‘Mansfield’s’ Great Pretender

Gwyneth Paltrow isn’t the only American who has mastered a flawless British accent. Boston-born Alessandro Nivola could even trick Professor Henry Higgins with his perfect English tones in “Mansfield Park,” the new film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel of the same name. In fact, everyone on the set believed he was a native son.

“As soon as he arrived, he became English,” says “Mansfield” director Patricia Rozema. “He quite sent several minds reeling when he spoke as a nice American boy at the wrap party. They felt like they didn’t know him. The English were quite alarmed he wasn’t English.”

In person, the 27-year-old Nivola is cute, funny and personable. In short, a real dreamboat. It’s hard to believe the down-to-earth actor is the same person who plays the upper-class cad Henry Crawford in “Mansfield Park,” let alone Nicolas Cage’s psycho younger brother in the action hit “Face/Off.”

“Nobody hardly ever recognizes me,” he laments over a bowl of pasta at a Wolfgang Puck’s Cafe at the Sunset Plaza. “A few times it’s happened. I got down on my knees to thank the Lord above that this nice young waitress timidly walked up to me and asked if perhaps, maybe, I might have been the guy in ‘Face/Off.’ ”

In “Mansfield Park,” Henry Crawford and his beautiful sister, Mary (Embeth Davidtz), become the center of the lives of their rich neighbors, the Bertrams. As Mary fawns over quiet Edmund Bertram (Jonny Lee Miller), Henry sets his attentions on the poor relation, Fanny (Frances O’Connor), who believes his intentions are not honorable.

Nivola landed the role in “Mansfield Park” because of his work in another British film, “I Want You,” directed by Michael Winterbottom.

Rozema happened to see “I Want You” and offered him the part of Henry.

“It was bizarre because I was playing a guy from the south coast of England, a working-class guy who was an ex-fisherman who had gotten out of prison,” says Nivola. “So he couldn’t have been more different than Henry.”

But Rozema saw something in his eyes--an “alluring” twinkle--which she thought would make him perfect for Henry. “It is the shape of his eyes when he smiles,” she says. “It is something that you want to look at. He is personally insatiably social. He has a huge appetite.”

Davidtz also adores Nivola. “I love him,” she enthuses. “He’s a good boy. He’s young and handsome. He’s a very open and funny guy. But on a working level, he is very exacting. There were times he would go, ‘I want to try something better.’ I was really impressed. He works really hard. His mom did a good job [raising him].”

Explicit Scenes in a Jane Austen Story

Although it’s never clearly revealed whether Henry really loves Fanny, Nivola believes that in his heart he does. “I really chose to play him as if he fell in love with her,” he explains. “I think the character is somebody who is a man of the moment. He’s not necessarily a conniver or a schemer. He loves life and loves flirtation.”

Henry, he explains, pursues her because “it is a challenge. I just play it very simply that he fell in love with her, but kept all of his character traits.”

Though most feature versions of Jane Austen novels, such as “Sense and Sensibility,” “Emma” and “Persuasion,” are quite prim and proper, “Mansfield Park” features a nude love scene between Nivola and actress Victoria Hamilton.

After Fanny rejects Henry, she catches him in bed with her married cousin, Maria. “He had too much pride to sort of accept Fanny’s rejection humbly,” Nivola says of Henry’s rash behavior.

“He had to retrieve his manhood by sleeping with someone else who happened to be living under the same roof as him and was married. I think that sex scene was really important because it slammed the door on any possibility of a relationship” between Henry and Fanny.

After he completed “Mansfield,” Nivola stayed in England to do Kenneth Branagh’s musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labours Lost.”

“It’s set in 1930s,” he explains. “We sing 10 of the great standards. I sing the opening number, ‘I’d Rather Charleston,’ and I dance ballroom with Alicia Silverstone.”

He’s also singing a different tune in Mike Figgis’ experimental, digital improvised film, “Timecode 2000,” currently in production in L.A.

This time, Nivola is playing a Backstreet Boy-type singer. “I have huge homeboy pants with a chain, these yellow sunglasses and a tight sort of nylon shirt. I keep saying, ‘Whatzu/Whatzup?’ ”

“I have a theory he is one of these guys who is doing the hard legwork now” for his career, says Davidtz. “He is working on singing and dancing. He studies hard. It will pay off 10 years down the line.”

Nivola caught the acting bug when he was 8 after seeing a cousin in a college production of Sartre’s “No Exit.”

After informing his mother of his career choice, “she took me at my word and started sending me to drama school for summer, which at the time was more like a camp. I got more and more convinced that this was a good idea.”

At 15, he got a summer internship at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn. “I was a sound-tape splicer,” he says. “I would make big sound loops of cricket noises to go on in the background of plays. While I was there, I was offered some teenager’s part in one of the plays. Then they started asking me back every year. I came back for five years and would play all the kid parts.”

By his sophomore year at Yale University, he had an agent and would drive from the university in New Haven, Conn., to New York three times a week for auditions. More often than not, he admits, “I would come crawling back [to school] with my tail between my legs having made an idiot of myself.”

Eventually, he began to get some jobs. He got a professional gig at the Yale Repertory Theatre, as well as with a Seattle-based company.

“They wouldn’t let me take a term off from school, so I just skipped school,” Nivola says, laughing. “I just skipped all my classes for half a semester. I didn’t show up until midterms. My professors were titillated by this thing I was doing, so they actually sent me all the reading for the semester. It was probably the first time I actually read all the books on the reading list!”

Movie Review: * Kenneth Turan reviews “Mansfield Park.” Page 52.