Jude Law is Back on Track

But still, the truth is that some of those films just weren’t very good. Alfie, especially, was a disappointment and, as the star and central character, Law was forced to shoulder much of the blame. It wasn’t, I tell him, that he wasn’t good in it, just that the whole film seemed misconceived, a quixotic attempt to make relevant a relic of a time long past.

“One person said something that I have to be honest I agreed with,” says Law, “which was that Alfie should have been a woman, in a modern version. And I thought that was brilliant. I think that statement sort of summed up maybe where we went wrong.” And he wants to leave it at that, because he feels disloyal to the director to be picking over their film’s bones with a reporter.

I ask him if he’ll choose parts with more care in the future. The answer, effectively, is no. “Some people ask, ‘What’s your career plan?’” he says. “Apparently people have career plans, in this world, in acting. I’m not one of those people. I certainly don’t know many actors who do stuff because it’s going to raise their profile, either. Not that I had any need of that.” Wry smile. “Other things have taken care of that over the past few months.”

“Actors,” believed the essayist William Hazlitt, “belong to the public: their persons are not their own property… I conceive that an actor, on account ot the very circumstances of his profession, ought to keep himself as much incognito as possible. He plays a number of parts disguised… and he should not disturb this borrowed impression by unmasking before company more than he can help.”

So how good an actor is Jude Law, given his inability, through no real choice of his own, to “keep himself as much incognito as possible”? And how difficult is it, as a result, to divorce his public persona from those of his characters?

Anthony Minghella, the eminent British director who has cast Law in his last three films, reckons that Law is “our most undervalued actor”.

“Somehow,” Minghella tells me, “the collision of his personal life with his work as an actor has obfuscated his quality.”

Sean Penn, who has endured his fair share of media hounding, believes that the distractions of tabloid gossip are temporary, and won’t impact on Law’s professional reputation, “Maybe these kind of things can be interruptive at the time,” he says. “But they really don’t tell us anything about a person. In the long term all that will be forgotten.”

In the meantime, says Minghella, “All [Law] can do is ask for people to look at his work honestly and not play the game of compare and contrast with the characters.”

In the coming months, we will have three more opportunities to play the game, or not and to draw parallels - both gratuitous and unavoidable - between the lives Law portrays on screen and the one he lives himself.

First comes All The King’s Men, an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel about tarnished idealism in the Deep South, which was first translated to the screen in 1949, winning the Best Picture Oscar the following year.

Written and directed by Steven Zaillian, screenwriter of Schindler’s List, the new version is a classy, almost old-fashioned Hollywood drama, with pointed political concerns and a barnstorming performance from Sean Penn as Willie Stark, the rabble-rousing demagogue loosely modelled on Huey tong, senator for Louisiana in the Thirties.

Filmed in pre-Katrina New Orleans it’s a tremendously atmospheric film, effectively conjuring a world of smoky public offices, backwoods towns dipped in bourbon and swamp-side Southern aristocrats sinking into moral quagmires of their own design. It’s remarkably faithful to the book, too, making only judicious cuts to the narrative and wisely putting great chunks of Warren’s juicy dialogue straight into its actors’ mouths.

Among an excellent cast, including Kate Winslet and Anthony Hopkins, Law shines. His character, high-born newspaper columnist turned muckraking political aide Jack Burden - dig that name - is the rather dubious moral center of the film as well as its narrator. He’s also, arguably, the character who suffers most as the whiff of corruption becomes a stench, and All The King’s Men is Burden’s story as much as it is Stark’s.

“They’re a pain in the arse, actually, parts like that,” says Law. “They’re really draining, because you spend so much time watching and listening and at times you just want to get up and say, ‘When can I do my bit?’ And there never is a chance.” He’s damning himself with faint praise, here, because he delivers an exceptionally fine performance as Burden, a character arguably more complicated and nuanced than Penn’s grandstanding politico.

The older actor is unbounded in his praise for his co-star. How good an actor, I ask him, is Law? “He’s all the way there,” says Penn. “He’s one of the top two or three I’ve ever worked with. And I’ve been very lucky in who I’ve worked with.”

There’s usually an air of well-he-would-say-that-wouldn’t-he around actors’ appraisals of each other, particularly when they share top billing in a forthcoming film. Penn was hardly likely to have bemoaned Law’s shortcomings to me. Nevertheless, this is high praise. Penn is widely perceived as the actor’s actor of his generation, and he has played opposite Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson and many other icons of American cinema.

“From my point of view,” he says, “with Jude you’re in the company of somebody completely dedicated. He has talent and he has grace, and he’s a real gent.”

Why, then, is he so often underrated? “He’s too handsome to be properly rated as an actor,” says Penn. “That’s how it is. It’s a perversion of our times.”

As if to illustrate Law’s earlier points about the malign influence of the media, All The King’s Men comes before us already encumbered by negative publicity. It was originally to have been released in late 2005 but, Law tells me, it was decided then that the film was too long, and that it needed a better ending. Sony agreed to delay release by almost 12 months, at considerable cost - Law reckons around $15m just to buyout the foreign sales - while Zaillian perfected his film. Despite this spirit of full disclosure, unfriendly speculation has continued to dog All The King’s Men. By the time you read this it’ll already have opened in the States and on 27 October, it’ll be out in the UK, when audiences can judge for themselves.

Two weeks later another new film arrives. Breaking And Entering reunites Law with Anthony Minghella, with whom he shot to international fame in 1999, in The Talented Mr Ripley, and who gave him his first full-blown Hollywood lead, in Cold Mountain, in 2003. Law was Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated for both those performances - and won a BAFTA for Ripley - and his work with Minghella has been among his most satisfying so far.

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