The suggestions in this column, a couple of weeks ago, that I could easily imagine Danny Denzongpa playing Gabbar Singh or that Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi would have been a better movie had Naseeruddin Shah, and not Ben Kingsley, played the title role, have caused some consternation among my friends. They are, of course, entitled to disagree with me but what their responses tell me is this: All too often, an actor becomes so closely identified with a role that we refuse to accept anybody else in his or her place.
Courting the king: Eric Bana is a tall and big Henry VIII in The Other Boleyn Girl. AFP
And yet, almost all the great recurring characters of cinema — Sam Spade, James Bond, Napoleon, Henry VIII, Superman, Batman, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, etc. — have been played by so many different actors that it is hard to settle on a single performance as being the definitive one. And often, our idea of what is definitive varies from generation to generation.
I was reminded of this while watching The Tudors, a British-American TV series on the life of Henry VIII. Our view of Henry has been fixed by the famous Holbein portrait in which he is painted as a fat bearded man with red hair and a fancy hat. Previous representations of Henry on film have stuck closely to this look. In the most celebrated early movie, Charles Laughton was made up to look like Holbein’s Henry. Richard Burton stuck to the same look for Anne of The Thousand Days as did Robert Shaw for A Man For All Seasons. TV Henrys (Keith Michell, Ray Winstone, etc.) have tended to be large men and while Eric Bana in the recent The Other Boleyn Girl was not fat, he was still big and tall.
But Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (the murderer from Woody Allen’s Match Point) who plays Henry VIII in The Tudors looks nothing like the Holbein portrait. In fact, he resembles a Welsh midget. Nor do the producers seem to care. They’ve just announced that even in the fourth series of The Tudors, set in a period when the historical Henry was so fat he had to be lifted on to his horse with a hoist, Rhys-Meyers will play him as a normal, if slightly stunted, leading man.
You can argue about all this. Perhaps actors should look like the historical characters they portray or perhaps, it doesn’t matter. But the success of The Tudors across the world means that a new generation will grow up thinking of Henry VIII as a slim, short man and will be baffled by earlier portrayals of the king as a giant fatty.