Will scandal demolish Kevin Spacey’s House Of Cards?
The double Oscar winner, riding high as Frank Underwood in Netfl ix’s TV series, was this week hit by claims he tried to seduce a 14- year- old boy
IN JUNE Kevin Spacey hosted the Tony Awards at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. At one point in his opening number the versatile star of presidential drama series House Of Cards donned a frock to perform a spoof of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard complete with the line, “I’m coming out,” followed by, “Wait, no, wait”.
Not surprisingly the audience – which had reacted to the first line with stunned silence – burst into laughter at the end of the second – the 58- year- old Oscar winner’s knowing reference to rumours about his sexuality that have swirled for decades.
But yesterday the wait was finally over. In a statement relating to an alleged assault upon a 14- year- old male actor in 1986 the confirmed bachelor took the opportunity to reveal his sexual orientation. “I choose now to live as a gay man,” he said.
Spacey immediately came under fire for appearing to conflate his sexual orientation with the reported molestation of a minor. It is an uncharacteristic misstep for a man who has enjoyed a stellar career and is used to operating with fi ne- tuned precision in everything he does.
His shimmering decade as artistic director of London’s Old Vic theatre concluded in 2015 with universal praise and enabled Spacey to take personal credit for helping to elevate London’s position in the international cultural league table.
During that time the man born in New Jersey and raised in California was proud to become an honorary Brit.
Curiously he also became the most-high profile fan of tennis player Andy Murray whom he would follow around the world, determined not to miss a single point and analysing his game in a bid to improve his own.
It is passions such as these which have given Spacey a reputation for what Hollywood Reporter magazine memorably described as “exalting in his contradictory status in Hollywood as a big- name star who operates like an eccentric outsider”.
This insight was amplified by his long- term producing partner Dana Brunetti who said: “Once he gets into something – working out, learning to play a musical instrument – he goes into it full bore. He has always been a tennis fan but lately it’s become an obsession.”
THAT obsessive attention to detail goes some way towards explaining Spacey’s phenomenal success as an actor. When he appeared in the 1998 London production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh his character made his entrance by walking slowly and deliberately across the stage before standing with his back to the stalls. It was like watching a panther stalk prey.
As the audience watched him do nothing other than breathe deeply for half an electrifying minute, still with his back to them, they were filled with a sense of spine- tingling menace.
Yet despite his charismatic presence the man born Kevin Spacey Fowler first started acting to entertain his mother Kathleen to whom he was very close and who often accompanied him to red- carpet events before her death in 2003.
“Hearing my mother laugh was the greatest sound I’ve ever heard so I learned how to do voices and imitations,” Spacey once explained.
Kathleen was a secretary and the hard- working breadwinner in his “modest middle- class home”. His father Thomas, a technical writer who yearned to be a published novelist, was “unemployed a lot”. Witnessing the distress that failure caused his father, Spacey vowed to make a success of his own artistic life. “I saw what it did to him. I was not going to be like that.”
Supporting himself with odd jobs to satisfy his hunger for acclaim he wrote passionate letters to directors and conned his way into cocktail parties to get noticed. His impressions – part of a standup act that often incorporated tap dancing – also helped.
He spent two years at the prestigious Juilliard theatre school, where he was a contemporary of Val Kilmer, before making his first professional stage appearance in a New York production of Henry IV in 1981.
His Broadway career took off shortly afterwards and in 1986 he appeared in his first film, Heartburn, as a thief. But lacking the looks of a conventional leading man it wasn’t until a decade later that he finally made it big in Hollywood.
In 1996 he won a best supporting actor Oscar for The Usual Suspects and suddenly he was in huge demand. Impressive performances in the critically acclaimed Seven and LA Confidential followed but it was his role three years later as the suburban father in American Beauty that secured him as a screen great.
British director Sam Mendes fought for him to have the part having seen his London performance in The Iceman Cometh. “I really didn’t want anyone else from the beginning and I stuck to my guns,” said Mendes. Spacey delivered on that faith with his second Oscar.
WITH Hollywood at his feet Spacey then surprised everyone by quitting the US to head up a not-for-profit theatre on the wrong side of the Thames in London’s Waterloo, leading to accusations of “craziness” from his American colleagues. He once summed up the reaction of friends in the line: “Why not sit around a Beverly Hills pool collecting residual cheques?”
But Spacey was in search of a new challenge. “I didn’t want to do the same thing for another 10 years,” he once said.
“I am not content because I have purpose,” he added two years ago. “It is so exciting to get out of bed and not know what is going to happen.”
His decade at the Old Vic imbued him with a new hinterland. Within a few months he had his finger in every aspect of the machinery of the elegant 19th- century theatre from the choice of plays and actors right through to the advertising and even the poster artwork.
And the risk paid off. He was soon winning plaudits from everyone while discovering that he genuinely loved his new life in the capital. “I could go on and on about what I like,” he said recently, sharing his passion for London’s architecture, politics, debates, sport and food. Even the fact it is a “walking city”.
Spacey was only lured away from his London job by the promise of playing Francis Underwood in the American Netfl ix adaptation of the Michael Dobbs’ novel House Of Cards. The series, which offers an insider’s view of US politics and has just started shooting its sixth and final season – Netfl ix announced last night the show will not return for a seventh – has proved a wildly successful third act to Spacey’s life. Now only time will tell how the new revelations about his personal conduct will affect his future career.