Actors: Introverted Englishman

Never in their 32-year history have the New York Film Critics awarded a picture more than three prizes. But last week they voted four hurrahs for A Man for All Seasons: best picture, best direction (Fred Zinnemann), best script (Playwright Robert Bolt), and best actor. This last honor went to Britain's Paul Scofield, who as Thomas More plays a saint without seeming self-righteous, a giant of his age without seeming supercolossal. American audiences, who seldom get to see Scofield, will probably agree—and conclude as well that Scofield ranks with the best of England's superior breed of actors.

Scofield's new eminence in the U.S.

does not surprise his fellow Britons, who rank him after the aging acting knights—Olivier, Richardson, Guinness, Gielgud, Redgrave—and ahead of the young hotspurs represented by Albert Finney and Robert Stephens. Indeed, Scofield, 44, is pretty much a generation all to himself; once Richard Burton shared that status, but as Burton confided to a friend, "When I saw Scofield act, I knew I could never be that great, so I decided to grab the loot."

Fallen Angel. Neither loot nor limelight has ever seduced Scofield. The most introverted of English actors, he avoids public places, parties and the press. Between performances, he commutes by train to his cottage 50 miles into rustic Sussex, lives "a complete family life" with his wife, Actress Joy Parker, their two children, some horses and dogs. "It sounds funny for an actor to say it," he says, "but I haven't any desire for the center of the stage."

That helps explain why he commands stage center so nobly. Says Robert Bolt:

"As a true actor should be, he is an interpretive artist, not a personality merchant." For a major star, he is unique in lacking idiosyncrasies, ranging without trick or mannerism or telltale signature from classical heroes to contemporary antiheroes. A gaunt six-footer, he looks like a fine-grained, graceful Abe Lincoln. His expression glows with open intelligence, wit, humanity. From two foxholes lurk eyes that can flick a sense of danger to the farthest balcony. A critic wrote that he has the face of a fallen angel.

Those brown eyes are Scofield's secret weapon, says Sir Laurence Olivier, but others think it is the voice. "You can't take your ears off him," wrote one London reviewer. It is an instrument of unmatched subtlety and quiet amplitude. Scofield agrees that "what reaches them is the voice—not the quality but the conviction of the voice."

School Dropout. It is that conviction, as well as his presence and artful stagecraft, that has made Scofield's performances near legendary. Helen Hayes, who saw him in the Broadway production of A Man for All Seasons, led the applause by rising and bellowing "Bravo! Bravo!" Playing Hamlet in Moscow in 1955, Scofield drew 16 curtain calls, the last three with the whole audience chanting his name in unison. When he played the whisky priest in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, the London Sunday Express called his performance "one of the finest pieces of character acting since the war."