"I
suddenly think the job of acting is a difficult one,” says Rowan
Atkinson. “It’s not as flip, irrelevant and shallow a calling as
I thought it was in the Eighties.”
Atkinson,
who is preparing to make his “straight play” debut as the lead in
Richard Eyre’s West End revival of Quartermaine’s Terms by Simon
Gray, is globally famous for playing an absent-minded, middle-aged
buffoon who says next to nothing. He’s also notorious for giving
away as little of himself as possible: an interviewer once reported
he was so reluctant to disclose anything about his family he refused
to acknowledge the existence of his children. (For the record, he has
two, Lily and Benjamin, with his wife, Sunetra.) So, ahead of a rare
interview with him in a London members’ club, I’m unsure what to
expect.
My
trepidation is increased by the fact that I grew up when Atkinson was
lending his malleable features and gift for physical humour to two of
the defining television comedies of the Eighties: Not the Nine
O’Clock News and Blackadder. He ranks as one of the true greats of
British comedy, his status cemented by the enduring power of the
material that propelled him to prominence in the late Seventies and
early Eighties. In 1981, at the age of 26, he became the youngest
performer to have his own production in the West End, a self-titled
revue show for which he won an Olivier award.
In
the three decades since, his two studies in the art of bumbling
masculinity – Mr Bean and Johnny English, the Bond-spoof inspired
by his lucrative ads for Barclaycard – have made him fabulously
wealthy (with an estimated fortune of £71 million) and recognised
around the world. His triumphant appearance this summer in the
Olympics Opening Ceremony, where he clowned around while continually
hitting the same key of a synthesizer during the London Symphony
Orchestra’s mock-magisterial rendition of the theme-tune from
Chariots of Fire, rubber-stamped his status as a national treasure.
Is
he grand, awkward or aloof as a consequence of all this success?
Answer: none of the above. In person Atkinson is only too happy to
chat. Dressed in jacket, shirt and jeans and with his glasses removed
for the conversation, he could hardly look more unassuming; only his
inimitable way of knitting his eyebrows or rolling his eyes slowly
from side to side in contemplation gives one flashes of the facets
that he so often exaggerates in performance.//telegraph.co.uk
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