Grumble magazine

(I wrote one for Jeremy. It seems only fair to write one for Edward, too.)

I started drafting this article in my head while watching Ian McKellen’s Richard III one evening last winter. I hadn’t seen it before, and I enjoyed it quite a lot – fine piece of filmmaking, an interpretation that I thought worked, and I’ll watch Ian McKellen do just about anything. Ian McKellen rocks.

But it’s not Ian I want to talk about – not today, anyway. Watching Richard III made me realize that I wanted to talk about someone else.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Edward Hardwicke.

If you like movies that have a large cast of mostly British actors, you’ve probably seen him – but you likely wouldn’t recognize him again. He’s not particularly striking in appearance: aside from his deep rich voice, there’s nothing much out of the ordinary about him. And he’s that type of actor who disappears into the character he is playing. Watching him is not like watching Ian McKellen play Richard, or Cate Blanchett play Elizabeth. You aren’t watching Edward the way you watch Ian and Cate, wondering what they’ll do with the role. He’s just the character, and you sort of forget that there’s a role and an actor involved.

He’s had a quite respectable career. Look him up on IMDB, and you’ll find he’s done something most years since 1965. Not many starring roles, but a bunch of interesting supporting characters. His role in Richard III provides a good example – he is Lord Stanley, the chief supporter of Henry Tudor, a good soldier who maintains his support because it’s the right thing to do for England, damn it, even after Richard takes his son hostage.

He’s been in a bunch of BBC mysteries – the baronet at whose house the murder occurs, a judge, a witness, the client with the case. In an odd juxtaposition, he’s also been in several religious miniseries – playing (among others) Isaac, Zachariah, and Judas. He’s done a bunch of minor Dickens characters, he played Horace Holly in a production of She about ten years ago, and he was the voice of Lara Croft’s father in some animated something recently. He played Sam’s grandfather in Love, Actually, although any lines he may have had wound up on the cutting room floor. In Elizabeth, he’s Lord Arundel, who gives the imprisoned princess his cloak – a kindness she does not forget. He later winds up on the losing side of a rebellion against her, but his motivations are more interesting than those of the other rebels – religious conviction rather than personal gain. And of all the rebels, he alone goes to his arrest and execution with dignity, after quietly kissing his children goodnight.

He blends into the background, into the scenery, into the universe.You wouldn’t remember him doing any of this – you wouldn’t realize it was the same actor, unless you clued into the voice. He blends into the background, into the scenery, into the universe. While you’re watching the star to see what she or he does with the leading role, Hardwicke just is Lord Arundel, Sir Henry Angkatell, Horace Holly, Lord Stanley, and Zachariah.

And for eight years, he was an incomparable Dr. Watson to Jeremy Brett’s incomparable Sherlock Holmes. He gave some interviews during that time, some of which are preserved on the DVD collection. In them, he is mostly asked what it’s like to work with Jeremy. He doesn’t seem to mind.

I got to talking about heroes and companions with a friend a while back (first conversation we ever had, actually, so that would qualify as the start of the friendship – ain’t the Internet grand?), and he said the point I was making reminded him of a piece of music by John Adams, “Slow Ride in a Fast Machine.”

Toward the end there’s a beautiful part in the soli trumpets. It sounds like flying. Meanwhile, there’s a boring ol’ woodblock just going click, click, click, click, and two keyboards cycling through same monotonous three or four notes over and over and over again. It sounds pretty boring, but here’s the thing: the melody wouldn’t sound like anything at all without the underlying repetitive stuff. I love playing it. It’s the solid ground that allows the melody to lift off.

Yes. Yes, it is. Character actors like Hardwicke hold down the fabric of the universe – whatever universe we’re visiting at the moment – so the lead actor has something to show his interpretation against. Over the last forty years, Hardwicke has held down the fabric of many universes. Which is a pretty respectable way to spend a career, really. Here’s to the common man.