Meet the real Rowan Atkinson
WHEN Rowan Atkinson unleashes his version of Fagin on to an expectant West End audience tonight, it will be the first time in two decades that his rubber-faced features have been seen on a commercial stage.
We are used to the gangly comedian in his TV incarnations – as the cynical, lip-curling Edmund Blackadder, reeling off such withering lines as “Fortune vomits on my eiderdown yet again”, or as the bumbling, gurning, accident-prone Mr Bean – but bobbing across a stage singing Got To Pick A Pocket Or Two as Dickensian miser Fagin, the wily, self-serving leader of a group of child pickpockets in the musical Oliver?
At 54 years old, Atkinson might have run the gamut of every facial expression known to mankind but when it comes to giving us all a song, he is more of an unknown quantity.
“I’m curious to know how people will react to it but that’s more curiosity than nerves because I feel we can do it,” the actor ventures on the eve of opening night.
His confidence is well placed because not only is Atkinson a supreme master of characterisation, he is an acute perfectionist, so you can bet he has scrupulously dissected the role and pre-planned every gesture, nuance and intonation, stringently rehearsing every aspect of his performance.
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Contrary to popular opinion, this is not the first time Atkinson has appeared in Lionel Bart’s famous 1960 take on Dickens’s Oliver Twist.
Rowan has not one ounce of showbusiness in him. It is as if God had an extra jar of comic talent and for a joke gave it to a nerdy, anoraked northern chemist.
He starred in his son’s school production three years ago and even then he sought some top-level tuition, phoning theatrical impresario Sir Cameron Mackintosh who has been trying to persuade Atkinson to take on the role professionally for 15 years.
Mackintosh explains: “He said, ‘I’d like to come and talk to you about Oliver!’ ‘Good’, I said. Then I discovered he was actually getting some advice for playing it at his son’s school!” But when Mackintosh proposed reviving the show last year, Atkinson had become fascinated by the part, felt he would never forgive himself if he passed up the chance and volunteered his services.
“I suddenly realised that the next time it came around I would be too old to play it,” he explains. “That was the clincher for me. The feeling that if I was going to do it, then I should do it now. He’s a villain and it’s always nice to play a villain. Villains are always more fun than straight guys.”
So far all the omens for the musical are good. The combined pulling power of Atkinson and the winners of BBC1’s reality talent show I’d Do Anything – which found two Nancys and a handful of Olivers for the production – has meant there has been advanced ticket sales of £15million, making the show the fastest-selling in West End history.
Expectation is high, then, but what the notoriously guarded Atkinson won’t relish, one suspects, will be becoming the focus of media attention once again. Fiercely private, publicity-shunning and surprisingly shy, he has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid being caught in the limelight.
He has frequently turned down interviews, insisted during others that all “personal questions” are off-limits and once refused to tell a journalist whether he had any children (as well as his son Benjamin, 13, he has a daughter Lily, 11).
When Bean, featuring Mr Bean, shot to worldwide success – the 1997 film took £152million to become the most lucrative British movie of all time – he so dreaded being recognised on holiday in Italy that he attempted to prevent it being shown there (he didn’t succeed).
Lately he has agreed to a few rare interviews to publicise Oliver! and last Christmas he took part in a televised documentary on the BBC comedy series Blackadder.
So rare are appearances of Rowan Atkinson as Rowan Atkinson that the most noticable part of the programmme was the very fact that the actor was in it. It was all rather eye-opening. His manner was cautiously dignified, almost suave and strangely nonchalant.
“I’m not a great laugher, sadly,” he revealed languidly. “But I might have a snigger.” As revelations go, it’s not huge but it was so unusual to see the “real” Rowan Atkinson that it all seemed incredibly insightful.
“I thought he was a stuffed toy,” confessed director Richard Curtis on the programme, referring to his first impression of Atkinson when they both attended an Oxford University sketch-writing group. “He didn’t say anything for the first three meetings. He was just a curiously shaped object in the corner. Then just when we were trying to decide what the material should be, and we’d all been handing in sketches for months, Rowan actually stood up and did two absolutely astonishing sketches.”
“He’s a very shy man,” says Tony Robinson, who played Blackadder’s sidekick Baldrick, “so it’s not like the first time that you meet someone such as Rik Mayall or Mel Smith where you’re overwhelmed by the force of their personality.
“When he’s not working, you are unlikely to realise that he’s in the room but as soon as he starts, all attention focuses on him, partly because of this extraordinary supreme talent that he’s got.”
It might be part of his extreme shyness that he always likes to feel prepared. “I’m not a spontaneously funny person”, he has admitted. “I tend to need a script and I need rehearsals.”
He has lamented that everything he does is “riddled with faults” so it is easy to wonder why he keeps putting himself through the trauma of performing, especially given the fact he now has an estimated fortune of £8million with homes in Oxfordshire and Chelsea.
“He once said to me that he wasn’t bothered about going into showbusiness but it was the only way he could find of affording the cars he wanted,” his long-term producer John Lloyd has commented.
Atkinson is passionate about fast cars and there is a wonderful anecdote of how, when he was starring in the Bond spoof Johnny English, he could only capture the look of falling in love by imagining “he had just clapped eyes on a brand new Aston Martin”.
According to Stephen Fry, Atkinson’s best man: “Rowan has not one ounce of showbusiness in him. It is as if God had an extra jar of comic talent and for a joke gave it to a nerdy, anoraked northern chemist.’’
Atkinson certainly didn’t come from performing stock. He was born in 1955, the youngest of three sons of farmers Eric and Ella Atkinson. He attended Durham’s Chorister School where he was taunted by his fellow pupils for looking like an alien (Tony Blair was two years above him but he barely remembers him) and then he went to Newcastle University to study engineering.
After graduating the highest in his year, he ended up at Queen’s College, Oxford, studying for an MSc in engineering science, where he first met Richard Curtis. He was then spotted by John Lloyd while performing his Oxford revue show at the Edinburgh Festival in 1976 and Lloyd vowed to make him “more famous than Chaplin”.
He cast him in the groundbreaking satiricial show Not The Nine O’Clock News and Blackadder and Bean followed, sending Atkinson into the celebrity stratosphere.
Now Atkinson can deservedly bask in his reputation as one of the comic geniuses of the era and, despite such comments as “there’s only one thing more important than not talking about your domestic life and that’s not talking about why you’re not talking about your domestic life”, he has nothing to hide.
Since 1990 he has been happily married to Sunestra Sastry, a make-up artist on Blackadder, whom he quietly wed at the Russian Tea Room in New York. His only other serious relationship is believed to have been in the early Eighties with the former Men Behaving Badly star Leslie Ash, for whom he once planted an avenue of ash and rowan trees.
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There have only been a couple of incidents when he has popped his head above the parapet. Once was three years ago when he successfully campaigned against a controversial Government Bill to outlaw “incitement to religious hatred”, believing that it would criminalise the telling of Jewish, Catholic and Muslim jokes.
“All religions deserve equal freedom of worship and practice but none deserves the right to freedom from criticism,” he said.
He is similarly unperturbed that playing a specifically Jewish villain – Fagin in Oliver! – could elicit charges of anti-Semitism.
“It’s like jokes – religious or dirty jokes always have the potential to offend people but so often their offensiveness is in inverse proportion to their quality,” Atkinson explained. “That is, a really good joke rarely causes offence and, in the same sense, a really good performance will rarely cause offence because people buy into it and they find it totally believable.”
What is almost unbelievable is Atkinson’s lesser-known piece of heroism when he, really rather sensationally, saved his family from an air crash in 2001.
The pilot of the Cessna plane they were taking from Mombasa to Nairobi had passed out and despite a total lack of flying experience, Atkinson snatched the controls and slapped the pilot until he came round.
One hopes that no such catastrophe will befall his six-month run as Fagin, but given that Atkinson has admitted he has never been “totally proud” of any of his films except Four Weddings And A Funeral, you can bet, confidence aside, that he’ll be his own worst critic.
Oliver! opens tonight at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London.
