Electronic
Telegraph Saturday
April 4, 1998 In
retreat from vulgar stardom
Stephen
Dillane has all the qualities of a romantic hero, but, he tells Rupert
Christiansen, he prefers to be a tormented Uncle Vanya
Stephen
Dillane plays the title role
in the Royal Shakespeare Company's new production of Chekhov's Uncle
Vanya, but it is some terminally tormented Dostoevskian hero that
his appearance suggests when we meet in a break from rehearsal. His
expression is gaunt, his hair and beard straggle aimlessly; he looks
tubercular, exhausted, grungy. For our interview, he twitchily proposed
that we "walk around somewhere", but finally I persuaded him
to settle. He sipped listlessly at some carrot juice and looked utterly
miserable.
Perhaps
that's how he likes it. One of the most thoughtful and charismatic of
our actors, Dillane, 40, made his name in 1994 as a soulfully desolate,
directed by Peter Hall. Since then he has managed to ward off the curse
of vulgar stardom by undertaking a series of difficult roles and
refusing to cash in on his superficial physical attractiveness (which he
does as much as he can to hide).
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Uncle
Vanya opened last week at the Young Vic, but when I met Dillane
a couple of weeks ago he was still in rehearsal and his ideas about the
play and his part in it were still fluid. "There's a lot of
research going on," he said. "We read a lot - about Chekhov,
about Russia. I haven't arrived at a clear idea of who Vanya is; I can't
say I know him yet. But he seems extraordinarily complex and perhaps
vulnerable in a way that Astrov the idealistic doctor, to be played by
Linus Roache, isn't."
In
Vanya's director Katie Mitchell, he has met his match for
high-mindedness: his type of raw-nerve open-endedness is precisely what
she requires from an actor.
"Katie
won't block anything in," he said, "it all has to grow. She
works very, very hard: I don't think there are 10 seconds in a day when
she isn't completely focused. That's fine by me - I can rise to that
sort of concentration. What interests me about plays is the chance to
dig around and explore. I prefer the open process to the finished
performance: too much theatre today is led by the need to get the
end-product up and running."
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The
son of a surgeon, Dillane
read history and politics at Exeter University and started his career in
journalism. "A profession I hated. I was desperate for a way out -
and after I read an interview with Trevor Eve in which he explained how
he'd turned to acting after getting fed up with training as an
architect, I decided I'd found it." There must be more to a
life-changing decision than that, one feels: was there any hint of a
theatrical gene in his family? "No, but I'd acted a lot as a
teenager in end-of-term plays. Mostly in women's roles, which wasn't
good for my confused adolescent psyche."
Studying
at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, he fell under the spell of the
doyen of acting teachers Rudi Shelly, whose pupils also include Miranda
Richardson and Daniel Day-Lewis. "Rudi was a great influence on me.
He could be quite hot on technical things about voice projection, but
what grabbed me was his insistence that you can't separate acting from
life. He made us read books like Zen and the Art of Archery. I needed to
feel that acting had a spiritual dimension - whatever that means - and
Rudi helped me to find it."
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Holding
on to a sense of that spiritual dimension is vital to Dillane,
although he comes over all mumbling and embarrassed if asked to
elaborate on it. "I don't pretend that I've got a philosophy of
acting, but I know I don't really like watching people act. I want to be
affected by the play, and the best acting is the sort that doesn't get
in its way."
Meanwhile,
there's the mortgage to pay... and even the noblest actors cannot
live on RSC salaries alone. His best potential source of income is the
movies, but he finds acting for the camera "quite difficult"
because it's so "product-led", and the whisper that he might
follow the trajectory of his contemporary Ralph Fiennes and turn into
the next exportable British superstar hasn't so far been justified.
His
first major film, Welcome to Sarajevo, didn't do much better at
the box office than it did with the critics, and he is almost
incandescent with contempt for the forthcoming Déjà Vu,
directed by Henry Jaglom.
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What
may send him hurtling towards vulgar stardom is his subtle and sexy
performance in Firelight, a costume drama set in the 1840s, due
for release later in the year and already the winner of several film
festival laurels. Written and directed by the author of Shadowlands,
William Nicholson, its intriguing scenario concerns a high-minded young
landowner (Dillane)
with a paralysed wife who pays a girl desperate for money to bear him a
child.
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Variety Club
Showbusiness Awards
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"I
was looking for the thinking-woman's crumpet," Nicholson explains.
"Not a hunk, not a pretty boy, but someone who could convey sexual
power and the Victorian sense of obsessive duty and moral anguish. I
knew Stephen
fitted the bill after watching one clip of him playing the object of
Lindsay Duncan's adulterous desire in the television adaptation of The
Rector's Wife. He's very rewarding to work with, but intensely
self-critical. Halfway through shooting, after a lot of agonising and
self-doubt, he suddenly announced, 'I've worked it out - you want me to
be a romantic hero.' "
A
significant discovery: behind his Dostoevskian grunge, I guess a little
bit of Stephen Dillane
wants to be a romantic hero too.
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