ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 1, 1995 TAG: 9512010062
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LONDON
SOURCE: MATT WOLF ASSOCIATED PRESS
Dora Carrington may be the title character, but the performer commanding the attention - and early awards - in the movie ``Carrington'' is Jonathan Pryce.
Pryce plays the homosexual Lytton Strachey, biographer and author of ``Eminent Victorians'' (1918) and Carrington's beloved if platonic companion from their meeting in 1915 at Virginia Woolf's country home to his death 17 years later at age 52.
``I'm very glad the film is not called `Lytton,''' the soft-spoken Welshman said, ``because then it's all to do with confounding expectations and surprising an audience.''
The film is playing at The Grandin Theatre in Roanoke.
Emma Thompson plays Carrington, the Bloomsbury artist who committed suicide at 39, shortly after Strachey's death.
The supporting cast of rising English actors includes Rufus Sewell, Sam West and Steven Waddington, with a cameo appearance by Janet McTeer as Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell.
Referring to writer-director Christopher Hampton, Pryce said: ``If Christopher had an obsession, it was with Carrington - the film he wanted to make was about this character around whom these men revolved.''
Appearing in glasses and a long red beard, fingers long and sinewy, Pryce plays Strachey as the liveliest wit Oscar Wilde never wrote.
On his deathbed, he sniffs, ``If this is dying, I don't think much of it.''
The role of an actor's dreams?
``It's partly why Carrington was so obsessed with Strachey. He did draw the light,'' said Pryce, who won the best actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May for this performance, and is being talked up for an Academy Award.
``The opportunity to explore that depth of character in a film is quite rare,'' said Pryce, 48, who has been far better represented on stage than screen over the last 25 years.
``It's like Wilde in terms of language, but, as far as depth of character is concerned, the nearest equivalent is Chekhov; it's quite a literate script.''
Chekhov provided two of the actor's stage triumphs on London's West End - as the writer Trigorin opposite Vanessa Redgrave in ``The Seagull'' (1985) and, three years later, as Astrov, the doctor, to Michael Gambon's Uncle Vanya.
Pryce's Hamlet in 1980 at the Royal Court remains one of his generation's most acclaimed, as does his Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1986.
He won a Tony award in his Broadway debut in 1976 in Trevor Griffiths' ``Comedians.'' He got a second Tony in 1991 in his Broadway musical debut, playing the sleazy Eurasian pimp in ``Miss Saigon.''
Most recently, he spent nine months at the London Palladium in the musical ``Oliver!'' in which he offered a surprisingly cautious and fey Fagin.
``My involvement was very odd,'' he said of the revival of the Lionel Bart musical, which he will not reprise if it travels to the United States. ``I barely rehearsed the eight weeks we had, so all my work was done in front of an audience.
``The final five or six months I began to enjoy it; the final week, I enjoyed it a lot.''
On screen, Pryce has been mostly a supporting player for hire in films as diverse as ``Jumping Jack Flash,'' ``Glengarry Glen Ross,'' ``Shopping'' and ``The Age of Innocence.'' His choice of movie roles, he said, has been far less discriminating than his work on stage.
``Often, with a film, I read a script once and think, `That would be fun to do,''' said Pryce. ``Then I start filming and say, `I should have read this twice.'
``Films to me in the past have taken less commitment to be involved with. They are a passing thing which seemed very rarely to do with the actor unless you were in a position of power that you called the shots.
``You did it, and either people enhanced it in the editing process or ruined it; it seemed a very much more haphazard venture than theater, so it takes me longer to commit to a piece of theater than it does to a film.''
Pryce made his film debut as a German-Jewish refugee in Lord Grade's all-star ``Voyage of the Damned'' in 1976. Better movies since have included Richard Eyre's little-seen ``The Ploughman's Lunch'' (1983), with Pryce as a cynical radio reporter, and the futuristic fantasy, ``Brazil'' (1985), as a beleaguered clerk alongside Robert De Niro.
On TV, he received an Emmy nomination as Henry Kravis in HBO's ``Barbarians at the Gate'' and is known to devotees of U.S. TV commercials as the Infiniti car spokesman for the past three years.
His next film is bound for the headlines since it pairs Pryce with Madonna in the much-discussed screen adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical ``Evita,'' with Pryce playing Juan Peron to Madonna's Eva. Antonio Banderas co-stars as Che.
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Jonathan Pryce. color.by CNB