第73页 The Making of Harry Potter - Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets

提及Kenneth Branagh的部分

  Of all the new characters joining Hogwarts in it second year, perhaps the most noticeable was the flamboyant best-selling author and celebrity wizard Gilderoy Lockhart, brought in by Professor Dumbledore to become the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. Several actors were considered for the part, including Hugh Grant, whom Chris Columbus had directed in Nine Months. But what Kenneth Branagh came in to audition, it was immediately clear that he was Lockhart. David Heyman recalls,"He was perfect. Ken is the consummate actor. And yet he was comfortable playing the narcissist and the buffoon. His performance was heightened, but it had real truth."

  The Emmy-winning actor/director Kenneth Branagh arrived on the British theater scene in the early 1980s  and quickly established himself in the Royal Shakespeare Company before forming his own troupe, the Renaissance Theatre Company. By the age of twenty-nine, he was echoing the work of Laurence Olivier by landing dual Oscar nominations as both actor and director for his 1989 adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry Ⅴ. At that time he was also married to Emma Thompson, joining her and future Harry Potter stars Imelda Staunton and Robbie Coltrane on Thompson's eponymous TV comedy-sketch show. His movie work as a director and actor continued with more Shakespeare and projects as diverse as Peter's Friends, Frankenstein, and Wild Wild West.

  Columbus was eager to work with Branagh. "I'd looked at other actors, but I was concerned that audiences would be looking at the celebrity side of the actor as opposed to the performance," he recalls. "We started a tradition with the Harry Potter films that we wanted to work within the arena of the great British stage and screen actors. And for me, it was hard finding a younger actor that could hold his own against the likes of Richard Harris, Maggie Smith, and Alan Rickman. So it was difficult to conceive of anyone else play Lockhart other than Ken, who is one of the great stage and screen actors of our time and a great filmmaker."

  Branagh himself was initially less certain. "It was nerve-racking," the actor explains, "but only because I was aware that it was a hugh film with big expectations, and that audiences already had a very established idea of who Lockhart was. He's very flamboyant in the book and very self-regarding. We had to convince the audience that he could have done all the things he claims; he had to be plausible.

  "We tried to have a much fun as we could with the clothes and the look of the character. Gilderoy is something of a dandy," Branagh continues, "and so all his clothes are dandified and he struts like a peacock. He's rather vain and self-congratulatory and feels himself to be terrifically important. So he's a delicious character to play, ferociously irritating and charming, but a great character with a different costume for every scene."

  For Daniel Radcliffe, it was yet another opportunity to work with and learn form a truly seasoned actor. "He was fantastic. Lockhart is an egotist with thousands of pictures of himself, and he's a show-off and a fraud. Girls love him, and boys hate him because they know that something is not quite right, whereas Ken Branagh, on the other hand, is the nicest man on earth and one of the funniest people you'll meet.

  "He would teach me," Radcliffe continues. "Just before we would be doing the bathroom scene with Moaning Myrtle, for example, he would be talking to me about Twelfth Night and how the characters Viola and Olivia are near anagrams of each other. He explained the story to me. What a privilege and what a teacher."