The voice. The gentle, mysterious smile. The walk – generally an older man's walk, across a garden, or presidential office, or prison exercise yard. The enigmatically polite manner: intimidating, even awe-inspiring for allies and adversaries alike. The list of actors who have tried all this is long: Morgan Freeman, David Harewood, Terrence Howard, Danny Glover, Sidney Poitier, Clarke Peters, Dennis Haysbert, Idris Elba — and Lindane Nkosi, the one South African actor who has managed to make some sort of impression as this character in Anglo-Hollywood circles, for a film called Drum, about the 1950s anti-apartheid campaign, that played at festivals in London and Cannes.
Nelson Mandela has been a role to be approached reverently, a difficult part and a career hurdle in some ways, like a royal figure in a Shakespearian play, a figure with fewer lines than the younger principals, but with richly poetic speeches – like the exiled Duke Senior in As You Like It. It is perhaps because Mandela himself entered the general conscience as a prisoner: someone who was able to impose his legend on the world in enforced and martyred inactivity. British film-maker Peter Kosminsky got into hot water a couple of years ago by proposing a film called Young Mandela, when Mandela was a fiery ANC soldier who very much did not believe in non-violence. The film has not yet been made, although Idris Elba's performance in Justin Chadwick's Mandela: The Long Walk To Freedom touches on the subject.
The stately Mandela of the cinema screen has been shaped by the man's status as a liberal icon of the 1980s and 1990s and also, I think, by two screen performances that have nothing to do with him: Ben Kingsley's Gandhi in Richard Attenborough's classic 1983 epic, and, at one further remove, Paul Scofield's Sir Thomas More in Fred Zinnemann's A Man For All Seasons (1966). These are saintly figures who have mastered the grubby political arts, but rise above them, figures who are in retreat for much of the time, but who can smilingly and even effortlessly best their enemies in debate – and who are themselves pretty wily. Perhaps without the actors fully realising it, their Mandela performances are influenced by Kingsley and Scofield.
Nelson Mandela has been a role to be approached reverently, a difficult part and a career hurdle in some ways, like a royal figure in a Shakespearian play, a figure with fewer lines than the younger principals, but with richly poetic speeches – like the exiled Duke Senior in As You Like It. It is perhaps because Mandela himself entered the general conscience as a prisoner: someone who was able to impose his legend on the world in enforced and martyred inactivity. British film-maker Peter Kosminsky got into hot water a couple of years ago by proposing a film called Young Mandela, when Mandela was a fiery ANC soldier who very much did not believe in non-violence. The film has not yet been made, although Idris Elba's performance in Justin Chadwick's Mandela: The Long Walk To Freedom touches on the subject.
The stately Mandela of the cinema screen has been shaped by the man's status as a liberal icon of the 1980s and 1990s and also, I think, by two screen performances that have nothing to do with him: Ben Kingsley's Gandhi in Richard Attenborough's classic 1983 epic, and, at one further remove, Paul Scofield's Sir Thomas More in Fred Zinnemann's A Man For All Seasons (1966). These are saintly figures who have mastered the grubby political arts, but rise above them, figures who are in retreat for much of the time, but who can smilingly and even effortlessly best their enemies in debate – and who are themselves pretty wily. Perhaps without the actors fully realising it, their Mandela performances are influenced by Kingsley and Scofield.
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