It's been a long climb to the top, but character actor Jim Broadbent is now at the top of his game
Jim Broadbent is probably Britain's favourite character actor at the moment. He'll soon be appearing as Denis Thatcher to Meryl Streep's Maggie in The Iron Lady. We've seen him play the geologist Tom in Mike Leigh's latest film, Another Year. He took the lead in the recent adaptation of William Boyd's Any Human Heart, which won best mini-series at the Baftas this weekend, and he also starred as a father suffering from Alzheimer's in the BBC's gripping psychological thriller Exile.
Sadly, Broadbent knew the subject matter only too well, as his sculptor mother, Dee, died from the disease in 1995. "She was in a nursing home for a year," he says. "So I saw an awful lot of different Alzheimer's patients at that time. I definitely drew on my own experience."
There is a powerful scene where John Simm, who plays Sam's son, climbs naked into the bath with his father. "Do you mean the one where he jumps in the bath with me, or the scene where he is trying to drown me?" he asks, adding: "It was quite good fun. We had soapy water and swimming trunks, so we didn't have any embarrassments!"
Broadbent, however, is probably best known as Professor Slughorn in the Harry Potter films. My daughter calls him, somewhat harshly, "The one with a face like a sausage." I remember reading that Broadbent's tutor at drama school once told him that he would need to 'grow into his face'. "I never heard that phrase," says Broadbent, adding, "I always knew that I wasn't going to burst on to the scene and be recognised instantly. It took a while, but I don't know whether that was anything to do with growing into my face or not."
Exile is out on DVD on 13 June
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/may/23/jim-broadbent-favourite-character-actor
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