A fluke. Pure luck. That's how British character actor Ian Hart describes his first exposure to acting. The Liverpool native, who at 15 was more interested in seeing The Clash play live than anything else, happened to be following a friend around after school when he found himself in an improv class at the local youth theatre. "Before we had therapy, improvisation was a great way to get things off your chest," Hart quipped. However, this experience did not set the actor on that illustrious road of traditional drama schools and stints at the Royal Theatre, which would explain Hart's stateside success in films such as Backbeat, The End of the Affair, and the upcoming The Closer You Get, a sweet comedy about a group of bachelors desperately seeking love in an isolated Irish coastal village.
Rather, Hart, who plays a slightly bloated bollocks-scratching butcher searching for a wife in his latest film, met with a decade and a half of unemployment and casual labor jobs-everything from working on a farm to washing dishes and driving vans-until he finally got steady work as an actor.
For this natural talent, the '80s were not a good time to be an actor in England. With no professional training, he was not being cast in classical or Shakespearean theatre pieces-"not because I can't do them but because people have a preconception of me." So he generated his own work. The dearth of a film industry and more theatres closing due to a faltering economy compelled Hart to start his own theatre company. "I used to do an episode of TV or some dreadful daytime nonsense to get enough money to put a play on for two weeks," Hart said. In return for rehearsal space, his company would have to produce several children's plays or host drama workshops. Eventually, internal quarreling broke up his group and once again, Hart was back doing odd jobs to supplement his unemployment check.
Then came Hart's big break: Christopher Münch wrote a short film called The Hours and Times, about Brian Epstein and John Lennon for which Hart signed on to play Lennon. Filmed in six days in 1988, it was not until four years later and after many financial problems that the black-and-white short finally screened in England for two nights. Hart's performance caught the attention of Iain Softley, the director of Backbeat, who was coincidentally looking to cast a John Lennon role.
"[The Hours and Times] paid off dividends," the actor said. "A no-budget film for which we received no recompense whatsoever financially, paid off because it turned out to be a piece of work that was good and got me other jobs."
After two stints as the Beatles' superstar, the worry pervaded that Hart could only pull off Liverpool impersonations. But director Ken Loach saved Hart's bacon, so to speak, by casting him in Land and Freedom, a film about an Englishman fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Earning this role gave Hart the validation that someone would take a chance on him to play more than just a working-class sot.
"I think I've avoided a lot of the clich s that have been sent my way by trying to do as much diverse work as possible," he said. Hart, having proven himself an actor worthy of meatier roles, found that the film community took notice. What followed were roles in such films as Nothing Personal, Clockwork Mice, B Monkey, Mojo, Michael Winterbottom's upcoming Wonderland, and three films for Irish auteur Neil Jordan, Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy, and The End of the Affair.
His work, primarily in independent film, has taught Hart how to do without the creature comforts afforded a larger-budget film such as The End of the Affair, for example. "Doing bigger-budget films means having choices rather than choices being made for you borne out of necessity or poverty," he said. "The fact that you don't have to get dressed in a toilet, have a bus that used to be an ice cream van, or one guy with a hose to make rain instead of a street full of rain machines-it gives you a choice."
In addition, low- to no-budget films cannot offer the same support networks as larger films, Hart noted. But that shouldn't change the actor's approach to the work. Hart has strong advice for actors who, finding no extra help or preparation, try to direct themselves in a scene or try to force their opinion on a neophyte director. "You might be saving the film, but your responsibility is to facilitate the director's telling of the story. So many actors think they know better," he said. "I've worked with actors who've tried to run the whole scene, and with first-time directors the actors will get their own way because the director doesn't know how to nip that situation in the bud. If you want to go direct a film, go fucking direct a film. Go raise some finance, write the script, leave me the fuck out of it."
Though not without struggle, Hart has done well to work with directors who have recognized his inimitable talent and have given him the chance to rise above the stereotypes.