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The Forsyte Saga – Masterpiece Theater
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www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/forsyte/
www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/forsyte/notes.html
www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/forsyte/ei_lewis.html
Whether they realized it or not, viewers of the popular Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks miniseries Band of Brothers were watching an English actor in the starring role of Major Richard Winters, the taciturn American hero of an airborne unit during World War II. The actor Damian Lewis is from London’s Abbey Road and attended Eton.
Who is Soames Forsyte?
He’s fastidious, smug, and conceited. But he’s also a person capable of love, though unfortunately unable to express it in a satisfactory way, especially to a young woman. He understands life in terms of contracts, property, and duty. And if any of those things is threatened, he falls apart. He can be cruel and small-minded, but that’s often generated by this repressed passion that he’s unable to express fully, or successfully, or healthily.
I went to English boarding schools and grew up around people very much like Soames and in a milieu very much like the Forsytes’s, even down to wearing tails, and stiff collars, and cravats. So I feel quite at home in the environment in which The Forsyte Saga takes place. But I’m a more ebullient person than Soames is.
How do you perform such a conflicted, complicated character?
You’re hitting at a central point about acting, which is that for all the research you do, acting is finally an instinctive craft. My responses are not governed by some piece of information I have, but by what Gina McKee or Ioan Gruffudd or Rupert Graves is saying to me on the set. The scripts helped, and also the conversations I had with Sita [Williams], the producer, and Chris [Menaul] the director. We didn’t want a simple villain in Soames. I think it’s more challenging for the audience if they’re presented with a character they hate but also feel sympathy for, who presents them with moral questions and has them thinking, God, I feel so sorry for Soames, but he just raped his wife! That’s far more interesting.
That rape scene is very famous.
It’s famous because in 1967 it was so novel to see something that explicit on TV. Now we’re used to images like that, and the question in everyone’s mind becomes, how graphic will it be? Our rape scene isn’t at all graphic. It’s suggestive, but still terribly shocking within the context of the drama. It should be shocking — psychologically and emotionally shocking.
Is it very difficult to do a scene like that?
Yes, it’s horrible to do. And it was all the more horrible because we happened to be filming it on September 11th. Gina and I were doing this harrowing scene as news was filtering in about what was happening in New York. It was a very weird, very upsetting day. We were just acting, and meanwhile this real thing was going on.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forsyte_Saga
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