Introverted Englishman

Never in their 32-year history have the New York Film Critics awarded a picture more than three prizes. But last week they voted four hurrahs for A Man for All Seasons: best picture, best direction (Fred Zinnemann), best script (Playwright Robert Bolt), and best actor. This last honor went to Britain's Paul Scofield, who as Thomas More plays a saint without seeming self-righteous, a giant of his age without seeming supercolossal. American audiences, who seldom get to see Scofield, will probably agree--and conclude as well that Scofield ranks with the best of England's superior breed of actors.

Scofield's new eminence in the U.S.

does not surprise his fellow Britons, who rank him after the aging acting knights--Olivier, Richardson, Guinness, Gielgud, Redgrave--and ahead of the young hotspurs represented by Albert Finney and Robert Stephens. Indeed, Scofield, 44, is pretty much a generation all to himself; once Richard Burton shared that status, but as Burton confided to a friend, "When I saw Scofield act, I knew I could never be that great, so I decided to grab the loot."

Fallen Angel. Neither loot nor limelight has ever seduced Scofield. The most introverted of English actors, he avoids public places, parties and the press. Between performances, he commutes by train to his cottage 50 miles into rustic Sussex, lives "a complete family life" with his wife, Actress Joy Parker, their two children, some horses and dogs. "It sounds funny for an actor to say it," he says, "but I haven't any desire for the center of the stage."

That helps explain why he commands stage center so nobly. Says Robert Bolt:

"As a true actor should be, he is an interpretive artist, not a personality merchant." For a major star, he is unique in lacking idiosyncrasies, ranging without trick or mannerism or telltale signature from classical heroes to contemporary antiheroes. A gaunt six-footer, he looks like a fine-grained, graceful Abe Lincoln. His expression glows with open intelligence, wit, humanity. From two foxholes lurk eyes that can flick a sense of danger to the farthest balcony. A critic wrote that he has the face of a fallen angel.

Those brown eyes are Scofield's secret weapon, says Sir Laurence Olivier, but others think it is the voice. "You can't take your ears off him," wrote one London reviewer. It is an instrument of unmatched subtlety and quiet amplitude. Scofield agrees that "what reaches them is the voice--not the quality but the conviction of the voice."

School Dropout. It is that conviction, as well as his presence and artful stagecraft, that has made Scofield's performances near legendary. Helen Hayes, who saw him in the Broadway production of A Man for All Seasons, led the applause by rising and bellowing "Bravo! Bravo!" Playing Hamlet in Moscow in 1955, Scofield drew 16 curtain calls, the last three with the whole audience chanting his name in unison. When he played the whisky priest in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, the London Sunday Express called his performance "one of the finest pieces of character acting since the war."

Scofield, who was raised eight miles from his present Sussex home, was a school dropout at 17, though his father was a headmaster. "Whatever pressures there were against my going into the theater," he recalls, "they were pretty well canceled out by the fact that I wasn't going to be very much good at anything else." Thus he went off to the London Mask Theater School. When the war came along, Scofield signed up with ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association), Britain's equivalent of the U.S.O., and for the next two years played Shakespeare, Shaw and O'Neill. Later, he joined the Memorial Theater in Stratford on Avon, which has since grown into the pre-eminent Royal Shakespeare Company. He and Peter Brook are co-directors of the group although Scofield's chief function is that of spokesman "for the actor's point of view."

There was a time when Scofield plowed on from one play to another with scarcely a pause. Now he performs in two productions a year. "I reached the point," he says, "where it was time to do less--not to make less effort, but to put that effort into fewer plays." The current play for this season is Charles Dyer's Staircase, now running at the Royal Shakespeare's London theater.

The play--and the role--could hardly be more distant from Scofield's last two productions, Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and Gogol's The Government Inspector. Staircase is an offbeat black comedy about a homosexual "marriage"; Scofield plays a middle-aged barber; his partner is Patrick Magee, who played Sade in the London and Broadway companies of Marat /Sade.

Scofield thrives on this kind of variety. "I am a classical actor by background," he explains, "but I prefer working in plays by contemporary playwrights. My initial falling in love with a play is an emotional reaction. If I'm then going to make out of the play a performance which has any stature or substance, then I will have to apply to it whatever intellect I possess."

Mortal Nature. He arrives at first rehearsal deliberately uncertain about his part. He stammers out his speeches, tasting them with different inflections and accents, discarding conventional readings not because they are predictable, but because they do not tally with his instinct. This is what Playwright Bolt calls Scofield's "freewheeling" period in the shakedown. Bolt no longer worries about the false starts. "He never leaves in an effect for the sake of an effect," says the playwright. "With Scofield, you are guaranteed something pure."

As Scofield puts it, "Only the truth is essential. You get there by saying no to the half-truths, the approximations.

When you've eliminated all the noes, you don't really need to say yes--the rest is what you're doing. The actor must honor the specific mortal nature of the man he represents. An archetype cannot be acted, as a performance cannot be written. A play is not a homily."

This summer, Scofield expects to play Macbeth and King Lear in Stratford.

Both plays will be filmed for U.S. televiewers, who will have a rare chance to experience drama that is not a homily.

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