From Out Of The Shadows

The actor on the knock-on effect of Maurice and the tedium of upper-crust roles.

- Jack Watkins

A FILM critic recently wrote that, when Maurice, the Merchant-Ivory cinema adaptation of E. M. Forster’s Edwardian tale of a coming-of-age homosexual Cambridge undergraduate, was first released in 1987, the world wasn’t ready for it. ‘Well, the UK wasn’t ready for it,’ corrects its star James Wilby.

‘It went down fantastically well in the USA and ran for a year in Paris. My co-lead Hugh Grant and I shared Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival. Japan lapped it up. We did all right over here. The film wasn’t slammed, but Margaret Thatcher had just brought out Clause 28 and there was a semi-resurgence of homophobia.’

RADA-trained Mr Wilby admits that his first big-screen lead role owed much to his co-star. ‘We’d been in a film called Privileged a few years before. Julian Sands [George Emerson in Merchant- Ivory’s A Room With A View, in which Mr Wilby was a ‘party guest’] was to play Maurice, but pulled out. I knew Hugh had been cast so I phoned him up. The night before my audition, we went through every scene together, which was a massive advantage. Normally, you go into an audition completely dry.

‘Making the film was a fantastic experience,’ he goes on. ‘James Ivory is the kind of director who embraces actors. What often happens when the leading actor and director are both male is that there is competition between them on set because the main actor is generally who you see the film through. But James simply isn’t like that— he’s only interested in finding what you can bring to the part.’