The heartbreaking true story that could finally win Andrew Scott an Oscar

0To be or not to be: Ian Charleson as Hamlet in a previous touring production by Cambridge Theatre Company in 1974 – Donald Cooper / Alamy Stock PhotoTonight, Andrew Scott opens the London Film Festival in Elsinore, the title of which, for those who know Hamlet, points us to Shakespeare’s greatest play and the Danish court in which his hero meets his fate. Critics who saw the film in Toronto have hailed Scott’s performance as Ian Charleson, the Chariots of Fire star who played Hamlet at the National Theatre (NT) in 1989 while dying of Aids-related complications, as career-best work, and he’s being tipped for Oscar glory. Scott played Hamlet to award-winning acclaim in 2017, but judging by initial reactions, this feels like a different order of achievement.

The film – written by Stephen Beresford and directed by Simon Stone – has been researched in detail and will doubtless inspire people to find out more about Charleson and that era.

It’s a testament to the deep affection in which he was held, and the traumatic nature of those times for gay men, that almost 40 years on, some who knew Charleson, or were involved in the production, still prefer to keep their counsel when asked to share their memories. “Can we not go there?” one of those who was near the heart of things at the time asked me. Emotion coursed through the conversations I had with those willing to talk: sudden silences, and even tearfulness…

To tell the story in detail requires rewinding to the troubled first phase of the production, starring another breakthrough name of the 1980s: Daniel Day-Lewis, whom Richard Eyre – then the NT’s artistic director – cast in the lead, with Judi Dench as Gertrude and Stella Gonet as Ophelia. On paper, it looked like a smart move, but things went awry: Day-Lewis received mixed reviews, and broke down at the 65th performance on September 5. He left the stage after the ghost’s exit in Act I and said that he couldn’t continue (he never did). The incident was sensationally reported as a paternal “haunting”, but the actor later clarified: “It was communication with my own dead father [the poet Cecil Day-Lewis]. But I don’t remember seeing any ghosts of my father.”

That backstage drama gets reenacted in the film. Stella Gonet remembers it vividly: “I went straight to Dan’s dressing room to see how he was – he was in shock, he couldn’t speak,” she tells me. “The dresser came running in saying, ‘Can I take your boots?’ He had to take the costume to give it to Jeremy Northam [understudying Hamlet]. All the understudies were going, ‘Oh my god!’ because they hadn’t looked at their parts for six months.”

“I had wrong-footed myself,” Eyre admits now of the casting choice. “[At the National] Olivier had done it with Peter O’Toole, and Peter Hall had done it with Albert Finney. I thought, ‘I’ll do it with Daniel Day-Lewis, the pre-eminent actor of his generation.’ It’s not a good idea to do a play because you’re honouring a tradition.” Day-Lewis had not signed up to complete the full run in any event, and there were a number of recasts planned (including Dench, who was replaced by Sylvia Syms). Charleson – a household name after playing the Scottish athlete and Olympic gold medallist Eric Liddell in the Oscar-winning 1981 film Chariots of Fire – had worked with Eyre on his hit 1982 revival of Guys and Dolls, in which he was a luminous Sky Masterson.

Eyre met him and cast him in August. Charleson had been diagnosed with HIV in 1986 and by the summer of 1989, Aids had taken severe hold. He undertook treatment including radiotherapy and chemotherapy. After Day-Lewis’s exit, Eyre would have been forgiven for opting for reliability at all costs. In his diary, he writes of the August meeting: “We don’t talk about him being HIV-positive, but it’s there as an unspoken subtext… I offer him the part, more with my heart than my head.” He says now: “I had made the decision in good faith and I couldn’t rescind it. I knew he was very ill, but I wasn’t aware how very near to death he was.”

Those joining him in rehearsals before his first performance on October 9 were shocked by his appearance. Paul Jesson, who took over as Horatio, knew Charleson well: they had worked at the NT the previous year in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Charleson nicknamed Jesson “Goopy” after his role in that (Gooper). “When he walked into the room at the first rehearsal we had, I was shocked. I said: ‘What have they done to you?’ I thought he’d had some sort of operation.” As Gonet recalls, too: “It was the cruelty of his form of Aids, that it affected his sinuses – so his face became very puffy. For someone who was so beautiful, it was awful.”

A few weeks in, Charleson gathered the cast to explain he had Aids but advised them to stick to the official line that it was an ordinary virus. “I think everyone appreciated his honesty in telling us,” says Guy Henry, who played Guildenstern. “There had been much speculation, and at least it was clarified. At that time, [HIV] was still very frightening. How was it transmitted? Could you get it from an actor shouting at you – from spittle? It was alarming but I must say, I don’t recall anyone recoiling from Ian.”

Charleson keenly wanted to play the role, though, and instead of bringing despair, approached it with remarkable lightness – onstage and off. “There was absolutely no self-pity,” Gonet says. “He made me laugh so much – we would be silly Scots together before we went on stage. It liberated things. With Dan there was a tension, with Ian there was a freedom – a yawn in Polonius’ direction, a wee wink. I hadn’t giggled as Ophelia up until then.”

When he delivered the soliloquy “O that this too, too solid flesh would melt,” Jesson notes, he was “quite flip, offhand and sardonic. Not heavy.” He counsels against sentimentalising him: “He wasn’t all sweetness. He could be quite sharp. He could be a bit outrageous, actually – sometimes critical of colleagues, always in a funny way.” Charleson had played the role in his 20s. “As with all these great roles, if you do it early on, you have an idea of how it should be paced.” His Hamlet had no time to lose. There was something else he’d noticed even back in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “You could see it in his eyes sometimes – fear. Even if he didn’t talk about it, he used it.”

Here was an actor tackling the most gruelling role in the canon, one steeped in mortality and entailing the acceptance of death – while facing his own premature end. Eyre and his star discussed the way his condition informed the portrayal. “Ian was explicitly conscious of his own fate running in parallel with the character,” Eyre says. “It was quite unnerving in the rehearsal room to know you were watching someone who was contemplating his own death as he was speaking about it.” The emphasis of the production shifted.

Instead of a prince indecisive about action, here was someone confronting the inevitable. “Suicide seemed the least of his concerns,” said Eyre. “‘To be or not to be’ seemed more like a terminal speculation. Not ‘Do I end it now?’ but ‘How long do I have?’” “After Hamlet has killed Polonius,” he continues, “he becomes, in his own eyes, tainted by murder. There is no way back. When he returns from England, there is a sense of certainty: ‘I know what is going to happen, please don’t make a fuss.’ There was no sense in Ian of ‘I’m off to a better place’. The doors were closing.”

And they were closing in real time. “He became so weak, he used to hold onto me,” Jesson says. “I propped him up whenever we were together. So we had this extraordinary intimacy. He used to die in my arms and he had no weight to him. Jeremy Northam, when he did it, was like a felled ox.”

That tenderness was in contrast to attitudes elsewhere. Someone at the National was tipping off journalists – news of Day-Lewis’s breakdown had reached the Daily Mail “almost before he was off stage”, Eyre says. When Charleson took over, the intrusion took on an uglier character. “I’ve heard today that the Sunday Mirror is asking if Ian is going to be able to open in Hamlet because he’s got Aids,” he recorded in his diary mid-September. Charleson was subjected to being door-stepped by journalists at his west London home. The wider backdrop was poisonous: Section 28 – legislation prohibiting local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” – had passed the previous year, and Fleet Street’s coverage of Aids and homosexuality was at its most vicious. “The thing the [Elsinore] script exaggerates is that it has me being naive about the response of the press – and that’s not true. I knew what I was getting into,” Eyre says.

Inside the building, not everyone was on board either. Someone scrawled a black cross over a photograph of Charleson’s face near the stage door. “You have to think,” he adds, “who did that? Not everyone at the National thought Ian should be there.”

Charleson didn’t hide away. “As far as I can remember, he often came to the bar afterwards, which Dan didn’t,” Henry says. “I don’t remember him being too remote or removed because of the illness.” Even so, Charleson was aware of his waning powers – he missed some performances, and kept apologising to Eyre. “It was very upsetting,” the latter says. “I could only keep saying: ‘You haven’t let me down in any way.’ We talked on the phone just before his last performance and he sent me a card around the same time saying how sorry he was. But I think he left in triumph. I have no regrets about casting him. In retrospect it’s a decision I feel very proud of.”

On the evening of November 13, 1989, Charleson played Hamlet for what would be the final time, after 18 performances. Though the production went on to tour overseas and return to the National at the end of its run in December, he would take no final lap of honour.

“His performance was possessed. He wasn’t playing the part, he became it,” Eyre wrote in his diary. As he received his rapturous standing ovation, he was, as Eyre put it, “like a bruised boxer after 16 rounds, battered by applause”.

Playwright Helen Kluger, who trained with Charleson at Lamda but was unaware of his illness, was there that night: “When he came on stage he was unrecognisable, his face bloated, [with] eyes that one could hardly see. I was in the first five rows, and I remember putting my head in my hands in shock. But from his first entrance to the curtain call he was in a state of grace and we were with him all the way. He visibly weakened throughout the night. The ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy came over almost as a prayer – the audience were all leaning towards him, willing him on. When he came on at the end for his bow, well, I never experienced a reaction like it. I just hope he knew what a sensational performance he gave us. I haven’t seen a production of Hamlet since and have no wish to.”

That rapture – and that thunderous applause – were their own affirmation of the wisdom of Eyre’s casting choice. “There can be a clarity when you’re with people who are dying,” Gonet says, simply. “They help you deal with it. He did that – he handed it to the audience.” Henry confirms this: “I remember saying at a schools matinee, ‘It’s extraordinary. People listen, they’re rapt. How do you do that?’ He said: ‘I don’t know. I think I just concentrate on what I’m saying.’”

He died on January 6 1990, aged 40. Buried in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, his grave is inscribed with Horatio’s adieu: “Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” His family wanted his cause of death to be known – his is said to be the first showbusiness death in the UK attributed to Aids-related complications.

His performance is now just a memory – and it’s a performance, by definition, without equal because the context of it was so uniquely harrowing. As Eyre says: “The notion that there was this plague, and its sufferers had the mark of Cain on them… I can’t see how those circumstances are going to be repeated.”

Does Elsinore do Charleson justice? Eyre believes so: “Andrew matches Ian’s grace and talent and beauty,” while Jesson goes further: “It’s devastating and Andrew Scott’s performance is astounding. There were moments when I thought he was Ian.”

In his final days, Charleson managed to send Eyre a Christmas card from hospital, the Royal Free in Hampstead. Eyre has kept it. In it was written (with a dying hopefulness): “One day when I’m better I’d love to attempt Hamlet again, and all the rest… I can’t tell you how much of a kick I got out of doing the part, if only for the short time I could.”

Elsinore opens the London Film Festival on Oct 7 and is released in cinemas on Jan 29

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