‘I live completely anonymously,’ whispers Jim Broadbent down the phone from Lincolnshire. Nonsense, I counter. You’re one of the most recognisable actors in this united luvviedom. ‘Am I?’ he asks gently.
Oh come on. You’re Bridget Jones’s dad, Del Boy’s arch-enemy Roy Slater, Lord Longford campaigning for Myra Hindley’s parole, dotty antiques-shop owner Samuel Gruber in the Paddington films, Game of Thrones’s Archmaester Ebrose, testy but lovable W.S. Gilbert in Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, and the blackmailer who unacceptably shakes down Maggie Smith’s eponymous Lady in the Van.
I best know Broadbent as Prince Albert in Blackadder’s Christmas Carol (1988), trying to go incognito among the commoners by passing himself off as Glaswegian. ‘Ah, fine city,’ says Blackadder of Glasgow. ‘I love the Gorbals.’ ‘Yes, the Gorbals,’ retorts Broadbent, as Albert, uncertainly in an unmistakably German accent. ‘I love them, too. A lovely couple, lots of fun.’
The literati recall him fondly opposite Judi Dench as decrepit Oxford don John Bayley in Iris (2001), a performance that earned Broadbent an Oscar.
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