The Eccentrics

THE ECCENTRICS (I)

‘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. MATTHEWS

A.E. Matthews, 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 Matthews 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 Matthews, 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 Matthews (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.

Matthews’ 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. Matthews 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. Matthews 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 Matthews 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, Matthews 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. Matthews 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.’

THE ECCENTRICS (II)

MARGARET RUTHERFORD