Jim Broadbent Biography

1976 was his first big year. He made his stage breakthrough when playing 12 separate characters in Ken Campbell's immense 12-hour science fiction epic Illuminatus. He also began his career-long association with fellow actor Patrick Barlow, who'd later appear in the likes of Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary. Together they formed the two-man National Theatre of Brent, performing hilarious "reduced histories" like The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Messiah, Revolution and The Complete Guide To Sex. This was an extremely valuable project for Broadbent, forcing him to learn massive control of his movements and facial expressions, as well as comic timing. Well, you need them if you're to play such varied characters as Robespierre, Mrs Simpson, John The Baptist, Marie Antoinette and God. As Broadbent says himself "As an actor, I'm quite prepared to look silly. I don't mind looking a complete berk".

As said, Illuminatus pushed him into the theatrical limelight and not only did the roles improve, he also made a series of connections that would serve him extremely well. Onstage, he played in Kafka's Dick and The Government Inspector at the Royal National Theatre, both of them directed by one Richard Eyre who, a quarter of a century later, would hire Broadbent to play Iris Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, and thus contribute mightily to his breakthrough onto the world stage. As the Seventies became the Eighties, Jim would also perform in Ecstasy and Goosepimples, both directed by Mike Leigh. Leigh, of course, would go on to be one of the great British film-makers, casting Broadbent in both Life Is Sweet and Topsy Turvy. He'd also direct Broadbent's own A Sense Of History, the first time he ever directed someone's else's work.

As far as cinema went, Jim started slowly. He made his debut in the excellent apocalyptic drama The Shout - and what a crazy debut it was. The film began with its own conclusion, continually cutting back to show us how it came to this, and the conclusion is set during a cricket match organised for the inmates of a mental institution, a game that descends into chaos and death. Thus Jim began his screen career as a bona fide loon, first more or less under control while fielding in the covers, then stripped naked and tearing around all over the field and finally right there as Alan Bates awful gift is revealed. It was a real change of tone when he then played a German soldier in The Passage, though this did feature one of Malcolm McDowell's most excessive performances. There was the Frederick Forsyth mercenary epic The Dogs Of War, the famously awful "punk" movie Breaking Glass, and a part as the compere in Terry Gilliam's dwarftastic Time Bandits (he'd later turn up as the nutty plastic surgeon Dr Jaffa in Gilliam's awesome Brazil). And there was the superior computer-conspiracy drama Bird Of Prey. Broadbent's rep was growing. He'd played Our Friends In The North with the RSC, and made more connections while doing TV work with young directors like Mike Newell and Stephen Frears. Again, these would come in useful.

In 1982, having the year before featured as Vroomfondel in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Broadbent appeared in a short movie called Dead On Time, co-starring Rowan Atkinson and written by Richard Curtis. An accomplished comic actor after his work with the National Theatre of Brent, he'd often appear in the classier British TV comedies, like Curtis's Black Adder series, the Comic Strip, and Victoria Wood's shows. And, of course, there was the insanely popular Only Fools And Horses. There's a high chance Jim feels enormous relief at his present success, having actually turned down the role of Del Boy himself.

Now those connections began to make a serious difference. Jim played a barrister in Frears' tense drama The Hit, then came Eyre's The Insurance Man (co-starring Daniel Day-Lewis, later to co-star with Jim again in Scorsese's Gang Of New York), and then his first major screen role, in Newell's The Good Father. Here Broadbent played a man whose wife leaves him to become a lesbian and wants to keep their son. Anthony Hopkins was a very, very bitter fellow-divorcee who egged Jim into a damaging court case.

In 1987, he would marry Anastasia Lewis, a costume designer he'd met four years earlier, and he'd become step-father to her two sons, Tom and Paul (Anastasia would later become an exhibiting artist, usually working in woven fabrics). In the meantime, Broadbent continued his remorseless rise. He played that paragon of political incorrectness Ernest The Viking (A Rapist) in Erik The Viking, directed by Gilliam's Python-buddy Terry Jones. Then came Life Is Sweet, where he was a cook named Andy, always putting off home improvement jobs and trying to deal with his weirdo daughter Jane Horrocks (he'd play alongside her later when he appeared as Mr Boo, who owns the nightclub where her Little Voice performs). After this came Newell again and Enchanted April, where four women rent a cottage in Italy and contemplate their lives. One of the women was Miranda Richardson - like Broadbent an exceptional actor AND a renowned figure on the British comedy scene - and she'd also turn up in Jim's next big hit, The Crying Game, where she was a ruthless terrorist and he was a friendly bartender.

Jim was now hot property as a supporting actor, capable of funny and fascinating cameos, but humble and professional enough to let the big stars around him shine. He was great as Warner Purcell, the neurotic and compulsively eating leading man in Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway. Then he was the Duke of Buckingham in Ian McKellen's fascist-state Richard III, then came Rough Magic where he appeared alongside Russell Crowe and Bridget Fonda as she sought out a Mayan shaman and the ancient laws of magic.

Braodbent was impressive in these major productions, but there were other, less-heralded roles that proved he was now an actor capable of generating immense warmth. In Wide-Eyed And Legless, his wife Julie Walters is diagnosed with a mystery sickness and, terribly debilitated, can no longer walk. So, wanting him to have a full life, she sets him up with a blind novelist and a strange and beautiful triangle is formed. Then, in The Last Englishman, he was overflowing with beans as Colonel Alfred D. Wintle, a hero at the Somme who demands to see action two decades later in WW2 and eventually parachutes into Occupied France. And then he made an excellent Chief Inspector Heat, gleaning information from the treacherous Bob Hoskins in Joseph Conrad's 19th Century thriller The Secret Agent.

Comedy, though, was never far away and now he played incompetent bank manager Peter Duffley in the sitcom The Peter Principle. Then he was Pod Clock, head of a 4-inch high family and battling against evil lawyer Ocious P. Potter in the big-screen version of The Borrowers. Now he was launched on a filmic run of quite extraordinary Britishness. First he played Mother in The Avengers, the head of whichever shady government office it is that employs John Steed. Then came Little Voice, and Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. Here Broadbent played composer William Gilbert who splits from Sullivan due to consistent failure only to be inspired to write the duo's classic The Mikado. This was when Jim's efforts finally began to be lauded by the Powers That Be - the role won him a Best Actor award at Venice. He moved on to play Renee Zellweger's dad in Bridget Jones's Diary, again written by his old mucker Richard Curtis. It is amazing, and very telling, that people who work with Broadbent KEEP working with him. They must always have known something the world has only just realised.

Broadbent's profile was now high, and his special abilities much sought after. And two great roles came his way. In Moulin Rouge he played Zidler, owner of the titular club and disapproving of the relationship between his star, Satine (Nicole Kidman) and young writer Ewan McGregor. Bullets Over Broadway had shown how brilliantly flamboyant he could be - this went several steps further when he vamped his weird way through Madonna's Like A Virgin. Quite rightly, he was rewarded with a BAFTA.

And then there was Iris, with Jim as hubbie and biographer John Bayley. Jim played the older Bayley, his younger self being taken on by Hugh Bonneville who'd acted alongside Jim back in 1996 in Sam Mendes' Donmar Warehouse production of Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus. The older Bayley, who suffers under the weight of Murdoch's onrushing Alzheimer's, was a role that demanded both enormous charm and "tragic bafflement". Broadbent delivered both in spades (perhaps informed by his mother's death from Alzheimer's in 1995) and snapped up a Golden Globe for his pains. At the ceremony, this sweet fellow was quoted as saying "I'm overwhelmed, I'm trembling! There's Jon Voight and James Coburn, all my heroes. I might pass out". So good was Broadbent's performance in Iris that he also won a BAFTA nomination and, of course, that coveted Oscar.

Despite his late Nineties run of Brit Flicks, Jim was not impressed with current British films. "They seem so derivative and predictable," he's said "and shallow, really. By and large they are in no way profound; there's nothing rich about them. They have one idea and that's it". Nevertheless, he persisted on both sides of the Atlantic. Next came HBO's The Gathering Storm, reuniting Jim with his Richard III director Richard Loncraine. Here Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave starred as Winston and Clementine Churchill, struggling in the late Thirties, with Jim playing Churchill's close friend Desmond Morton, head of the industrial intelligence service, who helps him to convince Parliament that the Nazi threat is real. Now big news, Jim would be nominated for both an Emmy and a Golden Globe. Then came the imaginative animation The King's Beard, about a barber hoping to make a fortune in a kingdom where everyone wants to ape the monarch's facial hairiness.

As if to back up his criticisms of British cinema's lack of richness, his next big screen appearance would be in Martin Scorsese's 1800s epic Gangs Of New York. Here he'd play the corrupt politico William "Boss" Tweed, who supports Daniel Day-Lewis's Bill The Butcher in his running of the Five Points area, but also seeks the votes of the new immigrants that Bill detests and persecutes. He'd be equally unpleasant, if more overtly so, in a major new adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, playing Wackford Squeers. Here he would beat and starve the pupils at a Yorkshire school, before being thrashed himself by an enraged (and fleeing) Nickleby. Spiteful and vengeful, he then conspires with Nickleby's wicked Uncle Ralph (Christopher Plummer) to bring the lad down. It was proof of Broadbent's new status as one of Britain's great character actors that he looked absolutely at home in a cast list featuring Tom Courtenay, Juliet Stevenson, Timothy Spall and Alan Cumming.

2003 began with a cameo in Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things, based on Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and concerning the flippant but violently materialistic behaviour of London rich kids between the wars. Broadbent would appear caned and indecipherable, the drunkest Drunk Major in screen history. Then it would be back to America for Bruce Beresford's high profile TV movie And Starring Pancho Villa As Himself. This involved Hollywood's efforts to expand from shorts to feature-length films in the early 1900s, and the deal they struck with the Mexican rebel Villa to follow his real-life revolution, battles and all. Antonio Banderas would star as Villa, with Jim as Harry Aitken, producer and partner of the legendary director DW Griffith. Much lower-profile (though it would earn him another BAFTA nomination) would be The Young Visiters, a BBC production of a tale written by 9-year-old Daisy Ashford back in 1919. Here Jim would play Alfred Salteena, a bumbling businessman who picks up rampant social climber Lyndsey Marshal. He introduces her to the great and the good as best he can then, inevitably losing her, attends classes to improve himself.

Having voiced a giant fairy-king rabbit in Tooth and a lion in the all-star TV animation Pride, he now continued his run of period pieces with the sprawling Around The World In 80 Days, which saw him as Lord Kelvin, mean head of the Royal Academy of Science, whose feud and sneaky bet with Steve Coogan's Phileas Fogg sees the latter racing around the globe. Next there'd be Mira Nair's Vanity Fair, scripted by Julian Fellowes, a recent Oscar-winner for Gosford Park. Reese Witherspoon would star as the ambitious heroine Becky Sharp, Jim playing the wealthy merchant father of Jonathan Rhys Meyers, sternly opposing his son's marriage to Becky's best friend, whose father has been ruined, and disinheriting the boy. It was an ambitious project, with too many relationships to squeeze into a single movie - as well as the battle of Waterloo - but it was well-acted.

Jim now stepped forward some 150 years when returning to Mike Leigh for a tiny part in his award-winning Vera Drake, where Imelda Staunton played a kind-hearted illegal abortionist in Fifties London. There'd be more success with another small part when he reprised his role as Bridget Jones' dad in The Edge Of Reason. And there'd even be a Grammy nomination, for his part in a spoken-word adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh.

2005 would bring another welter of animations, with Robots dealing with "human" decency on a corporately controlled planet of automatons, Valiant following heroic pigeons as they flitted between the Allies and French Resistance during WW2, and then The Magic Roundabout Movie getting all psychedelic, Jim providing the dopey tones of Brian the Snail. Inbetween these there'd be Art School Confidential, directed by Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World, Bad Santa), where a kid dreaming of becoming a famous artist attends art school then, realising his talent will not take him as far as he'd like, plots a far more controversial plan to get his name in ther papers. Jim, along with John Malkovich and Anjelica Huston, would feature as one of the school's idiosyncratic denizens.

And then would come another massive project in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, the first in a scheduled series of CS Lewis adaptations, to be filmed in New Zealand by Shrek's Andrew Adamson and, hopefully, set to replicate the success of The Lord Of The Rings. Jim would play Professor Digory Kirke, the nutty old boy on whose estate the four young kids come to stay to avoid the Blitz, and in whose house they find the titular wardrobe. Kirke was, of course, the boy trapped in The Wood Between Worlds in Lewis' The Magician's Nephew, who battles the white witch Jadis and later constructs the wardrobe from the tree planted by lion-messiah Aslan to protect Narnia from everlasting winter. Clearly, Broadbent's part in the series would not be extensive.

It really won't matter. Fame has been a long time coming for Jim Broadbent. And you know just how he'll react to any success or disappointment - pull one of those funny faces of his, and get on with the next job. No plonker, he.

Dominic Wills