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| The man who put the fun into Fagin |
Ron Moody |
In conversation veteran actor and the most famous Fagin of
them all, Ron Moody, returns again and again to the theme
that underpins his long career.
“It all fell into place for me,” he says, “in
1959 when I went to the Chelsea Arts Ball dressed as a clown.
It was a tramp clown – with a white face but no red
nose – and I found it the most incredible experience
because, all of a sudden, I was unobserved. I became the observer
of everything that was going on but I had a privileged position
outside of all that. The fact of having a white face made
me invisible.”
Through all his many and varied TV, film and stage performances,
his audience has never seen Moody in a spinning bow tie or
enormous shoes, but clowning is something he places at the
heart of his craft. His latest show, a return of the critical
and popular hit Move Along Sideways sees Moody, who lives
in Finchley, alone on stage playing to an audience of 500
at Euston’s Shaw Theatre.
The clowning is manifest, he says, through the bitter-sweet
nature of a show which he talks about with palpable enthusiasm.
“I play a lot of characters in this show – about
50 I think, although I haven’t counted them,”
he says. “Most of them are taken from the theatre or
literature. I’ve tried to make it a barnstorming kind
of piece, full of extraordinary men like the actors Herbert
Beerbohm Tree and Henry Irving and the great comedians.
“Of course, this means it mixes tragedy and comedy.
It’s a funny show but it has its darker moments. That
seems to be something that comes most naturally to me.”
A few days before Moody opens in Move Along Sideways –
a show that broke box office records five years ago at the
Theatre Royal, Stratford East – his latest movie premieres
at Hampstead’s Everyman Cinema. Paradise Grove is a
dark comedy set in a north London Jewish retirement home in
which Moody co-stars with Rula Lenska.
He says: “It’s a brilliant script by Charles Harris,
really brilliant. I think its his first major film –
he’s a documentary director. My character is in a terrible
situation, in an old folks’ home that he hates, but
he’s surviving it through his sense of fun. It’s
another tragi-comedy, really.”
Is he drawn towards such roles or does he choose imbue his
characters with these shades of light and dark? “Some
writers – Sean O’Casey or Shakespeare for example
– have their ‘heavy’ characters and their
comic ones, but I’ve always preferred to play parts
that have to balance both the comic and the tragic,”
he says. “It goes right back to clowning.”
And Fagin? “When I came to do Oliver! I’d just
finished doing a show about Joey Grimaldi, probably this country’s
most famous clown, and I based Fagin on him. He was an amazing
man, playing places like Sadler’s Wells and Drury Lane
and actually keeping some of these places going financially.
It meant that the ‘respectable’ theatre people
had to put up with this deplorable, common, form of entertainment.
Maybe its still the same today, although Ian McKellen is doing
panto so perhaps that’s a sign that things have changed.”
The role of Fagin in Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, first on
the West End stage and then in the Oscar winning movie, was
the one that brought Moody global fame. Has it ever become
a curse, being so closely associated with one of cinema’s
great iconic characters? “Only when I didn’t want
to do it any more. I’ve done Royal Command Performances
and Red Nose Days when people always want me to do Oliver!
and you get to think ‘why the hell can’t they
ask me to do one of my own characters?’ But I did do
it again this year at Canterbury, a bit reluctantly, just
to see if I could still do all the leaping about. That was
very enjoyable.”
Now well into his eighth decade, though rather coy about his
exact age, Moody’s interpretation of one of literature’s
most troubling creations remains definitive. New productions
demonstrate the fact that actors find it impossible to get
past his performance. “Including me!” he claims.
“I did it in a production at the Aldwych after the original
West End show, and I thought ‘I’ve done this,
I’m fed up with it, I want to do it another way’.
So I thought I’d play him as Dickens wrote him, as an
evil man who uses comedy to get his way with people. And it
didn’t work. So I went back to playing Fagin as someone
who is funny to the bone – a clown, in fact.
“And, of course, instantly the applause came back.”
n Move Along Sideways plays at the Shaw Theatre, Euston Road,
NW1, May 24 – 29. Box office 0870 033 2600.
n Paradise Grove opens at the Everyman Cinema, Hollybush Vale,
NW3 on May 20. Box Office 08700 664 777.
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