The face of a happy man

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Pete Postlethwaite may or may not be the greatest actor in the world. Some guy called Spielberg may or may not have said such a thing about him.

He may also be the nicest actor in the world - we'll have to wait and see. For the moment, I've got the pip with him.

He and his crew have taken out the entire smoking floor of the hotel. So as I huddle on a tiny balcony puffing into a freezing Melbourne wind, I am cursing Mr Postlethwaite.

The next morning he shambles into the foyer looking scruffily cheerful in his James and the Giant Peach sweatshirt and bright red leather boots the same shade as his nose.

Now, I say, don't mind about me, freezing on my balcony. Oh, he says, looking truly contrite. To make amends, he suggests that I should just pop up to his place any time I need a place to light up.

He seems to really mean this. So he is either a very, very good actor, or he really is the nicest actor in the world.

We amble down Flinders St, find a likely looking cafe with a fire and a smoking area, order coffee and light up. He has spotted a snooker table in the corner of a place a mere half a block from where he's settled in for the Melbourne run of his one-man show Scaramouche Jones.

His eyes blaze as bright as the end of his ciggie. Little things make Postlethwaite very happy.

The night before, I've seen him at the Athenaeum Theatre, a rickety barn with charm and a seat arm which keeps threatening to topple into the aisle. It seems the right place to watch the story of Scaramouche, the 100-year-old clown who will die at the moment the clock ticks over into the new millennium.

It is a dream role for an actor: a piece which is a metaphor for both the tragedies of the 20th century and for pure theatre. If great acting is about taking away, about stripping back to the essentials, then this play is about great acting done quietly.

He says - and it is a declaration of admiration for the writing which has created the clown: "There's absolutely no sign of Pete Postlethwaite up there. He stays in the dressing room because this character is now so much his own person."

He could be forgiven for wanting to stay there.

Because, he's always reading the same old things. He raises the first in response to being asked whether he gets annoyed by the same old things.

So, the first is that Spielberg said he was the greatest actor in the world. This is a quote which started life, I think, I tell him, as "Pete Postlethwaite is possibly the greatest actor in the world".

His reply, he says, "is to completely misquote, in fact, what I think he said: 'The problem with Pete is that he thinks he's the greatest actor in the world'."

Cough, cough, ha ha, we hack away. Yes, he's told the story before, but what the hell. It is easy to get conspiratorial with Postlethwaite. He has a knack of contemplating whatever nonsense you have just spouted as though you have just come up with the meaning of life.

HE ALSO speaks very quietly - his smoker's lungs have been taking a fair bit of punishment from 90-minute nights on stage projecting to houses of 900. You have to lean in to hear him and, because he speaks so beautifully and considers you so intently, you find yourself in the odd position of gazing in near adoration - at a man whose face looks like a crumpled map of a country that's been at war for centuries.

He won't mind that. Everyone has something to say about his face. Probably because it comes as such a relief to find a Hollywood actor whose mug looks like a properly lived-in human being's face.

The other thing that is always written about Postlethwaite goes along the lines of: Gee whiz, hasn't he done well for a working-class lad from Warrington. And now look at him. He's been in Jurassic Park 2, In the Name of the Father, Brassed Off, and his father a caretaker. Who'd have thought?

"You know, it's very demeaning to the working class in one way. I don't know, they'd like it to be a rags to riches story kind of thing."

He gets "tired of quite a few lines. The Spielberg. That corny old chestnut. It's like that line from Sunday Bloody Sunday, isn't it? Where the girl strips and somebody says, 'Oh, here come those tired old tits again'."

In the acting business, it is, he says, "very easy to start believing what other people say about you if you're not careful".

So if Postlethwaite believes what was said, "you know, turned down $20 million. I've had affairs with Helen Mirren ... "

If he'd had an affair with anyone, I say, I hope it was Rachel Griffiths. He appeared with Griffiths in Among Giants and she, surely, has the best legs of any actor in the world. He snorts happily at that. "We very much loved each other and got on very well."

Which is his way of making the point that living a public life is like living inside a game of Chinese whispers.

"What was that line in the First World War? Send reinforcements. I'm going to advance. And it turned out to be: Send three and four pence. I'm going to a dance."

IT MUST be difficult to keep the whispers going. Postlethwaite lives in a hamlet in Shropshire with his partner and their two children, aged 14 and 7. Here he cooks and does the washing and is a taxi driver to the kids.

Shropshire is "sheep and good people really".

He was born in Warrington 57 years ago to a "really brilliant, very loving" deeply Catholic family. His mum was a bit proud when her son, the actor, met the Queen. Secretly, he says, she would have loved to dress like the Queen Mum if she'd been able to afford it. Not so secretly, "I know there was nothing she would have liked more than to have a priest in the family. Never mind being an actor meeting Betty Windsor."

Actually, Postlethwaite entertained the notion. "There was a romantic aspect for some reason. That feeling of having a calling." Instead, he became a teacher, went to drama school, felt a genuine calling that made that face famous.

And now, never mind being a famous actor, what's he doing touring a one-hander? It can be a lonely sort of business, alone on a stage for 90 minutes a night, not to mention the feat of navigating floods of words.

Well, he loves the show. "Underlying all that fantastic language and the extreme detail of the story, there's an extraordinary cry for compassion."

And, "on a very, very simplistic and selfish level, it's a fantastic part for an actor to play".

Simple little things make the nicest actor in the world very happy.

* Scaramouche Jones, by Justin Butcher, is at the Sky City Theatre from July 30.