A Quiet Character in Real Life

Jim Broadbent has the look of an English Everyman, the kind of bloke who would be more at ease hoisting a pint at the local pub back home than drinking designer water in a tony Beverly Hills hotel lobby, his location for the day. The soft-spoken actor can sometimes hardly be heard over the holiday soundtrack playing nonstop in the background, and his casual appearance is a marked contrast to the sumptuous seasonal decor.

But put him on a film screen and Broadbent is a thoroughly commanding presence, with his uncanny ability to disappear into a wide range of characters. This year alone, his chameleon-like talent has been on display as bombastic impresario Harold Zidler in “Moulin Rouge,” Renee Zellweger’s beleaguered father in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and real-life academic John Bayley in “Iris.”

“I think I can just be very loud and large,” the trim, reserved Broadbent offers modestly, noting that transcending physical dissimilarities is a standard tool of the acting trade. “With John Bayley my big thing was that I’m not old enough”--Bayley is 20 years older than the 52-year-old Broadbent--”and with ‘Moulin Rouge’ my big thing was that I can’t sing and I can’t dance.”

So what inspired “Moulin Rouge” director Baz Luhrmann to cast Broadbent in his larger-than-life extravaganza? “It’s true that Jim is not fat, he is not red-haired, and he is not ‘blusterous,’” Luhrmann says, pointing to several of Zidler’s more notable traits. “But to do this role you had to on the one hand be broad, and on the other hand I needed someone who could be extremely psychological and real. It’s one thing to reveal yourself, but it takes a very special talent to be both outsized and true at the same time.

“That duality is very tricky to play,” explains Luhrmann, speaking by phone from London. “Every now and then there are extraordinary character actors, and Jim walks with a very short list of people who are the truly extraordinary ones. It’s that simple.”

“Iris,” which opened on Dec. 14 in Los Angeles and New York for a one-week run to be eligible for Academy Award consideration, is based on Bayley’s two memoirs. “Elegy for Iris” and “Iris and Her Friends” chronicle the relationship between Bayley and his wife of 43 years, famed English novelist and scholar Iris Murdoch, played by Judi Dench. The film focuses on their final years together, after Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Flashback sequences--featuring Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville as the younger Murdoch and Bayley--tell how they met at Oxford in the 1950s. Murdoch died in 1999.

Broadbent was in Los Angeles to talk about “Iris” when he learned he had been named best supporting actor by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures for his work in that film and “Moulin Rouge.” He has since received the same honor from the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn., and on Thursday received a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actor for his role in “Iris.” In truth, Broadbent is as much the star of “Iris” as Judi Dench is in the title role. “John Bayley’s a very supportive character,” he says with a chuckle, wryly deferential about the “supporting” nature of the accolade.

As research for “Iris,” Broadbent read Bayley’s two memoirs and listened to a lengthy radio interview Bayley gave on the BBC program “In the Psychiatrist’s Chair,” which provided the opportunity to hear Bayley’s voice as well as gain insight into his personality. “I did try as much as I could to actually do an impersonation, because it would be a terrible waste not to,” the actor says of Bayley’s distinctive high-pitched, warbling stammer.

Broadbent, however, opted not to meet Bayley once production began. “I would have liked to have met him before I started,” he says. “But once the film got going and I had my character up and running, I decided it would be better not to, or else I’d regret opportunities I’d missed.” The two will meet for the first time when “Iris” has its London premiere next month. From the time Iris Murdoch and John Bayley met, she was the powerhouse in the relationship. But Broadbent believes that Bayley was confident enough in his own abilities to assume what might appear a subservient role. Bayley’s easygoing good nature is not necessarily a sign of weakness, he asserts.

“He’s a very gifted man, a celebrated professor,” Broadbent says of his real-life counterpart. “I’m not academic at all, but I’m assured by those who understand these things that he’s the most wonderful literary critic and professor and teacher, a major man of letters in his own right. He’s not Iris; he doesn’t have her career or her celebrity, but there’s a balance that worked for them.”

That balance shifts notably in the film after Murdoch begins her inexorable decline. Bayley takes charge of her care and remains devoted to his wife to the end. The continuity of their attachment, despite the very trying circumstances, is poignantly conveyed by Broadbent and Dench.

“One of the wonderful things about acting with Judi”--whom Broadbent had not met before they began rehearsals for “Iris”--”is her ability to convey the whole dichotomy of what’s going on.

“There’s nothing there, but so much,” he says of Dench’s portrayal of Murdoch after the withering effects of Alzheimer’s have set in. “It’s not blank, but in a way it’s a blank sheet of paper into which you read a lot of nuance and the complicated history of the person behind the eyes.”

Like Bayley, Broadbent has firsthand knowledge of seeing a loved one stricken with Alzheimer’s. His mother died of the effects of the disease in 1995. While making the film, “I didn’t have to question or wonder about John Bayley’s behavior. I was very at ease with how one is around Alzheimer’s sufferers. In my experience, as it gets further and further along and the mind disintegrates more, one thing that doesn’t go is the ability to love and be loved. And the script was very, very good in that respect.” Director Richard Eyre, who wrote the “Iris” screenplay with Charles Wood, also lost his mother to Alzheimer’s.

Broadbent, 52, was raised in Lincolnshire, where his parents had a keen interest in theater. His architect father was so instrumental in converting a local Methodist chapel into a theater that when he unexpectedly died shortly after its opening it was named the Broadbent Theatre in his honor.

After graduating from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in 1972, the younger Broadbent worked extensively onstage, including stints for the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. But he’s focused on film for the last decade.

“For 20 years I did a lot of theater,” he recalls. “But I made a conscious decision to get into film more, to become at ease with the camera. It always frustrated me a bit that I wasn’t as relaxed as I would like to be, so I thought I’d get a lot under my belt and be a bit more natural. Then I got hooked on it.” Broadbent has since become a familiar screen presence in such films as “Enchanted April” (1992), “Bullets Over Broadway” (1994) and “Little Voice” (1998) and has gained widespread acclaim for his starring role as librettist William Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan fame in Mike Leigh’s “Topsy-Turvy” (1999).

There are no new assignments on the horizon--Broadbent is heading back to England to spend the holidays with artist wife Anastasia Lewis and his two stepsons--but he’ll appear as 19th century New York politico “Boss” Tweed in Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” next year.

When asked about the inevitable Academy Award buzz surrounding his and Dench’s “Iris” performances, Broadbent seems a bit uncomfortable.

“I don’t quite understand it,” he says. “But if it means more people knowing about ‘Iris,’ that’s brilliant. And that’s the point of the awards anyway, to draw attention to film in general and certain individual films.”

In Hollywood, a statement like that might be translated to mean “to draw attention to me,” but from Broadbent, it seems genuine--not at all out of character.