McAnally Really in His Prime in ‘Coup’

At last year’s annual conference of the Labor Party in Britain, some of the delegates were seen to be wearing badges that said “Harry Perkins for Prime Minister.”

This was a nice tribute to 62-year-old Irish actor Ray McAnally. He plays the Socialist steelworker who becomes prime minister in the near-future post-Thatcher years in the dazzling political thriller “A Very British Coup,” which has been shown twice in Britain and which airs on PBS here Sunday and Monday night. (See Howard Rosenberg’s adjoining review.)

Like some Americans who found Henry Fonda so convincing as President that he could probably fill the office, there were murmurs that the distressed Labor Party might indeed think of McAnally (who is nothing if not convincing in the role) for P.M.

McAnally, who is visiting Los Angeles to discuss some film projects, was moved to write a tongue-deeply-in-cheek article for the New Statesman magazine, declining to run. The magazine had carried a piece asking “Is Harry Perkins the best prime minister the Labor Party never had?”

In his article, McAnally noted that both Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II had done some acting before they went on to other work, but that he was not yet done with acting. “I said I’d rather be an old hand than a new statesman,” McAnally remarked the other day with a devilish Celtic grin.

The acclaim for his portrayal of the shrewd, tough, quick-tongued, dead-honest Harry Perkins has included a color picture in Time magazine. McAnally’s preferred status as what he calls “the enigma” may be in jeopardy.

“I love the anonymity,” McAnally says. “Maybe at a certain point, somebody will say, ‘Wait a minute, isn’t that the chap who played that other role, the cardinal or whatever it was?’ But even then, perhaps they’re not quite sure. Oh, no, I like not bringing a lot of baggage to a new part. I prefer being the enigma.”

He is, that is, the actor who immerses himself in a role so thoroughly that he is not the identifiable star pretending to be someone else.

When McAnally was at the Cannes film festival with “The Mission,” in which he indeed played the cardinal whose questioning face is the film’s final image, a reporter kindly remarked that it was wonderful McAnally should be getting such acclaim for his first film.

Yes, but it wasn’t quite his first film, McAnally replied. Making a joke of it to spare the reporter some discomfort, he added that it was actually his 207th.

Now that was an Irish statistic, enriched by a generous infusion of blarney. But it might have been his 40th. McAnally’s amused and enigmatic point was that he had been around quite a while, doing unobtrusively good work. Superior work, an admirer might well add. Since his early days at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, he has done 250 plays, 50 films, 250 television appearances and more radio shows than he can count.

He worked with James Cagney in “Shake Hands With the Devil” in 1958 and with Gary Cooper in “The Naked Edge” in 1961. Last fall he was the ebullient con man Rick Pym, father of Magnus, the perfect spy, in public television’s “A Perfect Spy.”

As Pym, he aged from 25 to 75, from the brash young trickster to a scruffy old man on the run, his charm and confidence now like the last bits of silver-plating on a cheap spoon. There was in Pym little of the sad-eyed worldly wisdom of the cardinal, nothing of the steely intensity and concern of Harry Perkins, little of the public Ray McAnally but everything of the thoughtful private craftsman McAnally is.

Accepting a British Academy Award for “The Mission,” McAnally said, “The wonderful thing about acting is that it lets you live other lives, like the life of a 17th-Century cardinal.”

Over lunch in Santa Monica, McAnally added that “the more seriously you take the roles, the more interesting a life you lead. I’ve operated as a surgeon, taken a submarine up and down, been shot, mangled and strangled and died any number of times. It’s all bound to be good for your breadth of mind, isn’t it?”

Rick Pym was a favorite role. “There’s something intriguing about watching a con man conning,” McAnally says. “You want him to get away with it. You see through it, of course, and you feel superior to the victim. ‘Look at that silly fool being taken,’ you say.”

The Pym character was based on author John le Carre’s own father, who went to prison for fraud. McAnally met the author only once, at a dinner with BBC brass before production began. Le Carre entered the room just as McAnally was demonstrating the imposing presence of his fellow Irish actor Michael MacLiammoir. McAnally stood and surveyed the room in a commanding and confident way. “My God,” Le Carre murmured to his host, “it’s Rick.” It was the first of McAnally’s good reviews for the role.

“A Very British Coup,” financed by Britain’s Channel Four, drew enormous comment at home. “The conservative press praised the acting, the direction and the production,” McAnally remarks, “and said it was very good for a vehicle of the fantasy type. The opposition press ignored the acting, the direction and the production completely and said these matters the plot is about need grave attention.”

McAnally, who feels toward idleness a distaste bordering on revulsion, has done three films since “A Very British Coup.” Just now he wound up a remake of “Great Expectations” for Disney with Jean Simmons and Anthony Hopkins. He has played a Scottish fishing boat captain in the Orkneys in “Venus Peter.” He has been the father of Christie Brown in “My Left Foot,” based on the autobiography of the man who has created art and literature with the only part of his body he could move.

McAnally also played what proved to be the title role in “Jack the Ripper” with Michael Caine for television and did a four-month run in the West End as George Bernard Shaw in “The Best of Friends,” co-starring with John Gielgud and Rosemary Harris.

Between 1985 and 1988, McAnally reckons he did 16 films, three miniseries and a half-dozen plays. Now he’s been asked to write a book about the Abbey. He calculates that he is a member of its third generation, and he’ll probably do the book to preserve a piece of history that is fading. The Abbey is changing because young actors will no longer sign the lifetime contracts that were once the standard.

“Nor five-year contracts, nor even contracts for a year,” McAnally says. It seems a pity to him because the long, intense rehearsals and the runs themselves become for the players profound explorations of the characters and ultimately of the players themselves.

“The thing of it is,” Ray McAnally says, “that the more truthful you are about the interior of yourself, the more universal you are in your meaning to an audience.”

What now remains to be seen is whether McAnally, whose fame is fast increasing, can be well known and enigmatic at the same time.