Hordern’s characters all ‘slightly dotty’

Press, 18 March 1987, Page 19

Hordern’s characters all ‘slightly dotty’

Sir Michael Hordern — who plays the Reverend Simeon Simcox in Sunday night’s drama series “Paradise Postponed" — lives in a family where there have been clerics for generations. Hordern, aged 74, is the only member of the series’ considerable cast to have appeared in a John Mortimer work before. That was in “Dock Brief,” playing a kind of early Rumpole, back in 1958.

In “Paradise Postponed,” Mortimer deliberately did not want other actors who had been associated with his work, and he also did not want a lawyer as a key character.

Hordern sold exercise books until he was 25. He did not attend drama school, but over the years has appeared in more than 100 films and countless stage and television plays.

He says of the character he plays in “Paradise Postponed”: "His attitude to life is plain, straightforward and honest,” but slightly eccentric.

“I think there is a slice of eccentricity in most of the characters I find myself acting ... judges and schoolmasters and

such, all slightly dotty. “I enjoy playing then* and I sympathise with people who are slightly off-centre. And they need sympathy too, because they are not quite like others.” Hordern relates to the part quite well. “I’m told I do a good deal of talking to myself, with lots of small noises and grunts with urns and aahs, which it’s claimed is the first sign of madness.”

He doesn’t think of himself as a character actor.

“There are those who are personality actors who perforce have to play the same character over and over again because that is their stock-in-trade and where their living comes from.

“But I think that must be terribly boring, playing yourself day after day. Absolutely dreadful. But Toad of Toad Hall one week and King Lear the next, that is acting. And a very entertaining way of earning a living too.”