Jim Broadbent has just won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Iris Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, in the new film about her life. One of the unsung heroes of British cinema, he tells Penelope Dening about his eclectic and ascending career
When asked whether he would like to meet John Bayley, whom he was to play in the screen adaptation of Bayley's memoir of his late wife, Iris Murdoch, Jim Broadbent decided against it. By then he had read the memoirs, seen dozens of photographs and, most importantly, had listened "over and over again" to a tape of Bayley's interview with Dr Anthony Clare's In The Psychiatrist's Chair.
"I got so much from that programme, not just verbally but his attitudes and his agreeable nature, because he was very agreeable. Whatever Anthony Clare said to him he agreed with him. When he said, 'I suppose you were a bit jealous of Iris', he said that yes, he probably was. He agreed with everything Anthony Clare said. You just knew that he was a nice man - and a genuine eccentric, and I hope this comes across."
Broadbent is in this respect very similar to Bayley, a man whom you do not have to have met to know that he, too, is a nice man, content to remain one of the unsung heroes of British cinema. Although an idiosyncratic actor - he could never be mistaken for anybody else - his ability to re-direct this energy into his work, to become a character rather than just mimic, is quite exceptional.
Well, now the secret is out. Having just won a Golden Globe as Best Supporting Actor for Iris - the key indicator in terms of the forthcoming Oscars - Jim Broadbent is now running neck-and-neck with Ben Kingsley (for Sexy Beast) for the Academy Award.
It is hardly a flash in the pan, however, nor unearned. Broadbent is currently shooting his 33rd film in a career that has taken in every aspect of film and theatre, from the two-man surrealism of The National Theatre of Brent to the Royal National Theatre itself, not forgetting his rich TV career.
In Britain, film and theatre increasingly overlap. Broadbent first worked with Richard Eyre - director of Iris - in Gogol's Government Inspector at the National Theatre nearly 30 years ago. Although Broadbent and Judi Dench had never worked together, they had both worked regularly with Richard Eyre in the theatre. Both are frequently told they look like their subjects, but the truth is that their physical presence is subsumed by the truth of their performances.
In real life, Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were both the same height - as are Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville, who play them as a young couple - whereas Broadbent towers above Judi Dench. This disparity in height, Broadbent believes, serves to "heighten the caring and protective element. Considering what the film is about, it was quite useful. In fact, it was quite interesting how it worked. I don't think it changes the status of the relationship. And anyway, people shrink with age."
Perhaps his richest collaboration has been with Mike Leigh, both in the theatre with Goosepimples and Ecstasy and on screen in Life Is Sweet (1990) and, most recently, Topsy Turvy.
Working with what was obviously a tightly scripted screenplay in Iris, I wondered if he missed the improvisational scope of a Mike Leigh film. "There were bits, like the bit in the supermarket I came up with - 'do we deserve that?' " He goes into the Bayley voice, eccentricity personified. "But Richard and Charles [Wood\] - their script is so effective really, it didn't need any help. But Richard said feel free whenever you feel like adding another line, but now I can't remember where that happened.
"I think that almost each job is its own genre in a way. With things like the National Theatre of Brent, there was an awful lot of improvisation and writing and playing with it. Then working with Woody Allen [Bullets Over Broadway\] - he has a tight script, but he asks you to improvise off the script. Moulin Rouge was fairly tightly scripted - but that was another world entirely." (Broadbent's rendition of Like A Virgin was, one critic wrote, worth the price of admission alone.)
"All the good jobs have more in common than not - they \ all like actors, like what actors bring to the job and demand quite a lot of actors, which is what makes it interesting to me."
Iris may have been comparatively tightly scripted, but the subject matter was far from remote. Broadbent's mother died of Alzheimer's. Had this made working on the film particularly hard? "I didn't find it painful. In fact it was sort of therapeutic. I was moved and reminded but not upset, I was touched." The most difficult scene, Broadbent says, was "the tantrum in bed" where the put-upon Bayley, at the end of his emotional tether, totally loses control. "That was quite hard, to get to that level, and what's hard is to sustain it for x number of takes and keep up that sort of emotional energy.
"But that's sort of technical. None of it was emotionally hard. Some journalist invented some whole scenario that I had to turn away from the camera in tears because I was so affected. The truth didn't make such a good tale.
"When my mother was ill, I read a book Michael Ignatieff had written about his mother who had Alzheimer's, and Tony Harrison did something about it. And we were very hungry for those accounts that made sense of it in a way. Because there's this sense that you're doing something wrong. But when you learn about other people's experiences, you find that there's a strange pattern, and you realise that it's not something to be alarmed about - it's just the nature of the disease. There were many similarities between my mother's case and Iris's. There's a scene, for example, where she dances down the corridor; and Judi didn't have any experience of Alzheimer's and I said, 'Oh my mother used to do that, strange little arabesques', and so she picked up on that. And it was very weird when she did it. It was exactly like my mother."
Both Broadbent's parents were passionate about the theatre, stalwart members of what he calls "a quirky amateur theatre group" in Lincolnshire, where he was born in 1949. His first stage appearance was in The Doll's House when he was six. ("A heady start; I still haven't done any more Ibsen.") There were also regular outings to Lincoln's Theatre Royal.
"I was always being taken to unsuitable plays - and of course pantomime, where I was always bounding up on to the stage." He was, he says, a natural show-off.
His long-term plan was to go to art school to study theatre design, but a spell as a student assistant stage manager at Liverpool Playhouse (£2 a week) introduced him to the company of professional actors. Although he did go to arts school for a year, he now knew what he wanted to do and was coached by a former actress who was a fellow art student.
The sense that you get from Broadbent, both in person and on screen, is of a man not quite comfortable with his own body - which, when combined with a self-deprecating sense of humour, marked him out as a character actor. Doesn't it irk, I suggest, that, in spite of co-starring in Iris - John Bayley is a leading role if ever there was one - Broadbent was relegated to the supporting-actor category? He shrugs non-comitally. It was a political decision taken by the film company, he says, which didn't like to have two actors in their stable up for the same award. I sense an element of diplomacy in his reply. Interestingly, in the BAFTA nominations, just announced, Broadbent received a leading actor nomination for Iris and best supporting actor for Moulin Rouge.
"It doesn't really bother me, but partly I just assume I'm going to be around a long time. That may be part of being told that you're not really going to get going until you're into your 30s, and it'll be even longer before you come into your own. And I suppose that's been a long process, and it's still evolving, still changing. And it's much more fun than starting by bursting out of drama school, getting huge leading roles and trying to sustainit for 30 or 40 years. So I've always been very happy with being seen as a character actor, and I've deliberately spread the net as wide as possible anyway."
Indeed, the spectrum of recent film roles is as far from Hollywood-style stereotyping as is possible to imagine: from his larger-than-life showman Zidler in Moulin Rouge and the irascible W. S. Gilbert in Topsy Turvy, to Bridget Jones's down-trodden father and the dottily-caring John Bayley. It was the unlikely success of Topsy Turvy that led to Scorsese's The Gangs of New York, to be released later this year, in which he plays a tough politician in 1842 New York. "He'd seen Topsy Turvy, but he's also seen A Sense of History, a short that I wrote with Mike Leigh, who directed it [the only screenplay written by somebody else that Mike Leigh has directed\], and I think that was what he liked particularly."
As we stand in the corridor chatting after the interview, Broadbent is approached by a number of people offering their congratulations on his Golden Globe. He stands, head slightly bowed, a little like a rabbit caught in the headlights.
At the end of Topsy Turvy, as W. S. Gilbert, Broadbent says: "I don't know how to take praise, it makes my eyes red." As this was a Mike Leigh film, the words are assuredly Jim Broadbent's own.
Iris is on general release.