A Great Read about a Great Actor/Director
|
Kenneth Branagh was a 9 year old boy when he was uprooted from his Northern Ireland by the Troubles. The move to England was difficult for the family. Ken tried to fit in by adopting a British accent and playing on the school soccer and rugby teams. But his real passion would become acting and in his later teens he worked toward a coveted scholarship at the reknown RADA. (His family didn't have the means to send him there.) He won the scholarship and by the time he was to graduate RADA, he had won the top student prize and was already working professionally.
This early drive that Kenneth Branagh showed kept growing. Most young actors would be happy to have a job at the Royal Shakespeare Company, but his ambition felt thwarted by the wooden structure of the company. So he founded his own theatre company in his early twenties. (Who forms their own theatre company in their twenties??) When it proves successful he rides that good feeling into the herculean push to get Henry V made into a movie before he was thirty. That required him acting, directing, helping co-ordinate financing and screenwriting. Nominated for multiple Oscars, it launched a larger career and he's been busy ever since.
Ken Branagh always aims high. Right now he is reportedly working on As You Like It and The Magic Flute, not exactly Scooby-Do III material! He doesn't want to be average. This can lead to great acclaim, but also great criticism. He's had wonderful successes, reviews and awards, but also some piercing criticism. If the criticism is of a particular performance it is certainly valid as it is subjective to each viewer.
However the book touches on a British phenomenon called "Branagh-bashing", unknown in the US where I live. Mark White does a good job of explaining some of this as an irrationality. He mentions how in England the film Henry V was bashed BEFORE it came out. How can that be? Evidently some Brits don't want anyone to have too much success, as White puts it. Some criticism was personal. There was a tabloid feeding frenzy and glee, not sympathy when Branagh's first marriage broke up. Again why? Just about every interviewer and co-worker describes Ken Branagh as hard-working, polite and affable. White says it's because the British think Kenneth "too eager, too keen". In America we'd praise him as a "go-getter". Other critics said Branagh was megalomaniacal by acting, writing, directing and producing. Yet the reality of the British film industry and theatre setting of the time was that Branagh had to make the infrastructure himself if any of his visions for Shakespearean interpretation were to get done at all.
As for Kenneth Branagh's reputation in America remember we don't get to see his stage work (which consistently gets great acclaim in Britain), yet his reputation is one of doing high quality work. His last three US TV performances, for example, (Conspiracy, Shackleton and Warm Springs) all were nominated for/ or won Emmy Best Actor honors. That's 3 for 3. The two movies most would have seen were Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and The Rabbit-Proof Fence. All 5 are high quality performances.
Hopefully with Branagh's successes of the past few years Brangh-bashing has quieted down. All I know is that he has become the most respected ambassador for Shakespeare in the world. In Japan, Scandinavia, America, etc. young people are being rescued from reading Shakespeare by viewing Henry V, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and Parker's Othello, which gets their interest and sparks their imaginations. More people in more countries will see his Shakespearean films than anyone else's in history. The last laugh will be Kenneth Branagh's. Not bad for a kid from Belfast and Reading.
|
|
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada