Entering an Empire of Pain

A star was born when “I, Claudius” premiered on PBS in 1977. A 13-part adaptation of Robert Graves’ saga of corruption in the Roman empire, the BBC series starred British actor Derek Jacobi as a stuttering, twitching boy who grows up to be emperor.

Jacobi was 37 when the series was shot and was already an acclaimed stage actor in England. He was virtually unknown to Americans, however, who were thunderstruck by his exquisitely nuanced performance.

It seemed unlikely that Jacobi would ever get a screen role as meaty as Claudius, so it’s not surprising that he’s devoted most of the last two decades to theater, much of it classical. A part worthy of Jacobi’s talent came his way in 1994, however, when a scruffy young painter named John Maybury offered him the lead in a low-budget film about Francis Bacon.

Anyone who knows a bit about modern art knows that this is a lot for an actor to take on. Born in Dublin in 1902 to British parents, Bacon began painting in the ‘20s, and by the ‘40s had developed his signature style. Imbuing human flesh with the quality of flayed meat, Bacon’s paintings are tormented evocations of loneliness, isolation and the human capacity for inflicting pain. Regarded as one the most significant artists of the 20th century, Bacon is credited with bringing the human figure back into painting at a point when it had been almost totally eclipsed by abstraction.

Alcoholic and a sadomasochist, Bacon had a rather untidy personal life. It was there, however, that Maybury found the linchpin for his film, “Love Is the Devil,” which focuses on Bacon’s affair with George Dyer, a petty criminal who was the subject of some of the flamboyantly homosexual artist’s greatest paintings. The affair ended in 1971 with Dyer’s suicide.

Amateurs obviously need not apply for the job of portraying this complex and brilliant man, but Maybury never dreamed Jacobi would take it on.

“I assumed he was way too grand for my little movie, but I sent him the screenplay anyway,” the director says. “He responded that it was one of the best screenplays he’d read in years and would love to do it. Needless to say, I was thrilled.”

Dining on the patio of a West Hollywood hotel, Jacobi, 59, comes across as elegant and self-effacing to a fault. Having recently sat enraptured through the entirety of “I, Claudius,” a reporter tells him she’d knight him herself if Queen Elizabeth II hadn’t already done it. He threatens to blush.

Jacobi’s modesty demands that he change the subject, so he says, “When I met John, my instinct told me he was totally on top of his subject. John’s a painter himself, so he knew what he was doing, and he wrote a very literate, intelligently structured script.”

The film is essentially a chronicle of the disintegration of Dyer, who’s played by Daniel Craig in his first major role. Maybury recalls that “Daniel was extremely intimidated when he heard that Sir Derek Jacobi would be playing Bacon--in fact, I had to beg him to take the part.”

“It’s true I was nervous, but thank goodness John persuaded me to do it,” says Craig, who’s currently in Africa shooting Hugh Hudson’s “I Dream of Africa” with Kim Basinger. “It’s always a danger to meet your heroes, but Derek was fantastic. He threw himself into it completely and was an absolute sweetheart.”

Having lined up his cast, Maybury then had to contend with some self-appointed keepers of Bacon’s flame who were determined to derail the film.

“The most problematic people were those who’ve made careers off their connection with Bacon,” says Maybury, whose film went into development two years after Bacon’s death in 1992. “John Edwards [Bacon’s sole heir] gave his full support, but the Marlborough Gallery [the former executors of Bacon’s estate] forbade us to show any of his paintings. Edwards eventually took the estate out of Marlborough’s hands because they were being destructive on several fronts. [Critic] David Sylvester also said that if I used one word from some interviews he’d done with Bacon that he’d sue me off the planet.”

These constraints were matched by constraints Maybury imposed on himself.

“There was no point in doing a bio-pic because there are documentaries on Bacon,” he says. “Nor did I want to make a dodgy film about painting. I focused on the relationship with Dyer because the paintings of George are my favorite. George Dyer is like Manet’s ‘Olympia.’ He’s one of the great icons of 20th century art, yet it’s as if he never existed. He has no family I’m aware of, and very little is known about him.”

Maybury was free to take poetic license with his characterization of the mysterious Dyer, but such was not the case with Bacon. The subject of three biographies and several documentaries, Bacon was an intensely social man, and Maybury discovered an endless parade of people who’d crossed paths with the artist and had an anecdote to tell.

“Bacon was very much on the scene, and I often saw him at parties and bars,” recalls the 40-year-old director, who was born in London and attended art school there from 1975-80. “As a student, I lived in a squat in Kensington around the corner from his studio, so I’d see him at the tube station, too. There he’d be, this funny, mad little queen.”

As to how Jacobi and Maybury arrived at their interpretation of the artist, Maybury says, “We watched tapes of TV interviews Bacon had done, and decided Derek shouldn’t attempt a pantomimic impersonation of Bacon. Derek doesn’t do Bacon’s voice, for instance, which had a plummy, upper-class sound, and occasionally lapsed into Cockney for effect. If Derek had attempted to do Bacon’s voice, the picture could’ve slipped into something comedic. What he did instead was master Bacon’s body language, his funny little gestures and mannerisms.”

Jacobi says the transformation was unsettling. “Bacon wasn’t a looker, so it was a bit disconcerting how easily I was made to look like him,” he says of the artist, who brushed his teeth with sink cleanser and colored his hair with boot polish.

“What concerned me more than how I looked, however, were the scenes that show Bacon painting. We’ve all seen bio-pics of painters, and when the actor picks up a brush and approaches the canvas, the heart sinks because you know that what you’re about to see won’t be believable. So, there are only two scenes where I’m painting, and the canvas is always off screen in those.”

Shot in 6 1/2 weeks for $900,000, “Love Is the Devil” looks astonishingly good considering its budget. Lit with naked lightbulbs--a recurring image in Bacon’s work--the film has an artificial, overtly cinematic look. Images flutter, blur and dissolve into grotesque distortions.

“A film about a visual artist should be visual, so we were extravagant with the production design,” Maybury says. “My production designer, Alan MacDonald, and I spent a long time looking at Bacon’s paintings, and they told us how the film should look: the claustrophobic, airless environments, nicotine stains, the skin tones--it’s all in the pictures.

“We restricted the color palette of the film the way Bacon does in his paintings, and devised all sorts of visual tricks. Some images are shot through large chunks of glass, others are shot with a boroscope lens, which is a scientific tool usually used for studying nature.”

Curiously enough, all this flash converges to create a film with a morbid weight remarkably evocative of Bacon’s art.

“Francis was pessimistic about life, and often said it was ‘nothing but a short period of consciousness between two blackouts,’ ” Jacobi says. “I agree with him about the blackouts, but not with his dismissal of life. Life is filled with suffering, but it’s also miraculous and wonderful.

“He prided himself on his wit, but his wit was always tinged with the lash, and I wouldn’t want to have been a friend of his,” Jacobi adds. “I doubt we would’ve gotten on well because there was an element of the monster in Francis. That, of course, had its roots in his horrendous childhood. He was physically, emotionally and mentally abused by his father, and the only person who gave him any love was his maternal grandmother.” Such was not the case for Jacobi, who adored his parents.

“My father [Alfred Jacobi] left school when he was 14 and managed a department store, and my mother [Daisy Jacobi] was a secretary prior to her death in 1980,” Jacobi says. “Neither of them had any knowledge of the theater, but they were wonderful people who were totally supportive of me. I have no idea where my appetite for acting came from because I wasn’t an especially self-confident child, but as far back as I can remember, that’s what I wanted to do.”

Making his stage debut at 19 as Hamlet in an English National Youth Theatre production, Jacobi was awarded a full scholarship to Cambridge. He made his professional stage debut in 1960 as a member of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, where he spent three years. Sir Laurence Olivier spotted Jacobi playing the lead in a Birmingham production of “Henry VIII,” and invited him to join the National Theatre Company, where Olivier was director.

“It was astounding to get to work with him,” recalls Jacobi, who was with the National from 1963-71. “It’s an example of the luck that’s dogged my career; this is a profession with 85% unemployment, so to get to work is luck.”

It was through Olivier that Jacobi made his film debut, in a 1965 adaptation of “Othello” that was staged by Olivier, who starred in the film, and directed by Stuart Burge. A few years later came “I, Claudius,” and a new chapter of Jacobi’s career began.

Among those who came to revere Jacobi while watching “I, Claudius” was Kenneth Branagh, who subsequently worked with Jacobi in several plays and three films, including Branagh’s 1989 directorial debut, “Henry V.”

“Derek has an amazing facility for naturalism and for lyric poetry,” says Branagh, who’s currently in L.A. shooting a western. “I saw him on Broadway in the 1984 production of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac,’ and I remember thinking at the time, ‘This is what great acting can do--it can transform an entire room.’ It really was as if Derek was unveiling Cyrano’s soul.”

Critics have theorized that part of what makes Jacobi such an effective actor is that he doesn’t project a strong persona off-screen that conflicts with the characters he plays.

“I suppose it’s true,” Jacobi says and sighs, “but it’s only because I simply don’t have the facility to be a celebrity--and it’s too late to get it now.”

Jacobi laughs heartily when one comments that it’s never too late to sell out.

“No, I don’t think I can sell out because I don’t know the script,” he replies. “I marvel at actors who go on chat shows--I could never do that because I don’t have the gags. I’d be totally intimidated.”

This could prove problematic in light of the shift Jacobi hopes to make in his work.

“I’ve spent most of my career in classical theater and television, but for the last third I’d like to work in film. That may require compromises of a sort I haven’t had to make thus far, but at the moment I’m prepared to make them.”

Next year, Jacobi can be seen in “Up at the Villa,” Philip Haas’ adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s novella about a group of people in Florence, Italy, before World War II. “I play a sort of Quentin Crisp character,” says Jacobi, who co-stars with Kristin Scott Thomas, Sean Penn, Jeremy Davies and Anne Bancroft. Jacobi also will be seen in “Joan of Arc; the Virgin Warrior,” a film slated for 1999 release about the legendary French martyr. It was written and directed by Ronald F. Maxwell, and stars Mira Sorvino and Albert Finney.

On the heels of “Joan” comes “Father Damien,” Paul Cox’s film about the 19th century Belgian priest who worked in the leper colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Jacobi plays a malevolent priest.

“I haven’t played many villains, but that may be my forte in movies,” Jacobi says.

So, was Francis Bacon a villain?

“Francis was a masochist who needed to be hurt sexually, but on an emotional level he was quite sadistic. He had to know he was destroying George Dyer. Everyone saw the state George was getting himself into, and people warned Francis that he was dangerously unstable.

“A villain? I don’t know about that. But what he inflicted on George was far more destructive than physical pain.”