the guitar. The same was true with acting. I don’t really know when it happened. I’d see people in movies and say: ‘I want to do that.’”

In the early part of his career, Oldman did not dabble much with light comedy. He was rarely touted as the new Norman Wisdom. Joe Orton, the brilliant farceur, was murdered by his lover. Sid Vicious overdosed fatally after apparently doing away with his own girlfriend. Lee Harvey Oswald also came to a premature, unhappy end. When, in 1992, Francis Ford Coppola cast him as Dracula, it almost seemed like an outbreak of light relief among all this calculated misery.

One wonders if it ever got him down. It can’t have been easy constantly diving into that succession of tragedies.

"It was a bit gloomy," he says. "I always died in movies. Even now, my kids roll their eyes. 'How's Tinker, Tailorgoing down? I suppose you die in the end.' More eye-rolling. It's a very depressing gallery of people, isn't it? Even Smiley to some extent. Very melancholy. But early roles were particularly physical, very frenetic. It was neurotic, high-octane stuff. It is so wonderful to play a man who just sits in a chair and thinks."

Still, some actors claim that they can shake off doomed characters in the same way they remove a fake moustache. Perhaps the shoot of Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy, a brilliant study of the Sex Pistols' decline, was an absolute hoot. "I don't remember that being a happy shoot," he says. "It was a 17-week shoot. That really was the old days. We were in New York, Mexico and a bit in San Francisco. You had to come in every day and get into that mindset, just being stoned. I don't remember it being a happy shoot."

One could be forgiven for wondering where Oldman has been for the last decade. He's made appearances in (what else?) the Harry Potter series. He has done superb work as James Gordon in Christopher Nolan's Batmanfilms. But, until Smiley came along, Oldman fans were beginning to wonder if he'd ever get his claws into another meaty lead role. To be fair, his private life – about which he says little – has been busy. Having dallied with Lesley Manville, Isabella Rossellini and Uma Thurman, he recently embarked on his fourth marriage. He has four sons. In the early 1990s, he faced up to a dependence on booze and he describes himself as a recovering alcoholic. No wonder he found it hard to take on the big parts.

“Yeah. It’s just that I’ve been doing other things for the last 10 years. I have been busy bringing up a couple of kids. That takes time.”

He made a few peculiar choices in that period. Remember The Backwoods, The Unbornor Nobody's Baby.No? Well, that's probably just as well. "I don't watch my stuff, but occasionally, when channel surfing, an image will pop up," he says. "I won't watch those movies. Actually, I can't even watch Sid and Nancy. For me there is a bunch of stuff I would just stamp into the ground. I just don't think it's that much. Yeah, people say I remember you in this or in that. And that's nice. I've learned that it doesn't matter what I think."

Yet Oldman's reputation has not suffered. Ask young actors today who they rate and, like or not, his name will still jump to the top of the list. You only have to look at Batman Beginsand The Dark Knightto see why. The role of James Gordon, a cop who eventually becomes commissioner, is not huge, but Oldman somehow layers the performance with extraordinary degrees of integrity. Gordon is among the most powerful presences in the film. So he remains the right sort of idol. I wonder how he feels when the latest young gun identifies him as a role model.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I guess it means I’ve been doing my job.”

* TTSS opens next Friday

By George Smiley the spymaster

THOUGH HE DIDN'T gain heroic status until Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy(1974), George Smiley, the tortured, urbane spymaster, had been a recurring figure in John le Carré's novels. More actors have played him than the casual fan might suspect.

1. RUPERT DAVIES in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)Despite being the lead character of le Carré's first novel, Call for the Dead, the morally divided genius took only a minor role in Martin Ritt's fine version of the author's breakthrough book. Davies was best known for playing the not dissimilar Maigret.

2. JAMES MASON in The Deadly Affair (1966)A bit of a cheat this. Both the le Carré novel, Call for the Dead, and the character – called Charles Dobbs – were renamed for one of Sydney Lumet's most underrated films.

3. GEORGE COLE, PETER VAUGHAN, BERNARD HEPTON and SIMON RUSSELL BEALE in various BBC radio adaptations (1978-2009).A smashing line-up of character actors. Fans of the TV series were slightly confused by Hepton – who played lounge lizard Toby Esterhase – taking on the mantle for the wireless. Russell Beal, tubbier than Oldman, was many enthusiasts' pick for the film adaptation.

4. ALEC GUINNESS in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy(1979)and Smiley's People (1980).Just as Ian Fleming admitted to imagining James Bond as Sean Connery after the Scotsman claimed that role, le Carré owned up to seeing Smiley as Guinness following the actor's impeccable turns in the two classic BBC TV series.

5. DENHOLM ELLIOTT in A Murder of Quality (1991) The TV version of le Carré's second novel reminds us how awkwardly that work fits into the canon. Though Smiley remains the troubled, donnish intelligence operative, the story is pure whodunit stuff. Enjoyable nonetheless.