From a shy kid to Shakespearean lead
by Robert Crew
Toronto Star
24 June 1999
Toronto Star
24 June 1999
But he assures you it's true.
"I was cripplingly shy when I was younger," he says. "I was almost unable to speak and had violent, violent reactions to meeting new people."
He masked it all by being reserved and expressionless.
"Friends told me that a lot of people thought I was the most arrogant, stuck-up individual that they'd met in a long time, that I was vain and turned in on myself," he says.
"In fact, I was just crippled with an inability to do anything. What they were reading was something that wasn't there at all."
Years later, Johnson was able to draw on that painful adolescent experience to play the silent and antisocial Mr. Darcy, in the acclaimed stage version of Pride and Prejudice, running at the Stratford Festival until Nov. 6.
The slowly developing sizzle between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Lizzie Bennet (played by Lucy Peacock) is the mainspring of Jane Austen's 1813 novel.
"Both are social misfits. They don't fit in the world in which they live," Johnson says.
"And with all his money, Darcy is a sitting duck. He can't go anywhere but everybody wants to introduce him to their daughters or the daughters are coming on to him."
Johnson's other assignment this season is the title role in Shakespeare's Richard II. The production, directed by Martha Henry, opens tonight at the Tom Patterson Theatre.
"One doesn't want to speak, the other never shuts up," Johnson jokes.
It's the latest in an impressive series of roles Johnson has undertaken since returning to Stratford four seasons ago -- Biff in Death of a Salesman, plus Shannon in Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana, and Wayne Chance in the playwright's Sweet Bird of Youth.
"The Tennessee Williams roles demand so much of you emotionally and yet they demand such control in their seeming lack of control," Johnson says.
"And with Richard II, that work has begun to pay off."
He's also finding useful parallels between Richard and Williams' complex, larger-than life characters.
"He (Richard) is ugly and he is beautiful, he is generous and he is stingy, he is murderous and he is life-giving. Like Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams was not afraid to show everything about these characters and not care whether people liked them or not.
"If you do have the ability to show that and portray them in a really honest light, the chances are very good that people will stay to watch."
Richard II is a multilayered portrait of a flawed but very human person, clearly unsuited to the burden of kingship that is his by divine right.
He's a weak man but blessed with a poet's imagination and soul. Some of his major speeches are dazzling -- among the finest Shakespeare ever penned.
Understandably, the role has attracted many of the great classical actors of this century, including Maurice Evans, Alec Guinness, Paul Scofield, John Neville, Derek Jacobi and (perhaps pre-eminently) John Gielgud.
At Stratford, William Hutt was Richard II in 1964 while Brian Bedford donned and doffed the crown in 1983.
In 1979, director Zoe Caldwell alternated three Richards -- Frank Maraden, Nicholas Pennell and Stephen Russell. Johnson has clear memories of that production. Then in his mid-20s, he appeared as 1st Herald and Another Lord.
Johnson returned to Stratford in 1996 after a globe-trotting few years playing assorted villains for TV and the movies, with a little stage acting in between. "I had done so much light fare that eventually you need a really good feast," he says. "I have been so lucky to have that here.
"Most of the work was in TV and I was becoming a really bad TV actor."
But he won't be back in the festival next year. "It's been a wonderful four years but I'm not one who can stay for too long in one place.
"But I go to, hopefully, come back -- renewed, refreshed and as hungry as I was four years ago."
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