It's an art-house crowd-pleaser that shows us how an actor turned the chance to play Hamlet into an assertion of life in the face of death. The year is 1989, and that fiery young actor is Daniel Day-Lewis. (Walking off that stage, never to return to the production, is the first famous thing he did that seemed…extreme.) At first we think: Is this some weird theater biopic in which the young Daniel Day figures in? The movie is not about him.
It’s about another classy, dashing, well-known-at-the-time British actor — Ian Charleson (played by Andrew Scott), who was one of the two stars of “Chariots of Fire,” which had come out eight years before. He played Eric Liddell, the devout Scottish Christian who ran his Olympic races for the glory of God. That movie won the Oscar for best picture, so it placed Charleson, with his blond WASP handsomeness and slightly recessive severity, squarely on the map.
As “Elsinore” opens, we see that he’s been trying to make good on it ever since. But the sad truth is that Charleson, at 39, is already a has-been. His Hollywood career hasn’t panned out, and wherever he goes, people remember him from “Chariots of Fire,” which has become his badge of shame (and, in the film, something of a running joke), since the thing everyone loves most about that movie is the whooshing romantic synthesizer score by Vangelis. (At one point he gets into a cab, and the driver sings it for him.) They’re not wrong.
Charleson was a momentary heartthrob, but now, with his two-tone frosted hair (like George Michael’s, or maybe like Day-Lewis’ in “My Beautiful Laundrette”), and his delicate and abashed manner, he’s a gay actor who’s trying to contort himself to fit into the roles he’s offered, which are mostly in trashy B genre movies. Out and about in London, in the pubs and discos, he lives a vibrant gay life. Yet he doesn’t broadcast it, because he knows that will hurt him professionally.
He’s still trying to maintain a “straight” image in a mostly straight entertainment world. Early in his career, he made a movie called “Jubilee” (1978) with the transgressive gay director Derek Jarman (played here with whiplash ferocity by David Dawson), who is furious at him for having scrubbed that film from his resume. So why are we watching a biopic about Ian Charleson?
Because in 1989, he did something extraordinary. As we learn early on in “Elsinore,” he’s been diagnosed with HIV, which for him, thus far, has resisted erupting into full-blown AIDS. (He refuses to take AZT, which he considers a lame leftover chemo drug that does nothing.) Each day, he checks out his body with a hand mirror to make sure that there are no Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. Then, one day, as he’s sitting in the make-up chair getting ready to go onto a movie set, he finds one — a small purple blotch on his right temple.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
