In an early scene in “Carrington,” author Lytton Strachey, one of the movie’s main characters, goes before a government board to defend his status as conscientious objector to World War I.
Actor Jonathan Pryce, who plays the homosexual Strachey, comes mincing into the room and sits on the witness chair after a servant installs a round, flesh-colored inner tube, a device resembling an inflatable toilet seat.
As he prissily eases his behind onto this odd cushion, Pryce drily explains: “I am a martyr to the piles.”
That tidbit of scatological naughtiness and truth-telling, combined with Pryce’s deliciously wicked delivery, communicates volumes about Strachey’s complex character and his irreverent, iconoclastic role in literary history. He was to the manner born, logical inheritor of the prim Victorian stuffiness he in fact helped to dispel.
As member of the famed Bloomsbury circle, he was mentor to Virginia Woolf, but is less famous today. His works, including his biography of Queen Victoria, are certainly less well read than Woolf’s. And for all his notoriety as the most famous literary homosexual in the post-Wilde period, “Carrington,” written and directed by playwright Christopher Hampton, celebrates instead his longtime relationship with a woman, painter Dora Carrington (Emma Thompson), who lived with him for 15 years and killed herself right after his death at age 51.
The thesis, indeed the majesty, of this unusual new movie involves the irony of their friendship: Despite his dalliances with any number of men, despite several long-lasting affairs with other men and one marriage on her part, despite the fact that their world sometimes seemed a carousel of ever-changing, somewhat shared partners, each was the love of the other’s life.
At a time when sexual frankness and exploration seems to have been exhausted in pop culture, along comes this strange story suggesting there is infinite variety to the journey of the heart. It’s fitting that Strachey, quiet rebel that he was in his own day, is once again making us think about our ideas regarding sexual identity, freedom and the meaning of true love.
For Pryce, who has already won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival for portraying Strachey, the role proved a challenge and an opportunity.
“I wasn’t that aware of his life,” Pryce admits. “I knew of him and what he looked like, mostly because of her paintings of him. I knew he wrote a book called `Eminent Victorians.’ But I thought of him as a dry, fussy, not very witty man, and those preconceptions were dispelled.
“When I first read the script, I wasn’t entirely convinced I could flesh him out,” he continues. “But that didn’t last long. When I work on a role, I work on the character through myself. I’ve raised eyebrows in interviews when I’ve said I’m not homosexual, but homosexuality has been a part of my life for the past 25 years working in the theater. The emotional needs and drives are the same as for heterosexuals.
“To inhabit that side of myself and that camp humor was actually a delight–to be able to be that bitchy and get away with it for eight weeks. I worried more about his class.”
The son of a Welsh shopkeeper, Pryce describes his background as lower middle class, “though never humble.” In the end, Pryce credits the script by venerable playwright Hampton (“The Philanthropist,” “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”), who is also making his film directorial debut, for the richness of the portrayal.
“The script tells you everything about him,” he says, “down to the detail when we see him go to visit (painter) Vanessa Bell and stand haughtily by while she carries in his valise. It tells you of the fondness people had for him while aware of that selfishness.”
Figures like Clive and Vanessa Bell are glimpsed only briefly, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf are absent altogether in the film. “Carrington” gives the feeling no one in the world exists outside Strachey, Carrington and their incidental lovers. Based on the definitive biography of Strachey by Michael Holroyd, “Carrington” even depicts one scene in which the two share a bed and engage in a bit of sexplay.
“I don’t know if that really happened, but you don’t tell the whole story if you don’t depict Lytton attempting it. The idea that two people can have a passionate love and not have sex is what the film’s about. It’s unusual because it’s not in our consciousnesses. The other day a newspaper in London ran a big spread about people, men and women, who actually have platonic relationships. Is that so rare? Perhaps it is. But these relationships exist.”
Even before it opens in Chicago and elsewhere Friday, “Carrington” is proving a milestone for this thoughtful, introspective, detached actor, who offscreen displays none of the cocky assurance he shows on those ubiquitous Infiniti car commercials–to date his most recognizable role in America.
“I don’t mind being known as the Infiniti car man,” he says. “They’re stylish, witty commercials, and I have the acting background behind me. If I’d never played Macbeth, if I’d never played Hamlet, I’d be saying, `Look what I could do if only they’d let me really act.’ But I’ve had those opportunities, so the car thing is simply a plus from the financial standpoint.”
Pryce left traditional high school to go to art school, but wound up taking some drama courses and found himself on the stage as a young man in Notthingham and Liverpool. A production of a play called “Comedians,” directed by Richard Eyre, who is now head of the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, transferred to the West End and later to Broadway. In 1977, it won Pryce his first Tony Award.
“I went to the West Coast to do the Hollywood thing, but I came home in two weeks,” he says. He spent years instead honing his classical acting in British repertory theater, doing “Macbeth” with the Royal Shakespeare Company and “Hamlet” at the Royal Court. He also did the occasional movie, including “Brazil” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”
But he had always had a strong singing voice as well. “My very first role included singing in Bertolt Brecht’s `The Caucasian Chalk Circle,’ ” he says. When director Nicholas Hytner was casting about for someone to play the role of the Engineer in “Miss Saigon,” he remarked, “Pryce would be perfect, if only he could sing.” To which producer Cameron Mackintosh, who had offered Pryce the replacement job in “The Phantom of the Opera,” said, “But he can.”
Pryce went on to win the Olivier Award–London’s equivalent of the Tony–and then sailed into controversy when the show was about to move to Broadway. The Engineer is Eurasian, and for a time Actors’ Equity insisted that an Asian be cast, threatening the Broadway opening.
“I didn’t say anything at the time, but the irony was that I’d been involved in similar political issues in Britain about casting minorities in `Macbeth.’ I was able to identify with those making the protests. This time, I was the figure I had been fighting against. But I believed in the show and . . . what we were doing.”
Pryce won a second Tony and more recently played Fagin in Mackintosh’s revival of “Oliver” in London. His press tour through Chicago came just after recording sessions for the film “Evita,” in which he plays Juan Peron to Madonna’s Eva. Shooting begins in January, in Argentina if government approval can be obtained–officials there are reportedly unhappy about Madonna’s casting. Pryce is a supporter.
“She is terrific and we got along very well,” he says of the recording. “The director, Alan Parker, was talking about awards one day and mentioned my Oliviers and my Tonys. Someone turned to her and said, `So what have you won?’ She replied, `Nothing. But I have lots of cash.’ “
Pryce, meanwhile, is scoring big points on his own with “Carrington.” Oscar talk is already buzzing, and Pryce has reason to think the Infiniti man may soon be eclipsed. “Strachey’s niece, Barbara, wrote me a letter and thanked me for bringing out a warmer, compassionate side. She said he loved playing with her and her brothers and sisters when they were children–even though her mother tried to keep him away.”
Current owners of Ham Spray, the house where Strachey and Carrington lived their final days, gave him a marvelous postscript. Right after Strachey dies, in the last moments of the film, Carrington is seen planting some bulbs next to a gnarled old tree. Then she goes inside and shoots herself.
“Those bulbs, the owners tell me, still come up every year.”
