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Confessions of an honest Catholic commie
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Actor Ian Hart is not John Lennon, doesn't want to tread the boards, and pines for the working-class Liverpool of his childhood. Mike Higgins tries to give him absolution.
18 February 2001
After an hour in the company of Ian Hart, you feel less like his interviewer than his confessor. As I prepare to leave him, the 36-year-old Liverpudlian actor ruefully casts his gaze downwards. "You probably heard the trouble I got into over The Closer You Get...", he says, shaking his head. It was tricky not to. Sticking the knife into his last film - an admittedly poor Ireland-set romantic comedy - is one thing. Doing so in a national newspaper interview a couple of weeks before its release ... well, let's just say you strayed from the public relations path, my son.
The disarmingly frank Hart admits that he's been prone to quite a few errors of judgement since he broke through as John Lennon in 1993's Backbeat (winningly, though, he doesn't count forgoing the chance to appear in The Full Monty among his mistakes). That may a bit harsh; after all, his body of work includes Land and Freedom, Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy, Wonderland and The End of the Affair. Still, it must be frustrating to read, time and again, that by far the best thing about Ian Hart's latest film is Ian Hart.
Luckily, that's not the case with Stephen Frears' Liam. Even if this determinedly old-fashioned and muted drama from writer Jimmy McGovern offers little else, its account of a working-class family struggling in Depression-era, early Thirties Liverpool is a showcase for that engrossing, typically British brand of character acting. As the father and disillusioned, redundant dockworker who turns in desperation to the fascist black shirts, Hart exhibits his signature qualities: a confused, troubled integrity. (It's somehow appropriate that in his first feature film role 16 years ago he was credited as "Uncertain Mugger".)
For a performer apparently so undiscriminating in his role selection, Hart is surprisingly sure about what attracted him to Liam. "Frears", he butts in. "Also, I'm from Liverpool, and it seemed odd that I'd never done anything by Jimmy McGovern. But the opportunity to work with someone like Frears is really what gets you out of the house. A lot of directors don't have a lot of power - with Stephen, he's the one controlling the show." Nevertheless, it's the screenplay's interest in Catholicism, social deprivation and Liverpool - McGovern's perennial preoccupations - that seems to fire Hart. "I grew up in a Catholic environment: my school was run by priests, and I got beaten by them every day. I was in the Legion of Mary, I was an altar boy. A lot of what happens in the film I can remember from my own childhood." Indeed, were it not so trenchant, what follows from Hart might be called a rant: about the Catholic Church's historical hold over Liverpool, its indoctrination of its young believers, its connections with the Nazis during World War Two...
So it's odd when Hart declares that he pines for the rigid social order depicted by the film; the sort of bygone working class attitude that knew its place and the value of a well-scrubbed stoop. "I miss it, yes. When I was a kid, if you went out on the street, and the next-door neighbour said 'Stop that!', you did. It was never explained to you why you should respect people, you just knew that otherwise there'd be trouble. But it worked, in that I did fear confrontation with an adult. We've lost so much of that." Considering Hart's upbringing in Liverpool, it's not hard to see where this nostalgia comes from. His father worked in a car factory and, like many in the city during the 1970s and 1980s, was a victim of its economic decline. "He wasn't very fond of the Catholic Church. Me dad was a communist, but for him it was just arguing with people in pubs."
No prizes for guessing which of his film roles Hart enjoyed most: the young communist David Carr in Ken Loach's Spanish Civil War drama Land and Freedom. ("I had no responsibility for that performance - that was down to Ken completely.") Liam is stodgy stuff by comparison, a fact Hart acknowledges, perhaps unintentionally, when he compares the film to "a 1970s piece of television". What's more, typically good though Hart is in the film, there is more than a suggestion that he's treading water. Does he ever feel typecast? "Yeah, massively. From Backbeat onwards I was going to be one of those actors who played John Lennon", he reflects - two years before Ian Softley's Beatles film, Hart first played Lennon in The Hours and Times. "I was offered a job in [the stage show] Looking through a Glass Onion, touring Australia, singing his songs. I spent a year in the house thinking 'Is that all you think I am? A John Lennon impersonator?' I got really pissed off by it. It could have been back to square one, back to working in a café. I tried everything I could to diversify. But I think I've managed to get myself typecast as someone capable of a nervous breakdown. It's my fault, though", says Hart, stoically.
Cheer up, Ian, there's always the theatre for the celluloid thesp after some more demanding work, isn't there? Apparently not. "You can look at a film script, and you might think it's not perfect, but at least the director is interesting. But with theatre, it's six months, no money", insists Hart, who says he's been up for "bits and bobs" at the National Theatre without landing any parts. "And there's got to be something there every night which you can mine. There may not be something there, in which case you've still got to get up on Wednesday and Saturday and do the matinées. I can learn something from a shit film. I'm not too sure what I can learn from doing a shit play for three months."
After Liam, Hart appears in David Kane's follow-up to This Year's Love (in which Hart delivered one of his best, most disturbing performances), the romantic comedy Born Romantic. And Christmas will bring Hart what ought to be his highest-profile role yet, Professor Quirrell in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. For the moment, though, he's toiling away, filming for yet another solid supporting part in Kaige Chen's first English language film, Killing Me Softly. And, again, he's not trying to kid himself or anyone else: "I'm doing it because he's an interesting director. I went into the audition thinking this part's not great. But it's well worth spending the time in his [Chen's] company than spending the time in the house. The last thing you want to be is a bit-part player, but I've got myself down that alley way. I want to get out of it, but I can't help it - if I see something interesting..."
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As Unknown