- #HAROLD GUPPY INTIMATE RELATIONS MOVIE#
- #HAROLD GUPPY INTIMATE RELATIONS TRIAL#
- #HAROLD GUPPY INTIMATE RELATIONS PROFESSIONAL#
If the parties were a culture shock, so too were the London thesps. But I did learn juggling and slack wire."Īt only 22, he landed the role of Helena Bonham Carter's younger brother, Freddie, in A Room with a View. "I was employed mainly to put the tent up because there were very few able-bodied men. Primarily, so he reckons now, because he had been in love with Juliet Griffiths since he was seven and her mum "worked down the job centre". I didn't know you could get a scholarship so I determined early not to pursue that." So when the circus came to town, courtesy of the YTS, he joined up as a clown. "I kind of always wanted to act but to get a grant I would have needed two A-levels and I was too far away from even O levels. I was a dozy boy, I'd like to have been like James Dean but I was more Arthur Askey - pathetically rebellious in a cheeky chappy sort of way."īy 16, he had made one appearance in the school production of A Twelfth Night and had sung his way through three gigs with his pop band, A New Lumbago, at Weston Tech. I didn't enjoy it very much because it was boring and I had glandular fever so I missed a lot. With only one O-level to his name, Graves hasn't got good memories of his alma mater, Wyvern Comp. He had just finished a stint wrapping chips in Weston's Taste of Fish. There were, apparently, assumptions that, with his public-school looks, he might even be related to the poet Robert Graves.
#HAROLD GUPPY INTIMATE RELATIONS PROFESSIONAL#
There was perhaps a similar confusion about his class background when he first came to London, after his professional debut at the King's Head. I talk to the old biddies in the park when I'm with Roland and I'm not recognised very often." He says that if you do interviews and chat shows, you're asking the audience to suspend their belief in you as someone else. I could have said, `No, I'm not' but I chose not to. "I used to say it really was nobody's business. The truth is heterosexual domestic bliss with mature student, Yvonne - and greyhound, Roland - in Stoke Newington. That blank-canvas quality which allows the film to rise above the status of mere dramatic reconstruction (who should we blame?) to become a blackly-comic portrait of clumsily articulated desire (who isn't to blame?).įor a long time, he admits he enjoyed playing guessing games with journalists who enquired about his sexuality. Above all, though, there is Graves's intrinsic enigma. There is his physical presence, too - that game-for-anything sporting agility that exposes the post-war suburban souls he lands up with after years at sea as the grotesque embodiments of their society's overly rigid moral order. Those smoulderingly sheepish looks, so irresistible to women, have Julie Walters' prim and improper surrogate-mum Marjorie offering him much more than just lunch-box sandwiches to keep him going during his stay. There is his trademark little-boy-lost appearance (an appearance that seems unsullied by the decade that has passed since the handful of Merchant-Ivory dramas that first brought him to attention: A Room with a View, Maurice and A Handful of Dust). It's a part that Graves seems absurdly right for.
#HAROLD GUPPY INTIMATE RELATIONS TRIAL#
A dramatised account of evidence given at a murder trial in 1956 by Albert Goozee, upon whom the character of Guppy is based, the film leaves us feeling that the young man is not only prime agent and chief victim but also a strangely casual witness to an act of carnage rooted in illicit, three-way carnal desire.
#HAROLD GUPPY INTIMATE RELATIONS MOVIE#
The closing scene of the movie shows Guppy staring blankly out from a hospital bed, watched over by a policeman, facing the prospect of trial (and the death-penalty) for the bloody murder of his landlady and her teenage daughter.
It's an opening gambit that could easily have been uttered by Harold Guppy, the artless lodger he plays in the just-released Intimate Relations - a man whose inability to talk his way out of trouble results in his becoming mired in a painfully English kind of hell. "I'm just not very good at sentences," he adds, helpfully. "I'm crap at interviews," says Rupert Graves, cradling a half- empty glass of Stella and meeting my gaze with those famously fathomless brown eyes.
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