British actor: 'I've fallen in love with Aristotle Onassis'
Nobody panics quite like Robert Lindsay. For more than 30 years he has portrayed men with less grip on things than they choose to believe.
Wolfie, his gobby Tooting Trot in Citizen Smith, was a forerunner of Michael Murray, the manic Labour militant he played in Alan Bleasdale's GBH. Even the paterfamilias in My Family, the sitcom role to which he has been largely confined in recent years, has ceded control of his own home.
Lindsay's Fagin has met his comeuppance both on television and in the stage musical. In the theatre he has memorably lost the plot as Henry II, Richard III and, most recently, Archie Rice.
But no one in this crowded firmament of sociopaths and psychotics has quite so much power to hold on to as his latest role.
In Aristo, Martin Sherman's new play about Aristotle Onassis, Lindsay plays the Greek tycoon who as a young man survived his family's decimation at the hands of the Turks in Smyrna to acquire millions and, along the way, seduce Maria Callas and marry Jackie Kennedy. How does an actor pump himself up to inhabit such a man?
"I do play flawed characters," Lindsay concedes.
"I know a lot of very rich people and a lot of them I don't like. But I bumped into an elderly lady the other day who knew Onassis and she actually said, 'Oh I would have loved to have ----ed him.' Power is very sexy. And of course when you were on that yacht nothing else existed."
Aside from this anecdotal insight, Lindsay has read Ari, Peter Evans's biography, and Nemesis, Evans's follow-up account of Onassis's intriguing entanglement with the Kennedy clan. It's on this meticulously researched exposé that Sherman has based his play.
"Onassis's story is the kind of story that theatrical examination suits," says Sherman. "He's a tremendously powerful man who did some things that were morally wrong and paid for it. People have been writing about that theatrically since the Greeks."..
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
Wolfie, his gobby Tooting Trot in Citizen Smith, was a forerunner of Michael Murray, the manic Labour militant he played in Alan Bleasdale's GBH. Even the paterfamilias in My Family, the sitcom role to which he has been largely confined in recent years, has ceded control of his own home.
Lindsay's Fagin has met his comeuppance both on television and in the stage musical. In the theatre he has memorably lost the plot as Henry II, Richard III and, most recently, Archie Rice.
But no one in this crowded firmament of sociopaths and psychotics has quite so much power to hold on to as his latest role.
In Aristo, Martin Sherman's new play about Aristotle Onassis, Lindsay plays the Greek tycoon who as a young man survived his family's decimation at the hands of the Turks in Smyrna to acquire millions and, along the way, seduce Maria Callas and marry Jackie Kennedy. How does an actor pump himself up to inhabit such a man?
"I do play flawed characters," Lindsay concedes.
"I know a lot of very rich people and a lot of them I don't like. But I bumped into an elderly lady the other day who knew Onassis and she actually said, 'Oh I would have loved to have ----ed him.' Power is very sexy. And of course when you were on that yacht nothing else existed."
Aside from this anecdotal insight, Lindsay has read Ari, Peter Evans's biography, and Nemesis, Evans's follow-up account of Onassis's intriguing entanglement with the Kennedy clan. It's on this meticulously researched exposé that Sherman has based his play.
"Onassis's story is the kind of story that theatrical examination suits," says Sherman. "He's a tremendously powerful man who did some things that were morally wrong and paid for it. People have been writing about that theatrically since the Greeks."..