Paul Scofield 1922 - 2008

Paul Scofield, the great British stage actor who all too rarely deigned to appear in films, has died at the age of 86, from complications of leukemia. The AP has a full obit; Wikipedia has a concise career trajectory; IMDb has the filmography and an appreciative bio.

Of his acting generation -- Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris were his closest peers in age and impact -- Scofield was the film star who wasn't. No marriages to Hollywood sex goddesses, no flirtations with the star-making machinery, no appearances in "Harry Potter" movies. He was primarily about the stage and, even more fundamentally, about playing a role before a live audience. "Acting is all I can do," said the man who turned down a knighthood three times and who stayed married to the same woman for 65 years.

Our loss, as anyone knows who saw Scofield in his signature role as Sir Thomas More in Fred Zinneman's 1966 multiple Oscar-winner "A Man for All Seasons." (The star won best actor but didn't bother to turn up for the ceremony.) He had originated the part on the London stage and on Broadway, picking up trophies everywhere, and so he really couldn't turn down the chance to play the conscience of Tudor England onscreen. Thus we have the evidence: Scofield's More has a clear-sighted, righteous charisma that stands inflexible against the wishes of Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) to trade in his first queen for a newer model. (Trust me, the movie makes "The Other Boleyn Girl" look like kids playing dress-up.)

Then there was that voice: Sonorous, considered, emanating from banked fires deep within. Scofield made the concept of mature duty seem sexy, and I'm not being facetious -- I've just been listening to my editor, a young girl in 1966, practically fanning herself as she recalled the crush she had on the actor. When More stands before the block at the end of the film and says with artless simplicity, "I am commanded by the king to be brief, and since I am the king's obedient subject, brief I will be. I die His Majesty's good servant, but God's first," you could hear the hearts of historians and smart women everywhere breaking.

Scofield appeared in other films but none with the impact of "A Man for All Seasons," and he certainly didn't rush to find other leading roles. He was a strict classicist, recreating his King Lear in a 1971 film version, and appearing opposite Katharine Hepburn in Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance," a 1973 entry in the short-lived American Film Theatre project designed to bring great plays to movie audiences. (My high school English teacher took us to see a number of these; "Balance" was quite good, with Scofield subtly underplaying against the tornado that was Kate, but I still have saddle sores from the three-hour version of "The Iceman Cometh" starring... Lee Marvin as Hickey.)

The actor's latter-day claim to fame, of course, was as Ralph Fiennes' father in Robert Redford's 1994 "Quiz Show," the leonine intellectual Mark Van Doren looking down his nose at his son's involvement in a tatty TV game show. Scofield picked up a second Oscar nomination for that role, and deservedly: the sorrow with which Van Doren contemplates the son's ruin of the family name is both moving and terrifying -- an immovable mountain of parental/cultural guilt. (The best supporting actor winner that year was the equally excellent Martin Landau for "Ed Wood".)

Two years later came Scofield's last appearance in a theatrical movie, as Judge Danforth in "The Crucible" -- a fitting finale but not the one his talents deserved. Besides "A Man for All Seasons," the only time the actor may have met a lead film role worthy of his stature was in John Frankenheimer's underrated 1964 dramatic thriller "The Train," where he plays a Nazi officer obsessed with stealing the great artworks of Paris (Burt Lancaster is the resistance train engineer bent on stopping him). (I haven't seen 1973's "Scorpio," but here's a nice blog appraisement of it.)

To have seen Scofield on stage, then, may have been to take the full measure of the man. Unfortunately, a stage performance, no matter how great, vanishes from everything but memory when it's over. Perhaps that's what he intended all along. It's as though Scofield took to heart his line from "A Man for All Seasons": "I trust I make myself obscure."