By
Louise Sweeney
Christian
Science Monitor
March 1985
When they pass out the Tony Awards this year, Derek Jacobi may win by a
nose. An enormous nose.
It is the nose of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” the swashbuckling romantic
role Mr. Jacobi plays in the Royal Shakespeare Company production that took the
United States by storm this season.
Jacobi has doubly dazzled audiences by playing Cyrano back to back with
the role of Benedick in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”
But it is the nose that could bring him the coveted Tony for best actor,
the grandiloquent nose that playwright Edmond Rostand had Cyrano compare to a
public monument, a big cucumber or a little watermelon, a rock, a peak, a cape .
. .”no, not a cape, a peninsula!” And,
of course, the nose as the facial flaw that kept him from ever declaring himself
to his beloved Roxanne.
Before donning his nose one night during the recent double run at Kennedy
Center, Jacobi sat for an interview on Cyrano, Benedick, the Tonys, and the
craft of acting.
“There’s some of Cyrano in all of us, really,” Jacobi says.
“That wonderful struggle to survive in the face of defeat, in his head.
He goes on, he’s an extraordinary chap, you know.
I think people identify with him. I
mean, the nose is an outward manifestation of it . . . It’s not only on his
face, but that blemish is in his head
too.
“We all have things about us that to us are awful. But to other people,
they don’t even notice them. And
I do think the nose should be big, but if a nose is too kind of helter-skelter,
too grotesque, then it becomes merely a play about a nose.”
Pause. “And it’s more
than that.”
We are talking in his Kennedy Center dressing room, pre-nose.
That magnificent proboscis will be put on shortly in a makeup session
that takes an hour or so.
In real life beyond the footlights, Jacobi, clad only in his perfectly
fine nose and street clothes, looks like neither the blond-maned, quicksilver
young lover Benedick nor the feisty, dark, and brooding Cyrano.
He sits with his back to the dressing room mirror; uncharacteristic for
an actor, but a clue to Jacobi’s certain lack of ego offstage.
He appears to be an actor who regards himself as musicians do their
instruments. And it’s an
instrument on which all sorts of music may be played.
He makes Cyrano seem a towering, tempestuous presence, although Jacobi
himself is of medium height, with a pleasant, slightly ruddy face and wide blue
eyes. His hair is cut short,
somewhere between grey and tan, with a hint of bangs.
Gone are the cloaks and doublet, the capes and armor and plumed hats of
his double roles. He wears instead
a maroon, grey, and navy striped sweater over a collarless aqua shirt, tan
chinos, and black ankle boots.
Jacobi winces when the subject of the Tony Awards comes up.
“Oh, gosh, I’m so ambivalent about prizes.
If prizes have got to be given out, I suppose it’s nice to win them. But I think we should never let them affect us in any way.
Yes, it’s nice to be specially rewarded for something you’ve done if people
think you’ve done it well enough to receive an extra something.
But it’s the use of the word best and all that, that I find sometimes
difficult, because the best actor of the year often played the best part of the
year.”
That may be. But the critics suggest it’s less the role than Jacobi’s
blaze of talent. Jack Kroll of
Newsweek wrote, “Jacobi’s feat of double virtuosity is one of the most
memorable in many Broadway seasons.” And
he added, “Jacobi’s Cyrano is a triumph—romantic, hardheaded, drawing
blood with his sword and his wit, yearning for Roxanne [Sinead Cusack], who
can’t see past his potato nose to his gallant heart.”
And Frank Rich of the New York Times described Jacobi’s gift:
“The soul of his Cyrano—a noble amalgam of poetry and fire—floods
every corner of the RSC’s throbbing theatrical tapestry.”
As an actor Jacobi likes to make audiences feel that they’ve been on a
journey, although with Cyrano and Benedick the trips run in different
directions:
“I think with Benedick it’s a very joyous feeling, a feeling of great
exhilaration. If we’ve done it
properly, they’re very happy when Beatrice and Benedick get together in the
end. It’s a very lovely feeling.
I think that Cyrano is more cathartic for an audience
One night at Kennedy Center after a four-Kleenex performance of Cyrano,
the normally restrained Washington audience gave Jacobi five standing ovations.
Closing night was even more ecstatic, with the cast finally hoisting him
up on their shoulders and carrying him around the stage like a triumphant
warrior to the audience’s cheers. For
a last bit of panache, Jacobi flung Cyrano’s nose into the audience.
Then he left his dual role and the RSC behind “to bash the Bahamas”
on a well-deserved vacation.
Jacobi began his life as an actor in a dual role, too, in a kindergarten
production of “The Prince and the Swineherd,” in which he played a
six-year-old prince in love with a shepherdess and dressed up as a swineherd to
woo her. Jacobi grew up in London
in a nontheatrical family; his father managed a store; his mother was a
secretary.
But he was surrounded by theaters and had an English schoolmaster who
encouraged him to visit the Old Vic. He
became a film buff, too, by the time he was 12, going to Wednesday movie
matinees, double features with lots of American films.
“I just adore James Cagney.” He
speaks of his eight years at Britain’s National Theatre with Sir Laurence
Olivier and says Sir Laurence once told him Cagney was his favorite too:
“Cagney was the greatest of them all, because he could do it all.”
Jacobi is talking in a low, husky, intimate voice that sounds like deep
velvet. A humidifier is hurling so
much moisture into the air that the narrow, mirrored dressing room feels like an
Amazon rain forest. Jacobi is
saving his voice for the strenuous double role which on matinee days with Cyrano
requires six hours of nonstop talking. In
the warm, humid breeze the ostrich plumes on Cyrano’s and Benedick’s several
hats waft gently above his costume rack. A
brace of balloons given him by a child who saw Cyrano bobbles up and down near
the door.
Audiences. Jacobi sighs. “Actors’
antennae are very, very sharp. To
an actual stage . . . sound is very important.
Somebody in an audience who clears his throat—to an actor that sounds
like an Exocet missile going off. So
people ought to think twice about doing that.”
Rrrmmm. He clears his
throat. “To us it’s really a
wound.”
Derek Jacobi may be best known to non-theater audiences for his Emmy
Award-winning role in PBS’s “I, Claudius,” but he quietly scooped up
Britain’s Best Actor award this year for his quadruple RSC star turns.
They included not only “Cyrano” and “Much Ado,” but also “The
Tempest” and “Peer Gynt.”
This consummate actor admits that he is always studying his medium:
people. “One is always
watching people, watching what they’re doing physically, and how they’re
doing it. And also what thoughts
must be going through their heads to make them do that.
“Most of the time actors are scavengers—any little thing that helps,
you put into your bag of tricks. Even
with other actors, you see another actor do something on stage and you think,
hmmmm. Acting is about making a choice.
You see some of the choices actors make. How did he think of
doing it that way. Wonderful!
And suddenly in rehearsal one day you say, ‘Yes, that’s what I need,
that’s it.’ I do think acting
is a magical mystery tour. But
it’s also sleight of hand, it’s also the art of the conjurer.
It has to be.”
He chews thoughtfully on a lozenge, mentions that it’s always different
with every part, that he wishes it could be as easy for him as it is other
actors who say that if they get the character’s shoes right, or walk or hat
right, then they’ve got the character. With
Cyrano it wasn’t the tilt of the plumed hat or the swagger.
“With Cyrano it was a question of finding truthfully inside myself all
that anger, all that rage, all that hurt, all that love, and expressing that.”
It’s true, he says, that when he puts on Cyrano’s nose and beard and
wig it helped. “It was the look.
That helped me.” Jacobi
says he thinks Mr. Hands is right. “Some
actors put on a disguise and sort of act their way out.
Terry thinks that when I put on a disguise I act better. I don’t have to act my way out of a disguise.
A disguise usually confers on me the ability to do it.
And I think probably there’s more than a grain of truth in that.
I do like to appear to be somebody else.”
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