Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 9, 1994 TAG: 9404090112
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LYNN ELBER Associated Press
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
It's a complimentary sort of typecasting, Hardy acknowledges. But he jumped at a chance to play a bumbler in the new PBS series "Middlemarch."
Squire Arthur Brooke is "a very bad landlord," Hardy says. "He's got a kind heart but absolutely no brain, and he just lets people down right, left and center. Nothing's connected properly. All the circuits are wrong."
The change of pace turned out to be a lark for Hardy, best known to American TV audiences as the elegant, arrogant vet Siegfried in "All Creatures Great and Small."
"It was great fun to play," Hardy said of the Brooke role. "One had to find in oneself something totally unintelligent, well-meaning and rather ludicrous."
"Middlemarch," a six-part adaptation of the George Eliot novel about people adrift in a world on the verge of the Industrial Revolution, debuts tonight on PBS stations.
Hardy gave the novel a second read before filming, having skipped over it lightly during his student days at Oxford University.
"I'd read as little of it as I could possibly get away with," Hardy recalls. "In three weeks time we had to write an essay on it and it seemed a bit hefty, dusty stuff - and I had better things to do.
"That's what most of us suffer from, being made to read it in college. But it's a magical piece of work, a great canvas."
In re-reading Eliot's work, he discovered "its relevance today is extraordinary. You can find a parable in the political situation, in the emancipation of women, or non-emancipation."
Relaxing in a hotel suite during a brief visit to Southern California, Hardy looks trim and much younger than his 69 years. He is also gracious, expressing concern when a visitor fails to receive a glass of water.
"May I get it for you?" he asks, in the mellifluous tones that have echoed through plays, movies and television.
The visit isn't his first. He came to California on leave during wartime flight training in Texas as a member of the Royal Air Force. He returned in the late 1950s, pursuing his bride-to-be and a film career.
Although he won the girl, movies proved more elusive.
"There was one English part that came up in the 2 1/2 years I was here," Hardy recalls. That was in the 1958 film "Torpedo Run," which starred Glenn Ford and Ernest Borgnine.
Generally, he recalls, "It was not a good time. We were filming at an MGM sound stage, and it was the only sound stage working."
He landed, instead, in the golden age of television.
"They used to let me play Germans or Scotsmen or Englishmen," Hardy says. "I lived on TV entirely. And there was an awful lot of TV; good, big, serious stuff.
"There was Playhouse 90. There was Matinee Theater, which did five different plays each week, live. It was sort of a cream time, the glory days of drama on TV."
Movie roles might have kept him in Los Angeles. Instead, he accepted an offer from the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, where he had apprenticed postwar with the likes of Sir John Gielgud.
"I'm very English, and I might have hankered sooner or later to return home," he concedes.
In addition to playing the classics, he appeared in contemporary works in London's West End theaters. And there was more of the small screen, including "Winston Churchill - The Wilderness Years," which aired here on PBS.
"Television by then was riding high in England, although it was just the BBC," Hardy says. "They loved doing quality stuff, so I had the glory days there, too."
Given his long involvement with TV, it seems fair to ask Hardy about his view of the predicted 500-channel universe.
"It could be wonderful, but it could be awful," he responds. "Unless you give a delight which people actually remember and savor, you haven't done anything. If you're simply putting on wallpaper to fill an hour, which is forgotten in the next hour, you might as well not have drawn the breath."
For Hardy, the compelling interest now is theater.
"I really hanker to get back into the classics on the stage," he says. "There are lots of roles in my age to be done."
But he confesses he still dreams of a Hollywood fling.
"I'm sort of hoping that at the end of my life as an actor there may be more chance of doing substantial old men on film," he says.
He's completed a role in the upcoming Kenneth Branagh film of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's classic horror novel "Frankenstein," and hopes to do two movies this year.
"The joy of film is that when you've got a whole screen that size, the thought does it," he says. "All you have to do is think of it in terms of communicating the character."
by CNB