Actors - A Brief Reply.

Somebody asked me recently why I don’t hold Colin Firth in much regard as an actor, and also what I think constitutes good acting. I thought about it a lot over the last couple of days and, quite frankly, the subject became too deep - too complex to go into at length in my current mood. So I’m going to make my answers as simple and short as I can.

First question first. Colin Firth is one of the Brit Pack of actors who came to prominence during the nineties. For all their undoubted skill, a fact with which I wouldn’t presume to argue, I find them colourless. Whatever conviction they might put into their character portrayals, there remains something tepid and unconvincing about them. I’ve always assumed this to have something to do with the fact that they’re products of the Thatcher years. Thatcher’s Britain was a tepid and colourless place. Even her own acolytes, the city whiz kids, looked like anaemic Puritans as they went about worshipping greed in place of Jehovah. One of Mrs T’s famous pronouncements was ‘There is no such thing as quality literature. There are books that sell and books that don’t.’ That sort of attitude set the tone for the age, and I suspect that the likes of Firth, Grant and Branagh represent the product of that tone.

As for what constitutes good acting, I wouldn’t presume to offer an opinion. There's a welter of text books and teachers infinitely better qualified to answer that one. I’m merely a consumer, not an aficionado, and all I can offer is what impresses me personally. And it’s this:

If an actor can become invisible, so that all I see is the character, I’m impressed. The first time I noticed this was when I watched Olivier play the police inspector in the film Bunny Lake is Missing. I remember realising at some point in the film that it was Olivier on the screen, and feeling surprised. For all his personal charisma and his ability to deliver the great lines of serious drama with power and precision, he could portray a character like that with such cold and quiet restraint that I was completely drawn in. It’s why I’m at odds with the established view in believing that Kenneth Branagh is not fit to lace Olivier’s boots. You only have to look honestly at their respective versions of Henry V to see that, although I don’t think it’s Branagh’s fault; I believe he’s a victim of the age that produced him.

So where does this leave the great Hollywood stars, or those British actors like Robert Carlyle and Daniel Craig who don’t really fit into the Brit Pack image? That’s where it gets complicated.