The old axiom “politics is showbusiness for ugly people” is becoming uncomfortably inaccurate, especially for actors. To watch John McCain debating with Barack Obama in the last American election was to be struck by the contrast between gnarled old character actor and leading man. It was like Ernest Borgnine shaking his fist at Will Smith.
And now we have Nick Clegg. Not quite the young Paul Newman perhaps but, like Obama, someone who walked into people’s living rooms via the TV debates looking younger, fresher and less shop-soiled than his opponents. his success in those debates was due at least as much to the sense that his face carried something open, attractive and indefinably modern as it did to his oratorical skills. Compare politicians’ faces on our screens and we inevitably start casting them as the archetypes we carry in our telly-saturated heads.
The ability to come across as credible and trustworthy before you’ve even started to speak is a quality that commands a lot of money in Hollywood, but one that very few actors have. Like it or not, Clegg has it and Cameron and Brown were forced into the respective roles of Machiavellian smoothie (think Nigel Havers) and tightly wound heavy (Ken Stott).
It doesn’t hurt that he still looks about 23. Back in 1988, aged 19, he looked about 7. It was that year that he and I appeared together in the Marlowe Society production of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac at Cambridge.
The Marlowe seemed unfeasibly grand and impressive and old, and it was decided that the already unfeasibly grand and impressive and young Sam Mendes should direct it. Sam had left college the previous year and although the Marlowe is usually directed by older, more established directors (who underwent the ordeal of being interviewed by the snotty students they would end up directing) it was clear that if Sam wanted us, we wanted Sam.
I was thrilled by the idea of Cyrano because, as the burliest member of the student acting community, I thought I stood a good chance of being cast as the big-schnozzed swashbuckler. Sam came to my chilly room in Corpus Christi college. he took the armchair. “Do you know who played De Guiche in the Ralph Richardson Cyrano?” I didn’t. I wasn’t even sure who De Guiche was, having given the play only a cursory glance between fencing poses in front of the mirror. “Only . . . Alec Guinness”, Sam continued. I’d heard of him. “Stole. the. show. and you will too.” By the time he left I was punching the air. De Guiche has, I think, four scenes. He’s good, that Mendes.
Tom Hollander played Cyrano and it remains the best performance of that role that I’ve seen. But the whole production somehow felt blessed. the designer was Tom Piper, now one of the world’s finest. the cast included Ian Kelly, the actor and biographer of Casanova, Henry Naylor, a stand-up comedian, and Will Eaves, novelist and doyenne of the Times Literary Supplement. It was produced by Pippa Harris, a partnership with Mendes that continues in their powerhouse Neal Street Productions. and then there was the future leader of the Liberal Democrats.
It says a lot about the strength of the production that Nick was playing a smaller role than he should have. He’d just played the lead in a production of Larry Kramer’s drama, The Normal Heart, and was naturally talented. as Sam recalls: “I remember Nick in those days as watchful, endlessly good humoured and quick to laugh, especially at himself. and quite without ego. Doesn’t sound like a politician to me.”
I remember him as a vivid presence not just because, at that time, he was so baby faced he would have made Justin Bieber look like Sid James. But also because Nick was always without affectation on stage; a quality of direct communication that has served him well in the wider theatre he now inhabits. and even more strangely, as Mendes implies, he had no time for politics. and I don’t mean sit-ins and debating at the Union. I mean the snake-infested world of who’s in and who’s out and who slept with whom in the Amateur Dramatic Club, the centre of Cambridge student drama and a forum that made the court of the Borgias look like Noel Edmonds’ House Party.
Nick was very committed to the plays but utterly uninvolved in the nuclear bitching student actors expend much of their energy on.
Maybe Nick’s acting experience has been put to fiendishly clever use politically. maybe his image has been been buffed by a hit squad of PR men. But I doubt it. he just seemed like an extremely genuine, amusing, sometimes earnest young man. Crucially, he was unencumbered by the desire to be something he wasn’t. or to put another way, if he’s still acting he must be really good. because as every actor knows, the hardest thing of all is not acting.
• Jonathan Cake is an actor who has appeared in many films, including Brideshead Revisited, and television dramas, including the Government Inspector, in which he played Alastair Campbell.
