MR. SAMMON:  (Sounds gavel.)  Good afternoon.  Good afternoon and welcome to the National Press Club.  My name is Richard Sammon.  I am the president of the National Press Club and a reporter with Congressional Quarterly.  I would like to welcome club members and their guests in the audience today, as well as those of you watching on C-SPAN, or listening to this program on National Public Radio. 

      Before introducing our head table, I would like to remind our members of some upcoming speakers.  Tomorrow our guest will be Dr. Deepak Chopraw, author and lecturer.  His speech is entitled “The Path to Love.”  In May we have quite a line-up:  Mrs. Rachel Robinson, wife of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, will speak on May 13^th; Senator Paul Wellstone on May 14^th, Marcia Clark, prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial, on May 16^th, Elie Wiesel, educator and Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, on May 20; Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York City, on May 27^th; and Steve Case, the president of America Online, will speak here on May 28^th.

        Transcripts and audio and videotapes of Press Club luncheons are available by calling 1-800-NPC-2334.

        If you have any questions for our speaker today, please write them on the cards provided at your table—I will say a lot of you already have—and we have a good start—pass them up to me—I’ll ask as many as time permits.

        I would now like to introduce our head table guests and ask them to stand briefly when their names are called.  Please hold your applause until all the head table guests have been introduced.  From your right, Nelson Pressley ,  theater critic for the Washington Times; Mary Lou Beattie (ph), of Humanities magazine; Robert Marry , president and publisher of Congressional Quarterly; Rebecca Eaton , executive producer, Mobil Masterpiece Theater and Mystery, WGBH-Boston; John Andrews , president of the Shakespeare Guild; David K. Martin, associate editor of the Thomas Roll Call Report and Political Finance and Lobby Reporter—David is also the chairman of the Speakers Committee at the Press Club; the honorable Anthony Perry , counselor, political and public affairs, the British Embassy; Michael Maymaring , the editor and member of the Speakers committee who arranged today’s lunch—thank you very much, Michael; Brawyn Maddik , Times of London; Ellen Hume, PBS; and Keith Efstein of the Plain Dealer.  Thank you.  (Applause.)  

        Hamlet, Octavius, Macbeth, Richard II, Richard III, Benedict, Prospero, Prince Hal, he’s been the Kean in Kean, Beckett in Beckett, and Hadrian in Hadrian.  He first played Hamlet as a schoolboy, and made his London debut as Laertes at 25.  His remarkable interpretation of King Claudius is a highlight of Kenneth Brannagh’s current film Hamlet.  In fact, last night, while he was being honored by the Shakespeare Guild, Mr. Brannagh sent a fax overseas, and the fax congratulated him on receiving a very special award there, and he called him the greatest living Shakespearean actor.  Somehow I don’t see Shakespeare ever sending a fax—(laughter)—or if he ever would—but that was an awfully nice fax for Sir Derek Jacobi to receive last night.

        His duo productions of “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “Much Ado About Nothing” were warmly received in the United States, but he is best known for his work on television perhaps.  American audiences were mesmerized by Mobil Masterpiece Theater’s “I, Claudius,” where he took the title character from a frightened confused schoolboy to a savvy, ruthless and ultimately exhausted emperor.  More recently, critics on both sides of the Atlantic heaped praise on his sensitive and compelling portrayal of Allen Touring (sp) in “Breaking the Code.”  His loyal fans are currently home every Thursday night with Brother Cadfael, the medieval crime-solving monk on PBS’s Mystery Theater.

        He received the ultimate accolade for a British actor in 1994 when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. He also is honored with similar knighthood in Denmark.  And the only two actors to have those similar dual knighthoods are Sir Laurence Olivier and Derek Jacobi.  In Washington to accept the Shakespeare’s 1997 Sir John Gielgud Award for Excellence in the Dramatic Arts, Sir Derek Jacobi joins us today to reflect on Shakespeare, the theater and his career.  Going to keep the introduction short, because we want a lot of good questions and answers.  All is well that begins well.  Sir Derek.  (Applause.)

        SIR DEREK:  Thank you.  Thank you.  (Applause.)  Thank you very much.  (Applause.)  Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.  It’s wonderful to be here.  I’ve been in Washington for five days now, and my feet haven’t yet touched the ground.  It’s been wonderful. But I seem to be have been speaking publicly most of that time—not that I dislike speaking publicly, but I always like to talk about things that people want to hear.  And rather than give a formal speech about my life in art, or indeed the art in my life, I want to answer your questions, so that at least I talk about things that you want to hear about, and of things that I am privy to.

        But before I do, I’d just like to say how wonderful it is to be here, how wonderful it is to see so many people here, and how fabulously warm and welcoming Washington has been.  I’ve met so many people in these last five days, and everybody has been so kind, so welcoming, so enthusiastic about Shakespeare and the arts and theater, it’s been really, really heart-warming.  I’m exhausted.  (Laughter.)  They pour me onto a plane at 7:00 tonight and I go back to London, but it’s the most lovely exhaustion, I promise you.  So what questions would you like me to answer?  (Applause.)      

      MR. SAMMON:  I mentioned a few days before this event I mentioned that we had Derek Jacobi here, and often the very first reaction is people would say, “Oh, Claudius.”  And I’d say, “No, Derek Jacobi.”  (Laughter.)  And so that a lot of people have some questions on Claudius.  So why don’t we start off with in “I, Claudius” you had to reveal intellectual prowess coupled with extreme physical frailty.  Yet I suspect it is just such inner tensions that provide the complexity you want in a character.  Can you tell a little about the preparations you made to acquire a stutter, a limp, and so political sinuosity?  (Laughter.)

        SIR DEREK:  Oh, it’s interesting about being associated with one part, because in the course of a career I think every actor would like one part that becomes his—one that he is associated with.  And I’ve sort of become associated with Claudius I suppose. For some actors it never happens—they don’t get that one part.  For some they get more than one part, and people say, ”Aren’t you tired of Claudius?”  And, “Doesn’t it become boring when people only say, ‘Oh, well, you played Claudius’?”  Well, it doesn’t actually, because Claudius for me opened many, many doors.  And the door that I was most grateful to it for opening was the door to your country, because if it hadn’t been for “I, Claudius” I couldn’t have worked here in the theater nearly so easily as I did.  And when I first came to Broadway in 1980 in, would you believe, a comedy, called “The Suicide”—a Russian comedy called “The Suicide.”  (Laughter.)  Now, we didn’t last very long.

        But to get back to Claudius, it was a painstaking preparation I suppose for Claudius.  You see, what we did we recorded it in order.  There were 13 episodes, so we had to do the old Claudius first, because in the first two episodes, if I remember correctly, Claudius appeared as an old man, and he appeared at the beginning of the episode to sort of welcome the viewers and tell them what was going to happen.  And then he appeared at the end of the episode to virtually say, “Good night.  Tune in next week.”  And we had to find this old man—I had to find him, the make-up girls had to find him, and the director had to find him.

        Now, this was six months before we would eventually get to him again at the end of the series.  And the problem was hoping that we found the right old man who would appear at the end of the series so much later.  So we had to find a look for him, we had to find how much by the time he was old, how much less he stuttered than he did as a young and middle-aged man, how much less he twitched, because these things as we went through life ameliorated.  So it was difficult.  It was very difficult.  And it was very painful.

        This—well, I’m talking 20 years ago now.  You know, “I, Claudius” was 1976—a long time ago.  And prosthetics in those days were only sort of in their infancy, prosthetics being the rubber that they put on your face to make you look old.  I remember it used to take—I used to have to get into the studio at 5:00 a.m. to be ready for midday. It took that long to get all that rubber on for Claudius.  And it was all put on in little bits, and it was all stuck on—it was horrendous, horrible.  And we can get men on the moon, but we have invented nothing better than spirit gum (sp).  (Laughter.)  Spirit gum (sp) is an actor’s nightmare.  It smells horrible, its consistency is horrible.  Anyway, my face was covered in it.  And one of the difficulties was getting this mask off at the end of the day, because I was in it for a good 12 hours.  And eventually we found the best way of getting it off was lying in a bath and put lots of babbydaff (sp) or foam in the bath, get a snorkel, and—(laughter)—and lie under the water.  And gradually this thing was lifted.  And I had a complete Claudius at home, a complete mask that came off.  But in the early days, of course those days we didn’t do that.  I used to rip it off and veins broke in my face and blood appeared.  So they couldn’t film me the next day.  So we wouldn’t have to do the old man on the second day.  When I was doing young and old we had to do the young man on the first day.

        Limp was a cinch.  Limp was easy—stone in the shoe, and that was easy, so that I didn’t ever forget which foot to limp on and all that.  (Laughter.)

        One other—if I’ve got time, another nice little twitch story.  When I was—the little boy that played me as a young boy—I think I started at about 17, but there was a little boy who played me much younger, and very good he was too.  And one day we were watching him do his stuff in a run through, and Margaret Tizack (ph), who played my mother, said, “Have you seen Ashley?  Isn’t he doing well?”  And I said, “Yeah, he’s fine.”  She said, “Well, have you not noticed anything wrong?”  And I said, “No, no, he’s great—he’s great.” She said, “He’s twitching the wrong way.”  (Laughter.)  I had already established the twitch you see one way, and Ashley was twitching the other way.  So we told the poor boy that he was twitching the wrong way, which threw him completely—(inaudible)—already.  (Laughter.)

        MR. SAMMON:  Thank you for your speech entitled, “How I prepared for Claudius.”  (Laughter.)

        The question is:  You mentioned that you are so closely associated with Claudius—do you ever fully shed a role?  Do you find yourself solving a dilemma today with the help of Claudius?  For instance, if you are checking your bags in the airport and you are having a hard time, do you say to yourself, “How would Claudius handle this?”  (Laughter.)

        SIR DEREK:  The first time I came to America after Claudius I remember I was going through customs in New York and I always try to look as innocent as possible—and I am innocent—there is nothing in my bags—(laughter)—but they always make you appear very guilty.  And this guy who looked very tough, and I think he might have been toting a gun—I don’t know—but he went—(gestures, laughter)—and I went over to him, and he said, “Show us your limp.”  (Laughter.)  So, but no—I mostly leave the characters at home.  I think, you know, if you are—particularly in the theater and you’re doing a play eight times a week, you cannot live with that character 24 hours a day.  There has got to become a cut-off point.  I mean, actors are real people as well, and we have to live in the real world because that is where we get all the material to perform all these various characters that we are asked to perform.  And it’s very important that we should live in the real world.  Particularly in the theater you were forced to live in the real world.  Perhaps in the moves you get—your real world is a little heightened, a little unreal, a little surreal.  

        But certainly in the theater you are much nearer the nitty-gritty of life, and you are much more on your own.  You know, in theater you make yourself up—you get yourself there. In the movies it would enfold you—you’re chauffeured, limoed, and you’re fed and you’re watered and you’re made up and you’re dressed.  In theater it’s you.  That’s where job satisfaction comes in—it’s you and the audience.   But you have got to be able to cut off, because otherwise (that’s were madness lies?).  You have got to be able to retrench and to live your normal life.  And I think in the rehearsal stage you tend to take your work home with you.  I—everybody here must have projects that they work on that go home with them, and you can’t forget them, and you try to live a normal home life, and your mind is with Lady Macbeth, or you are living with her for the week—(laughter)—very strangely—(laughter)—but it’s necessary.  That cut-off point must come.

        MR. SAMMON:  Sir Derek, there is an ongoing discussion about the validity of method acting.  Do you subscribe to the method of becoming someone in order to portray them?  Were you as Claudius wearing Roman underwear under the toga?

        SIR DEREK:  Well, at one point in Claudius I was sitting on the lavatory—I think everybody could see that I wasn’t wearing Roman underwear.  (Laughter.)  No, actually, we have a marvelous—(inaudible)—outtake film which is those bits that go wrong, you know, at the end of every film on television they make a little film of all the bits that went wrong.  And I remember there was one-—an Ogilvie (ph) I think, who played my father, at one point he was wrestling with George Baker or something, and both their little skirts came up, and they were both wearing sort of Calvin Klein—(laughter)—but what was the question?  (Laughter.)

        MR. SAMMON:  (Off mike)—

       SIR DEREK:  Oh, the method, the method, the method, yes.  (Laughter.)  Yes.  No, I think the method as such is something that actors do naturally, instinctively, or they should do.  The actual tabulation that Stanislavski gives of number one, number two, number three, down to 10 or 12 points—he merely stated and wrote down what actors—most actors—all actors should do absolutely instinctively.  And I think the great danger of taking the method too seriously is that you start acting for yourself, and you forget the participation of the audience—you forget you are doing it for someone else.  It becomes, if I may use the term, (“masturbatory”?) acting.  It—as long as you are feeling it, as long as you are crying, as long as you are convinced that you are getting to the essence of this character, that is all that matters.  What does matter in fact is the audience.

        And where the method for me falls down is the fact that when you are doing—as I said before, eight Lears a week, eight Hamlets a week, eight Macbeths a week—you have to at times send on technique.  You can’t live those parts fully as the method would have you do eight times a week.  You have to acquire –let’s call it skill, let’s call it craft, let’s call it technique—but let’s also call it tricks.  “Tricks” is not such a nice word, but they are actor’s tricks, and every actor has them, just like a conjurer.  I’m not going to tell you mine—no actor would tell you his tricks.  But they are a necessity.  And the problem with method acting is that you can do it much more easily on film, because you can do it for the instant—you don’t have to keep repeating it.  In a theater situation it is much different.

        I—dare I say that the—yes, I dare say that the Actors Studio in a sense regrets the American theater, I think, because it made actors too much standing on themselves, and forgets who they were doing it for.  We are not there to demonstrate our ability, our capacity to lock into our emotions.  And, “God, isn’t it good—I’m really crying here, so I must be really locked into my character.”  We forget that you are the ones who should be crying.  If by the way I am crying, fail, but if you don’t cry, I failed.  And that to me sometimes is where the method becomes a little too inward looking.  And one of the differences that I found between American and English actors is the American actors find the English actors in a certain sense a little facile, only because the English actors can—okay the American actors can do it too—but they tend to do it not so much—the English actors can turn on—(inaudible)—they can turn it on and off.  They can go into a scene—on the film in Hamlet, you know, we had a lot of American actors with us, and when Kenneth Brannagh did “Much Ado About Nothing,” there were American actors in that—and they find it difficult to cope with the fact that Kenneth and Emma and the English actors could finish a scene and sort of joke and laugh about—crack jokes, have fun, be normal—and then do it—turn it on and do it.  Whereas the American actors thought this was cheating a bit, that you had to carry it with you all the time.  They are two different techniques.  They are both as (varied?).  Ultimately it’s the results that count.

        MR. SAMMON:  I wonder if you might describe a night from hell when props fell over, cues were missed and moustaches slipped askew?

        SIR DEREK:  I fortunately have been spared most of those things.  I’ve had a very lucky career and a very full career, but a relatively embarrassment-free career.  I can’t think of any occasion when my tights split—(laughter)—or my moustache came off or my nose fell off.  No, I’m sorry, I’m being very boring with this question—(laughter)—nothing funny has happened to me.  (Laughter.)

       MR. SAMMON:  We’ll see if we can do something before the end of the program.  (Laughter.)

        You were in Washington to accept the Shakespeare Guild’s Sir John Gielgud Award.  Have you worked with Sir John?  And what are your thoughts on his career and his contributions to the British stage?  

        SIR DEREK:  Oh, there are many—there are many indeed, and they are loving.  I first worked with Sir John when I was a 25-year-old actor at the National Theater in London, at the Old Vic, when the National was at the Old Vic for ten years under the leadership of Sir Laurence Olivier.  And I worked with John in “Tartuffe” was my first play with him.  I’ll tell you a story about that.  Those who were present at last night’s awards ceremony must close their ears, because they’ve heard this story.  But I played a very small part in “Tartuffe,” directed by Tyrone Guthrie (sp), another legend in our theater.  And I came on right at the end.  I was a figure that came on and had a long speech—sent Tartuffe to prison.  I had to wait a long time to speak.  I was very nervous.  But the first dress rehearsal I came on, and I was head to foot in white and gold, and I had a gold wig, I had white and gold boots up to my thighs, and I looked a million dollars—I tell you—(laughter)—you really couldn’t miss me.  As I came out onto the stage these two follow spots were trained on me, and the voice of Tyrone Guthrie (sp) came from the auditorium, saying, “I want all the lights down—take the lights off Sir John, we’ve seen a lot of him this evening, and very good it’s been, but enough is enough.”  (Laughter.)  John was very gracious to me—very gracious.  (Laughter.)  He is a lovely man, he is a great actor, he is a great personal hero of mine.

        I worked with him on stage, on screen, and on radio, and I was saying last night I find it very comforting to think that he became a film star when he was in his mid 70s, which was 20 years ago now.  He was 93 a couple of weeks ago, so there is hope for us all.  (Laughter.)  He’s—again, I was saying last night that where stars can dazzle—and he certainly does—he also has a very wicked twinkle—he has a wicked sense of humor.  And there was an occasion when we were filming “Richard II”, when he deliberately tried to make me laugh, deliberately crossed me—which he did—which he succeeded in doing—just as the camera was rolling, just as it—(laughter)—ruined the take.  But he’s impish.  He has a wonderful impish humor.  And all these legendary mistakes he’s supposed to make—I don’t think they’re mistakes at all—I think he knows exactly what he’s saying.  (Laughter.)  I think he’s got an eye on history, John.

        But he is—his voice—his voice is extraordinary.  It is one of the great voices of the theater—amazingly so.  For 90—well, now for 93 years, but certainly since his teenage years, he smoked 40 cigarettes a day—and Turkish cigarettes ones—the untipped ones.  He doesn’t cough, he has the most beautiful voice in our profession.  So I don’t know what that says about tobacco, but I suppose I should shut up about that.  (Laughter.)  

MR. SAMMON:  We can move to Hamlet.  What is it about Hamlet that seems to define an actor’s career?  And how does one approach the soliloquy when it’s the only thing in the play the entire audience knows by heart?

        SIR DEREK:  Oh.  (Laughter.)  The—“Hamlet” of course I think is the greatest play ever written.  Of all the Shakespeares, I think it’s the one big personality part.  I think there are as many Hamlets as there are actors to play him.  It can be played in many different ways.  I’ve played it nearly 400 times. 

I’ve directed it—I directed Kenneth Brannagh in it in 1988.  And I’ve played now Claudius in it, so I know the play very well.  Hamlet is a great mountain to climb, and you never get to the top.  I know spectators and critics love to find the definitive in performances, but there are no definitives—certainly not in Shakespeare.  I don’t think there are definitives in any form of performance.  

        But one of the glories of “Hamlet” is that it is so rich and so dense that every generation discovers new truths in it, and every actor who plays it finds more truth in it and different aspects of it—new light in it.  The soliloquies are difficult.  Either you play them introspectively or—and so you allow the audience to overhear your thoughts, overhear what you are playing—or you play them directly to an audience and engage them as if you are talking to them.  There are very many various ways of delivering the soliloquies.  They are glorious speeches in “Hamlet,” and they are all, I think five or six, they are all totally different.  I, when I played Hamlet, did the most famous of them, the “To be or not to be” soliloquy not as a soliloquy in fact.  It would take far too long to explain to you why I did that, because I did root it in the text.  But of all the soliloquies I found that that was the odd man out.  And I did it as a speech, a speech to Ophelia.  And of all the Ophelias I played it to, and there was about a half a dozen of them, all said it helped them—it helped them in their interpretation of Ophelia.  I also got Kenneth to do it that way when we did it on stage, and he said it helped him too.  I know scholars raise their hands in horror, and they were aghast at the presumption to have taken such a famous and wonderful speech, which is the archetypal soliloquy, and denying it its place in soliloquy legend.  But I firmly believe that what I did was rooted in the text, and anybody who wants to know the textual references and all that, I am very pleased to tell them—it would  just take too long today.  But it certainly works.  And, ironically, all the things that Hamlet says in that soliloquy about suicide and madness happen to Ophelia—he talks about them, she doesn’t.  And it’s the irony of that to me is very telling and very dramatic.