Britain’s Young Actors: Skill and Range

If you look at a cross section of summer films, you can’t help but be struck by the opportunities that British actors have, playing characters of interest and substance at relatively young ages.

Jodhi May, portraying a 12-year-old South African schoolgirl in “A World Apart”; James Wilby in “A Summer Story” but especially in “A Handful of Dust”; his co-star in “Dust,” Kristin Scott Thomas, and Imogen Stubbs, whom audiences will find as a farm girl in “A Summer Story.”

(A lucky few discovered her last year, in “Nanou,” a contemporary love story about a French political activist and a young English photographic student traveling abroad.)

In August we will have the Cannes-acclaimed performance by Natasha Richardson as the title character in “Patty Hearst.”

These actors are working in a wide range of periods and social classes, almost none of them contemporary. There are Evelyn Waugh’s aristocrats from the early 1930s, whose languor of language and manners are part of the point of “A Handful of Dust.” “A Summer Story” contrasts a Devonshire country family with the London gentry of 1902 in a film based on a John Galsworthy short story. And we see the world of the privileged Johannesburg whites in the 1950s in “A World Apart.”

If you see much film at all, this British felicity in period roles has its poignant side. About a decade ago, as the bottom-liners took over--with the exception of the glossy “Out of Africa”-sort of blockbuster or the doughty American independent movie set on an endangered farm somewhere--rich period movies began to disappear from our screens.

So, while the British seem to have the past--and especially their past--to themselves, our actors seem doomed to repeat the present, until they may shortly lose the knack of playing anything earlier than 1952.

Consider the range, the depth--and the discipline--of this summer’s British performers, some of them in a first or second film. How do they come by a knowledge of period style and class behavior? Where have they learned to sit, to stand, to hold a cocktail glass, a teacup, the reins of a horse?

(Not quite all their young actors have that flair: Helena Bonham Carter still strides across a courtyard in Florence or a Tudor antechamber as though she had blue jeans on beneath her corsets. But she is an exception, and for her every moment in “A Room With a View” you could study one of Judi Dench’s or Maggie Smith’s. And I don’t mean to suggest that only British actors have a sense of period style: We have Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, James Earl Jones, Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia . . . but after those names, the nominations slow down.)

So, how does English training produce their models of nuance? For one thing, acting is considered something one has to study--not film technique but the theater, from the ground up and the history outward. And in addition to a solid classical grounding, the English seem to acquire a taste for repertory: They all work everywhere as often as they can, on radio, in TV and in the small theaters that crisscross the British Isles. No role is beneath them. Even their stars keep working; it’s not that they’ve forsworn lordly egos, but there seems to be the attitude that the work is the work, and you are enriched by doing it, not the other way around.

There is also no shortage of long-established, serious schools in which to learn fundamentals in England. America, a few hallowed institutes and colleges and institutes aside, seems to function around guru-technicians, spotted mainly around New York and Los Angeles.

The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts seems to show up in the biographies of half the young actors in English film today. (James Wilby and Imogen Stubbs are the RADA pair above.) In interviews at Cannes with Chris Menges, who directed “A World Apart,” he gave credit to London’s Anna Scher Children’s Theater School, which had trained Jodhi May. In other words, this was no undisciplined amateur who carried her half of the story so fearlessly but a very young actress who had nevertheless begun the work of learning her craft.

Kristin Scott Thomas, the shimmeringly beautiful and ruthlessly self-absorbed wife of “A Handful of Dust,” began, albeit traumatically, at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, then for almost 10 years worked in French theater, television and movies, before Prince used her, mostly decoratively, in “Under the Cherry Moon.”

At 45, the versatility of Bob Hoskins is new to many in the American audience. In “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the Briton not only taxes his imagination to its utmost, acting with characters to be drawn in later, but exercises that extraordinary and quite singular American accent of his.

Before Hoskins made either “The Long Good Friday” or “Mona Lisa” and the secret about his talent was finally discovered by movie audiences, British, and a few prescient American television viewers, had some clue to his range after Dennis Potter’s spellbinding TV mini series, “Pennies From Heaven,” followed by his Iago (to Anthony Hopkins’ Othello), also for television. In a way, you might consider what Hoskins did with the stylization of “Pennies” the ideal groundwork for the fierce mental exercise of “Roger Rabbit.”

In addition to Hoskins some of these other British talents may even find their niche in American films: You might place a small bet on the ravishing actresses Scott Thomas and Stubbs--even with the meager demands made on her in “A Summer Story.” (After her first season with the Royal Shakespeare Company, one critic said about Stubbs that “her birthright is the big Shakespearean roles.”)

But you suspect--possibly hope--that their inclination toward serious work in the theater goes deep. It brings up another crucial difference: Many American actors train with the thought of becoming stars; the English with the expectation of becoming actors who will perhaps perform before audiences until they drop. (When, occasionally, those English actors become stars, it’s stars who can act. In America, it’s not always the case. You may get more electrifying personalities on this side of the Atlantic, but with quite different attitudes toward the work.)

Finally, consider the system that allows these British actors to prevail. It’s almost the reverse of the situation here, where a fresh face must be unearthed every season--ready or not. Apparently in England, although there are enormous monetary restrictions to almost every production, there is a sense among producers and directors of searching for craft over star quality. Occasionally, they may come up with both--a Daniel Day Lewis or a Jeremy Irons. But when they need a solid cast in which every role is entrusted to an actor who will make something interesting out of even the tiniest role, (Alec Guinness and Judi Dench in “Handful of Dust,” for example), there is nothing quite like the security of assembling one of those rich, English plum pudding casts.

They have always been one of the enduring joys of English movies; it’s fine to see that the tradition has diminished not a whit as the new crop of exceptional actors begins to make itself known. Yet it’s a slightly bittersweet thought to consider that, as American movies continue to focus on the unlovely present, British actors may soon have the fun of the period film almost entirely to themselves.