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Hero who gave me GOLD
Paralympian Jonnie Peacock says he owes his success to the pioneering doctor who started the Games, as the man’s extraordinary story is told in a television movie
The world’s top sportspeople have always been presented as akin to superheroes. And a new documentary film that features our leading Paralympians (one of them sprinting with cheetahs, no less) takes that idea and – pardon the pun – runs with it.
Indeed, one of the directors, Ian Bonhote, says the production team thought of the athletes involved as Marvel Avengers ‘who come together to save humanity’. That’s a lofty goal for a project that is itself an epic venture. Rising Phoenix tells the story of the Paralympic Games, and how they grew from one man’s vision.
That man was Sir Ludwig Guttmann. Never heard of him? Until recently neither had Jonnie Peacock, one of our greatest Paralympians. The British sprinter, who had his right leg amputated after contracting meningitis aged five, became a global star himself at the 2012 London Games, when he won gold. The unforgettable sight of Jonnie running on his futuristic-looking blade inspired a generation – even today non-disabled children ask him where they can get a blade like his.
But it’s Sir Ludwig, a doctor who fled to Britain from Nazi Germany in 1939, who deserves all the medals, as everyone involved in this film agrees. ‘Most people have no idea how much we owe him,’ admits Jonnie. ‘But he’s the true hero here.’
The film’s creator, exOlympics marketing chief Greg Nugent, tips his hat too. ‘What’s extraordinary is that he had this vision of a parallel games. Here is a guy who changed the world, yet we don’t know his name. We should.’
The story of Sir Ludwig’s own life is itself an epic worthy of Hollywood. A German Jew, he was one of the country’s leading neurosurgeons but was banned from practising professionally in Aryan hospitals whe nthe Nazis came to power. He was assigned a job as medical director of a Jewish hospital in Breslau where, during Kristallnacht when Jews were rounded up by the authorities in 1938, he ordered his staff to admit anyone presenting for treatment, without question. When 64 patients were admitted in one night, the Gestapo investigated. Dr Guttmann walked them from bed to bed, pulling faces at the patients from behind their backs to encourage them to make the same expressions. ‘Look, he’s having a fit,’ he explained, saving countless souls from the concentration camps.
The Guttmann family fled
Germany in 1939 and were offered sanctuary in the UK. Dr Guttmann, his wife and two young children settled in Oxford, where the academic community embraced them. With his poor English, Dr Guttmann was unable to work as a surgeon, but his expertise was recognised and he continued his research into spinal injuries at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary.
In 1943 he was asked to head a new spinal injuries centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, treating disabled war veterans. A tth e time, they were written off, confined to bed. Life expectancy for amputees was around two years. But Dr Guttmann had other ideas, insisting they should be encouraged out of bed as soon as possible.
‘Before, patients were put in plaster casts and couldn’t move,’ explains Eva Loeffler, Sir Ludwig’s daughter, who was only six when the family settled in Britain. ‘They developed terrible sores and infections. My father started turning them in their beds, himself, with an orderly. He insisted they had to increase their muscle power.
Sport was a crucial part of the rehabilitation process for him.’
Eva says her father was an authoritarian who would bang on the table to make his point. His patients were initially hostile to being treated by him – ‘He had a very strong German accent, and they thought it was terrible to be treated by a German doctor’ – but they came to adore him. ‘They called him Poppa,’ says Eva. ‘He devoted his whole life to them.’ Eva says she recalls only one family holiday during her childhood, to Devon. ‘We didn’t see much of him. When he wasn’t at the hospital, he was writing his papers. He’d disappear into his study.’
Now she appreciates her father’s single-mindedness. She remembers his early vision of getting his bedbound patients involved in sport. ‘It was table tennis to begin with,’ she recalls. ‘I remember going to help him set up the tables. And there was archery. He would have all the men out, in their wheelchairs. We’d set up the targets. It was very amateur, obviously, but it was the start of it.’
On 29 July, 1948, the first day of the London Olympic Games, Sir Ludwig organised his own wheelchair games at Stoke Mandeville. It wasn’t an official ‘parallel games’, but it was the precursor. The first Paralympic Games, with 209 athletes from 18 countries, took place in 1960 in Rome, though the term wasn’t approved by the International Olympic Committee until 1984.
Since then the history of the Games has been chequered. Russia refused to hold them in 1980, declaring, ‘There are no invalids in the
Nearly eight years have passed since the heir to Downton Abbey ruined everyone’s Christmas by fatally crashing his car, and Dan Stevens, who played handsome Matthew Crawley, says he’s been apologising ever since.
For many Downton fans it was an unforgivable act because the love story between Matthew and his distant cousin Lady Mary Crawley was central to the plot and a major draw for viewers. At the time Dan insisted he’d given the producers ‘plenty of warning’ he wanted to leave the show to explore new opportunities in the US, but Downton creator Julian Fellowes later contradicted him, saying the actor’s abrupt announcement gave him no time to handle it differently on screen.
There were predictions that Dan – a Cambridge English literature graduate whose dropping of the crowd-pleasing Downton had, for some, the faint whiff of snobbery – had made a fatal career mistake. And to start with, the cynics appeared to be right. The New York Times damned with faint praise his performance in Broadway play The Heiress. When it finished its six-month run, Dan remained in New York with his wife, South African singer Susie Hariet, and their daughter Willow and son Aubrey. (They are now 11 and eight, and joined by sister Eden, four.)
As for film, he didn’t exactly set Hollywood alight at first. Dan lost weight for a string of gritty roles, including a drug dealer in clichéd 2014 Liam Neeson drama A Walk Among The Tombstones. The same year he also appeared as Sir Lancelot in the third instalment of the family movie franchise Night At The Museum. His third film in 2014, the violent thriller The Guest, was better received and his performance as a murderous soldier was described as ‘magnetic’. The Mail’s Brian Viner even queried whether Dan could be the next James Bond.
But his big moment came in Disney’s 2017 live-action reboot of Beauty And The Beast, in which he played ‘Beast’ to Emma Watson’s ‘Beauty’. It made Downton Abbey look like Dostoevsky but it was a boxoffice success and praised by critics. And later that year, Dan fans got another big dollop of their idol when he was cast as Charles Dickens in The Man Who Invented Christmas.
These roles put him back in floppy-haired heartthrob mode but he’s been determined to explore darker stories too.
Since 2017, he’s been a schizophrenic, mutant superhero in acclaimed TV sci-fi series Legion. And soon he will be on screens in the terrifying horror film The Rental. His character Charlie is a smooth-talking tech boss who rents a house on the coast with his under-achieving younger brother and their respective partners. Their weekend getaway turns out to be anything but relaxing, however, when they’re menaced by a stalker. The film is not for the fainthearted: against the glorious scenery of the Oregon coast, the chills come creeping inexorably in, and towards the end the tension is all but unbearable.
As for what drew Dan to the role, it was all about subverting expectations. ‘Charlie is this nice and upstanding guy early on, but there are things that creep in and you start questioning him...’
The Rental has just been released in the US to critical and commercial success – and thanks to lockdown, it had its premiere at a drive-in theatre.
Ahead of its release here, Dan, 37, can be found on Netflix in a very different sort of film, playing the most irresistible of villains. It’s generally agreed that in the hit spoof film of this summer, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story Of Fire Saga, his character Alexander Lemtov steals the show.
The tale follows the dreadful Icelandic singing duo Fire Saga, comprising Sigrit (Rachel Mcadams) and Lars (Will Ferrell), who through a series of mishaps achieve their dream of performing at Eurovision. There they encounter Lemtov, a flamboyant Russian pop star with embroidered jackets flung open over a bare chest, a mane of George Michael-esque highlighted hair, and a mansion full of well-endowed nude male statues. He’s a would-be lothario who tries so hard to woo Sigrit away from Lars, one almost ignores the fact he’s clearly not interested in women.
On screen, Dan looks like he’s
‘I must say, I had a great time being a blond’
having a ball, particularly while performing his character’s jaw-dropping Eurovision entry, the pop-opera anthem Lion Of Love, as he prowls the stage cracking a whip and shooting smouldering looks at Sigrit.
‘It was very interesting playing him,’ laughs Dan during our video call from his home in Los Angeles. ‘I liked that Lemtov wasn’t a straightout villain; that for all of this exterior of the bombastic performer he also had a tragic personal storyline.’
He says one inspiration for Lemtov was controversial Russian megastar Philipp Kirkorov, famous for his covers of Eurovision Song Contest songs. Kirkorov is also notorious for his garish wardrobe and ‘bad boy’ image. ‘He certainly inspired the wardrobe,’ says Dan. ‘I think we pinched a few of his outfits wholesale.’
Stealing a wardrobe is one thing – a bolder move was to suggest Alexander
Lemtov is gay, given that Kirkorov himself, although he was married for 11 years and has two children, has himself been dogged by similar rumours. Dan says the pop star took it in good part. ‘I haven’t met him but he got in touch with me just the other day. He said he and his family had all watched the movie and loved it! I believe it has done very well in Russia, which I think is very funny.
‘It’s such a glorious competition, Eurovision – I’ve been watching it since I was a child, and it was extraordinary to be able to step into that world. It’s also very funny to introduce it to Americans, who hadn’t heard about it before, and to make people there aware that one of the biggest TV events on the planet takes place off their shores!’
His only frustration, he says, is that the coronavirus pandemic prevented him from recording his own singing on the film. Lion Of Love was instead voiced by Swedish opera singer Erik Mjones. The plan had been for Dan, who sang in Beauty And The Beast, to combine his voice with that of Mjones, as Rachel Mcadams does in the film with Swedish singer Molly Sanden. ‘It’s always a challenge for me to hit the high notes,’ said Dan. ‘But thanks to f ilms like Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocket Man, we’ve been able to use similar technology to meld voices and have a character sing in a way a regular actor perhaps couldn’t – meaning in this case, absurdly high and powerfully.’
He agrees it was a far cry from the earnest Matthew in Downton. ‘I think typecasting comes from an actor’s own choices, and I pride myself in slipping into different modes for different roles.’
He acknowledges that, although he was ready to leave the costume drama, his final Downton moments were poignant. Matthew is killed returning to the Abbey from the hospital where his wife Lady Mary has given birth to their first child – a son and longed-for heir to Downton. ‘It was strange,’ he said of his last tragic scene. ‘Lying under a car thinking about the family of actors I’d be leaving. But it was time to go, though it was a show I’d been proud to be a part of.’
That plot twist had to be kept secret, although Dan’s wife and parents knew before it aired on Christmas Day in 2012. ‘Of course, the way Matthew went was shocking. It upset some people,’ he said. ‘I watched it with my mum, because she didn’t want to watch it on her own, she wanted me there to hold her hand! She was OK in the end, but I’m glad I was with her.’
Dan says his physical transformation after he left the series was simply a return to his natural appearance – he’d put on weight to play Crawley, considering it more appropriate for the period, and Julian Fellowes decided he should be blond after realising almost every other male cast member had brown hair. ‘I ended up being blond for three years,’ he recalled. ‘And I must say it was fun – I had a great time as a blond. But the way it is now is my natural colour.’
This Christmas Dan appears as Charles Condomine, the wealthy novelist who accidentally calls up the ghost of his late first wife in a new film version of Noël Coward’s comedy Blithe Spirit. It also stars Dame Judi Dench as the medium, Madame Arcati. It’s the second time Dan’s worked with Dame Judi – he was her son in another Coward play, Hay Fever, in the West End in 2006. In what he calls a ‘lovely circularity’, the new film of Blithe Spirit was directed by Edward Hall, son of Sir Peter Hall, who gave him his role in Hay Fever. And Sir Peter’s actress daughter, Rebecca, is godmother to his daughter Willow.
Dan has spent the Covid-19 lockdown entertaining Willow and the rest of his family in LA. ‘We enjoy singing and story time – we’ve worked our way through all the Harry Potter books and are now on Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series,’ he said. ‘Getting kids’ imaginations going is what I’m all about, and there are some big, bold imaginations in our house.’
It may not be entirely child-friendly, but is there any chance of a Eurovision sequel? ‘There has been mention of it,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what form it would take but I’d love it. I think there’s life in Lemtov yet.’
‘A Eurovision sequel? There’s life in Lemtov yet’