Dramatist McGovern reveals a lack of working-class actors
TELEVISION dramatist Jimmy McGovern has revealed he is struggling to fill working-class roles because of a dearth of actors from poorer backgrounds.
The acclaimed screenwriter, whose credits include Cracker, Hillsborough, The Street and Sunday, said that the disappearance of young, working-class actors was influencing the type of dramas that are being made.
McGovern, 65, is preparing a new drama about Reg Keys, the father of a serviceman killed in Iraq who stood as an anti-war candidate against Tony Blair in his Sedgefield constituency in 2005.
He said: “If this was old-time Hollywood, you’d get Gary Cooper or James Stewart in the Reg Keys role.
“But that’s a real problem we’ve got in Britain today.
“I’m constantly looking round for actors who can convincingly portray working-class men. They’re getting fewer and fewer because it’s only the posh ones who can afford to go into acting.
“And it affects the kind of British drama that gets made. If you were to cast Saturday Night and Sunday Morning today, who would you get for the Albert Finney role?”
McGovern’s comments came after Eddie Redmayne, who was educated at Eton, was crowned best actor at the Academy Awards.
His fellow British nominee Benedict Cumberbatch also enjoyed a private education, at Harrow.
Veteran actress Julie Walters, The Walking Dead star David Morrissey and Call The Midwife star Stephen McGann have complained about a shortage of young actors emerging from poorer backgrounds.
But Cumberbatch’s former drama teacher recently insisted that his expensive education had hindered rather than helped his career.
‘’I feel that they are being limited by critics and audiences as a result of what their parents did for them at 13. And that seems to me very unfair,” Martin Tyrell said.
McGovern’s new historical drama Banished, on BBC2, charts the establishment of Britain’s first penal colony in New South Wales, Australia.
The Liverpudlian said: “There’s this thought that crime runs in families and you’re only as good as your dad was.
“Well, that’s totally wrong and I always argue that Australia is the proof. Because if crime were in your genes, then Australia would be the most crime-ridden society in the world - when it’s one of the safest.”