Watch Stephen Frears, Silver-Screen Evergreen Oldie, accept his award, here:
Over a period of six decades and with remarkably little fuss, Sir Stephen Frears, 84, has established himself as our pre-eminent film director.
There’s quickness and exactitude in his vision, with none of the mystical egotism of Michael Powell, none of Ken Russell’s brashness and vulgarity, and none of the proselytising and politics of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh.
If I say Frears doesn’t require glosses or interpretations, this is intended as high praise. He finds the inner rhythms of his stories and allows narratives to unfold – the trade in human body parts in Dirty Pretty Things; the anatomy of con artistry in The Grifters; the search for a lost child in Philomena; the unravelling of a marriage in the series State of the Union; digging up Richard III in a car park in The Lost King; examining the coughing major in The Quiz.
There’s an intellectual insatiability behind his work – Frears is particularly interested in the workings of power: the various dramas about Tony Blair’s Downing Street, with Michael Sheen; Hugh Grant exuding sinister charm as Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal; the world of the Court in The Queen, with Helen Mirren stuck in a stream, communing with a stag.
Frears is peerless with actors and actresses, hiring only the best: Meryl Streep, Judi Dench, John Hurt, Albert Finney, Julia Roberts, Rosamund Pike. I particularly love his noble admiration for comedians, whom he casts in serious roles, utilising their intensity: Norman Wisdom and Fulton Mackay as the cancer patients in Going Gently; Jack Douglas as a police inspector in Bloody Kids; Dave Allen as an estate agent having a nervous breakdown in a deserted office block in One Fine Day.
Frears has found expressive and imaginative possibilities in Steve Coogan. He directed three episodes of The Comic Strip Presents. In ‘Mr Jolly Lives Next Door’, Peter Cook is a psychopath whose ambition is to take a chainsaw to Nicholas Parsons.
He is the best interpreter of Alan Bennett, with none of the portentousness and camp Nicholas Hytner has brought to later projects. Sunset Across the Bay, Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Doris and Doreen and Afternoon Off bring out the melancholy, and the small-scale hopes and delusions, of Bennett’s characters. The films are saturated with the inadvertently comical Englishness of English provincial life.
Victoria Wood was so taken with Frears’s presentation of Bennett’s Morecambe that she bought a house there. She and Frears worked on a script together of Ursula Bentley’s novel The Natural Order. When Hemdale, the production company, glanced at the plot – about a sixth-form Lothario bedding the young supply teachers – the project was cancelled with alacrity.
And he always bats away compliments, diverting them to the actors and screenwriters.
Roger Lewis is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
