Paul Scofield Talks About One Actor’s Life

LONDON —  Americans like their English actors to be grand, maybe even flamboyant. And most particularly, they like them to come to Hollywood, ensnare themselves in the star-making machine and maybe even fall in love with a local girl. Richard Burton fulfilled all these requirements admirably. His contemporary, Paul Scofield, did not.

The two men were good friends and rivals on the London stage before Burton answered the Hollywood call, became a superstar, married Elizabeth Taylor twice and died young. Scofield stayed home, pursued his craft mostly on stage, married once, received international acclaim (plus an Oscar) for “A Man for All Seasons” in 1966 and to this day has never set foot in Hollywood.

A tall man with a full head of white hair and a deeply creased face, Scofield is now 66. For the last three decades he has been regarded as the top British stage actor of his generation. But because he rarely gives interviews, little is known about him, apart from the basics:

His father was a school principal; he has been married for 45 years to actress Joy Parker; they have two children and two grandchildren; they live in Sussex and have a holiday cottage on the west coast of Scotland.

“Privacy is something hard to come by in our business, and if you want it you have to fight for it,” Scofield says over tea and scones in a quiet London hotel dining room. However, occasionally he is willing to open the door to his life.

The occasion now is a TV movie, “The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank,” which can be seen Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS. Scofield plays Otto Frank, Anne’s father. The film retells the tragic true story of two Jewish families hidden from the Nazis in Amsterdam. The production is based on “Anne Frank Remembered,” a book by Miep Gies.

Gies (played by Mary Steenburgen) helped the families hide in an attic for two years before they were discovered and taken to concentration camps. It was Gies who found Anne’s diary and returned it to Otto Frank, the only member of the Frank family to survive the camps. He died in 1980.

Scofield says he accepted the role of Frank with some apprehension: “It seems presumptuous and almost impossible to put oneself in his shoes. You’ve got to feel that you know, but you can’t really know the exact nature of that terror.

“Those people were so isolated. Humankind seemed to be against them. The incredible thing is that they preserved their dignity. So many of them were full of hope.”

To prepare for the role, Scofield “read enough,” he says. “I knew the story and the background of the story, and that awakened in me a consciousness of the whole experience. Apart from that and reading Miep Gies’ book, what matters to me is what’s on the pages of the script. It’s good to rest in that background, but you can’t portray it.”

However, during filming in Amsterdam last fall, Scofield did have the opportunity to talk with Gies about Otto Frank. “She gave the impression when I met her and in her book that when Otto had to assume responsibility, he grew in authority. He was totally in command. Before that, although he ran a business, I think he was shy socially.”

Gies impressed him because of her energy. “Miep is a blond extrovert. Even at 80, she had enormous energy. When I saw the extent of her energy, I saw how she must have been a lifeline. It would have been so easy for her to not get involved, saying, ‘We’ve all got our problems.’ She didn’t say that. She took it on.”

As did Scofield, who is very selective about his work. His only other recent television work was “Anna Karenina” with Jacqueline Bisset and Christopher Reeve. Scofield wasn’t happy with that production, saying, “It was just a strand of the book.” Biting his tongue, he adds, “I wouldn’t like to comment further.” He took the job, he says, because “You can get yourself into a negative frame of mind if you say no all the time.”

In another life, Scofield could have been cast as a college professor or an elder statesman. But in this lifetime he has never wanted to be anything but an actor. “What kicked it off,” he says, was being cast in his all-boys school production of “Romeo and Juliet” at 13. He played Juliet in blond pigtails.

Since then, he has taken on most of the other big parts in Shakespeare (Othello, King Lear, Hamlet, Prospero, Macbeth) in more prestigious British productions. He has also performed in productions of such modern playwrights as Harold Pinter, Edward Albee and Christopher Hampton.

Recently he spent a year starring in the London production of “I’m Not Rappaport,” in the Judd Hirsch role. “That was exhausting,” he says, “so I’ve decided to give the theater a rest.” His next project will be a film, “Why the Whales Came,” “a 19th-Century story about villages and superstition.”

The fact that many young people are unfamiliar with his work doesn’t bother Scofield at all. “The kind of actor you are is dictated by the kind of person you are,” he believes. “I’m going to overstate this, but if you tend to be the film star type of actor, every performance is a repetition of what’s been done before.

“Cary Grant, for instance, knew how to use himself and how to behave in a kind of way that was interesting. I don’t intend to denigrate it. That kind of acting is definitely more lucrative, no question about it. You create an image the public wants to see again. But for another kind of actor, that approach doesn’t get you very far into exploring other characters.”

Scofield doesn’t consider himself a personality actor like his late friend Richard Burton.

“I’m not quite sure what it was that made Richard want to make Hollywood his whole life,” he says. “It’s a perfectly understandable attitude: To want to be known by the widest possible audience. That’s an actor’s ambition.

“For me, I’ve always been terribly aware that the theater audience is a limited section of the public, and I’m content with that. Perhaps I’m a little unadventurous.

“Very early on, my wife and I were asked to go to Hollywood on one of those contracts. We decided against it, partly because we had a son already and wanted to bring him up here and partly because there was so much exciting work to do in the theater. I had nothing against Hollywood, but I knew from other experiences that I wanted to stay here.”