‘The eccentricities of genius, Sam,’ said Mr Pickwick.
Mr. Pickwick, Dickens’s great comic creation, was
referring to that
elusive quality which he himself undoubtedly possessed, and which is common to
all genuine eccentrics – there is
about them all an air of genius. Theatre and literature are crowded with these ‘special’
people. Long after the heroes, heroines
and villains have faded from our thoughts, the eccentrics are still there, firmly implanted
in our memory. Shakespeare’s Falstaff,
Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster - these are but a few of the
characters who have become part of British heritage. They are some of the
legends of literature, but it’s
clear their characteristics are so well defined, so well-drawn, that they must have surely all
been based very closely on real eccentrics.
However brilliant the author may be, however powerful the imagination, the creation of
classic eccentrics owes more to the skill
of observation than any other attribute.
In the world of cinema, there have been equally
memorable eccentrics; character actors
and actresses who extend their performances way beyond the scope of their roles, adding
an extra indefinable dimension to all
that they do and say. And British cinema has been rich indeed in such people.
Cinema eccentrics are a breed apart. They do play scripted parts - often with acclaim - but there’s
always that essential ingredient, an intangible,
unique quality marking them out as ‘different’, which comes shining through. It transcends dialogue,
photography or even the
most demanding director.
A.E. Mathews, known affectionately as ‘Matty’ to
everyone in the entertainment
industry, was born in 1869. It’s difficult to believe that when he began his career in
films in the early 1920s, he played romantic
leads, for his later performances have come to represent the archetypal English eccentric.
And he was the real thing – stories of
his off-set eccentricities abound.
But many of the tales were initiated by Mathews himself. For example, he was supposed to
be very carefree about learning his
lines for a play and used to give the impression he was constantly on the brink of
‘drying up’. Yet it’s known he devoted
long hours to studying a part, and his relaxed, almost absent-minded, approach to his
work was merely a well-calculated pose.
It did sometimes backfire: on one occasion when he met George Bernard Shaw, a
playwright whom he much admired,
he told Shaw that he had never been in one of his plays. ‘Nor will you be,’ Shaw replied
acidly, ‘I prefer actors to speak the lines I write. I hear that you prefer
your own.’ This remark only momentarily
ruffled Mathews, who could probably lay claim to being the oldest working actor of
them all.
He made his stage début at the Prince’s Theatre in
1887 in a play called
Held by the
Energy, in
which he played every part but one. Yet to
Alfred Edward Mathews (he rarely used his full Christian names), this would have been par
for the course. It was part of his stage
upbringing to turn his hand to anything and everything theatrical. He was the son of a
Christie minstrel and must have watched
his father as he was singing, dancing, and playing a variety of musical instruments, engaging
in ‘repartee’ - as joke-telling was referred
to in those days - and then being a part-time stage manager and set designer. A minstrel had
to do the lot, and his son was left in
no doubt that he should be able to do the same.
Mathews’ experiences in a long and busy career often
read like a catalogue of catastrophes. He
was laughed and booed off the stage in Australia. In South Africa,
the audience was so critical of
his efforts that they fired revolvers at the
ceiling. And in New York, during the first of his many Broadway seasons, he was doped and robbed
in Chinatown, and sent back to England
on a boat, steerage class.
But ‘Matty’ the Unpredictable was
also unflappable. He could laugh
at all types of misfortune because he never took himself or life too seriously, and this was
probably the secret of his success. He claimed
to have earned over £1 million, a great deal of money in those days, and blown it all!
‘What I haven’t thrown away, those damned
Inland Revenue people have collared,’ he once said.
At the age of eighty, A.E. Mathews made his film début
as a ‘star’ in the
screen version of William Douglas Home’s comedy about impoverished aristocracy, The Chiltern Hundreds (1949). He was surrounded by a strong cast,
including David Tomlinson, Marjorie Fielding,
and Cecil Parker. Mathews said of Parker, ‘He acted me off the set.’ But although Parker as
the loyal butler was splendid, this was
always Matty’s film. He was the personification of all those dotty English peers who ignore
the big issues and concentrate on trivia.
In The Chiltern
Hundreds, it
was an obsession with
marauding rabbits invading the grounds that seemed to occupy all waking hours. There
seemed to be so much of Mathews
himself in this role for, in truth, he was straight out of a Wodehousian world of absent-minded
Earls and Squires in Bertie Wooster-land.
He had made the Douglas Home character fit him like a well-tailored Norfolk
Jacket, having been involved with the original
stage play from the outset.
On the first night of the stage play The Chiltern Hundreds in 1949, after his first exit the audience
rose to give him a tumultuous ovation.
A fellow actor standing in the wings turned to say, ‘Congratulations old boy,
I’ve never heard such applause
on a first act exit.’ Quick as a blast from a double-barrelled shotgun, Mathews replied, ‘Well,
you know what that means – they don’t
think I'll live till Act II.’ He was at the time seventy-seven.
A.E.
Mathews died peacefully in his bed at the age of ninety on 26 July
1960. ‘It was,’ said Robert Morley (by no means a lightweight in the eccentricity stakes himself),
‘the most unlikely thing he ever did.’
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