There's something
quietly inscrutable and really rather regal about Don Warrington.
This is as apparent in conversation with the actor whose long
television career began in iconic 1970s TV sit-com, Rising Damp as it
is onstage in the touring production of Driving Miss Daisy, which
arrives in Edinburgh this week. It's something to do with the
perfectly enunciated and ever so slightly plummy drawl of his voice,
but there's a presence there too and a sense of containment that
suggests a stillness and an air of authority.
Such characteristics
make Warrington perfect, then, to play Hoke Colburn, the chauffeur to
Daisy Werthan, the deep south matriarch who gives Alfred Uhry's 1987
Broadway hit, filmed by Bruce Beresford two years later, its title.
Charting the pair's relationship between 1948 and 1973, Uhry's play
sees them move through a changing America, as in-built racism gives
way to the civil rights movement while Daisy and Hoke's
master-servant status gradually becomes an alliance of equals.
This is made explicit
in David Esbjornson's production via a series of sepia-tinged
documentary illustrations of Martin Luther King and other icons of
the era's black liberation movement. In a play regarded largely as
elegiac, this gives a perhaps surprising political undercurrent to
the action.
“I think the politics
in the play affects people,” Warrington says. “Some people will
say it's not political enough, but it's not a polemic. That's not
what the writer was setting out to do. It's a very human story. It's
so human and unusual, and that's its drama.”
Hoke was originally
played by Morgan Freeman, who recreated his role onscreen opposite
veteran British actress, Jessica Tandy. As with Freeman and other
noted Hokes, including James Earl Jones, Warrington brings a sense of
gravitas and sensitivity to the role.
“He's a decent guy,”
says Warrington, “but he's a man who has to make a living any way
he can, so he's an instinctive survivor. That's based on his sense of
hope, and how, come what may, he believes he will survive. He also
has this great sense of morality about him. He knows what is right.
He's sort of a moral politician, really. He believes that, no matter
how unfriendly to him the system is, fate will find a way.”
As the son of
Trinidadian politician Basil Kydd, such moral fibre is something
Warrington might have witnessed first hand. Rather than following in
his father's footsteps, however, Warrington knew he wanted to be an
actor from an early age.
“It was just
something I wanted to do,” he says now. “I don't know why. When
we were still living in the West Indies I saw an Asian film, and I
knew straight away that I wanted to do what the actors in the film
were doing. All these people singing and dancing, it looked
wonderful.”
Warrington's family
moved to Newcastle when he was five, where he had another epiphany
watching a very different kind of film.
“I remember seeing On
The Waterfront,” he says. “it had these huge themes of damnation
and redemption, and watching Marlon Brando, he had that elusive
quality, but with these incredible depths of emotion, and I just knew
again that this was what I wanted to do.
“It was my sort of
secret, which I didn't really share with anyone until I was old
enough to do something about it. Then when I was sixteen I went to
the local theatre, told them my ambitions, and they gave me a job.”
Warrington later
trained at the Drama Centre, which, as he notes, in the thick of
London's burgeoning counter-culture, was “a pretty revolutionary
school at the time. It was a big leap for me, going from Newcastle to
this house of creativity, which didn't prepare you for the real world
in any way.”
Warrington's first real
job as a professional actor on graduating was in a play called The
Banana Box. Eric Chappell's comedy, which was first produced in 1971,
and transferred to the Apollo Theatre in London's west end two years
later, was set in a seedy boarding house, which Warrington's
character moves into, claiming to be the son of an African chief.
This not only pricks the prejudices of his landlord, but also
inflames the passions of a female tenant.
When The Banana Box was
turned into a TV sit-com in 1974, the stage play's three principal
actors may have been retained, though its original title was ditched
in favour of the more evocative Rising Damp. With Leonard Rossiter as
landlord Rigsby and Frances de la Tour as the frustrated Miss Jones
joining the programme alongside Warrington and new recruit Richard
Beckinsale as long-haired student Alan, Rising Damp ran for four
series over four years, and in 1980 was adapted into a film version.
In 2004 the TV show came first in a BBC poll to name the top one
hundred sit-coms.
“It was very
well-written,” Warrington reflects, “and the characters were very
real. The casting was perfect for it, and even though it was a
sit-com, Leonard, Frances, Richard and I, we all wanted to make it as
real as we could, which I'm not sure would necessarily happen today.”
While the success of
Rising Damp undoubtedly opened doors for him, and helped transform
Rossiter in particular into a household name, Warrington maintains
that “There was nothing to change, because I didn't have a career
at the time. It was a very different time then, and its very hard to
say what doors doing Rising damp opened. My interest wasn't in fame,
it was in doing what my contemporaries were doing. At the time, there
were a lot of offers that seemed to come from my doing the programme,
but my interests lay elsewhere.”
Warrington's interests
took him to the Royal Shakespeare company and the National Theatre,
where he appeared as part of Bill Bryden's seminal Cottesloe company
in the Scots director's epic promenade take on The Mystery plays, as
reimagined by poet Tony Harrison..
“The first day we
opened we only had a dog and a drunk watching,” Warrington recalls
of the production, “but by the end you couldn't get a ticket.”
More recently,
Warrington has been playing a police commissioner in Caribbean-set
cop show, Death in Paradise, gas directed several plays, was awarded
an OBE for services to drama, and even notched a stint on Strictly
Come Dancing on his belt. Whatever Warrington tackles, it seems, he
always applied the same seriousness to each role.
“I've always looked
to parts which set me a challenge,” he says. “It's about trying
to make something real.”
Driving Miss Daisy,
King's Theatre, Edinburgh, March 5th-9th
The Herald, March 5th 2013
ends
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