Jonathan Pryce, Everyman

IN the tourist-packed West End of London, few people pay attention to a tall silver-haired Welshman moving through their midst.

Jonathan Pryce

IN the tourist-packed West End of London, few people pay attention to a tall silver-haired Welshman moving through their midst.

Sure, there are some "don't I know you from somewhere" double takes. A few eyebrows raised from cinephiles and television addicts; the occasional elbow nudge by lovers of big Broadway-style musicals. But this is theatre land: the gasps, when they come, are from those who know he's Jonathan Pryce, one of the top actors of his generation.

Pryce, 63, relishes his relative anonymity. "I'm not a star, I'm an actor; there's a difference," he has said. Along with the fact he has never courted celebrity, never overdone the interviews or opening nights, Pryce's chameleon-like ability to inhabit his characters completely lets him go about his business unhassled and unpapped. "I know how to blend in," he'll tell me.

Early last year, when he was appearing in a critically acclaimed production of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker at the Trafalgar Theatre -- the production that comes to Adelaide next year -- he was blending in a lot. Each night, after soaking up the ovations and shaking off the rags worn by his character, the tramp Davies, he was accosted by only the most dedicated autograph hounds.

Then he'd jump on a red London bus and head back to the Regent's Park home he shares with Irish actress Kate Fahy, his partner of 39 years and mother of his three grown-up children.

The wish to remain normal and un-starry can make Pryce a challenging interviewee.

"Jonathan can be a little, ah, edgy," says a man from The Caretaker's West End production company, who is hovering anxiously by the lift when I manage to arrive before my subject, who I spied walking along Shaftesbury Avenue perhaps a half-hour earlier.

"Best not get too personal," he says as he shows me into an office decorated with framed theatre posters. "Do you know what you'll be asking him? Have you prepared?"

Having read the wodge of press reviews, I know Pryce's interpretation of Davies, the best-known tramp in contemporary drama (well, Davies and the scruffy duo in Waiting for Godot), has been hailed variously as prismatic and brilliant, clattering and compelling. That the decision to make him Welsh -- as taken by veteran director Christopher Morahan, who last directed the play in 1972 -- is one of the revival's most original features. That The Caretaker, a play without much of a plot, is open to endless interpretations. That Pinter, when asked to explain his early masterwork, hurrumphed: "It's about two brothers and a caretaker."

I know, too, that before his death in December 2008 the Nobel prize-winning playwright had given Pryce, a long-time friend, the nod for this production, which premiered at Liverpool's Everyman Theatre in October 2009. And that The Caretaker was the play that launched the Everyman in 1964; and I know the Everyman is the theatre where Pryce's career (along with the careers of Alison Steadman, Antony Sher and Julie Walters) began.

I've even got my own Pinter anecdote by way of warm-up: back in the early 1990s, newly arrived from Australia and working in the publicity department of a leading arts centre, I once blurted to Pinter that I enjoyed a talk by another writer marginally more than I did his (well, he did ask).

"You prepare for these things and then someone tells you they like the other thing better," he boomed in front of several big-name authors, my red-faced bosses and me. "Who is she anyway? Who is she? She's just some publicity girl." As he was leaving, he caught my eye and winked.

"Ha ha." Having arrived dressed in navy blue and with a script marked "Top Secret" tucked under his arm, Pryce laughs good-naturedly. "Yes, that was Harold. He loved making trouble. I was once at a dinner held in his honour where the tradition was to present the guest with a bottle of wine from their birth year. But the wine from Pinter's year [1930] wasn't very nice, so they made a show of presenting him with a special bottle of armagnac instead. Harold said loudly" -- Pryce affects a stentorian growl -- " 'But. I. Don't. Like. Armagnac', which made everyone cringe. I said, 'Harold, you must know people who do.' "

Pryce and Pinter met in 1981 at London's National Theatre, where Pryce first appeared in The Caretaker as Mick, the domineering brother of the introverted Ashton. The role of Davies was played by Warren Mitchell: "A wonderful man, Warren, and the first actor I heard do Davies as Welsh [the role has been tackled by greats such as Michael Gambon and Donald Pleasence]," Pryce says. "There are hints that he's Welsh; Davies is a very Welsh name. The play's speech patterns and comic rhythms lend themselves to the Welsh accent. But if you asked Pinter where Davies was from he'd just say enigmatically, 'I don't think the text tells us.' "

He pauses for a few beats, Pinter-style, and leans back in his ergonomic chair on the other side of the desk. "I celebrate the Welshness in me," says Pryce, who was born in Holywell, north Wales (just across the border from Liverpool), the son of an ex-coalminer who ran a grocery shop with Jonathan's mother.

"My parents spoke Welsh. It was banned in schools when I was a kid so I learned it as a foreign language. It infuriates me that Welsh people don't have more media profile, that we've only got one newsreader in Britain with a Welsh accent." He shrugs. "Ah well. As long as Australians can understand what I'm saying."

It's all going rather well. I lean forward and double-check my tape recorder. "I'm not saying all that again," snaps Pryce, a scowl crossing his bony face. I'm suddenly reminded why he has excelled at playing scary or authoritative types: the ruthless Mr Dark in the 1983 film version of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes; the technocrat turned anti-hero of Terry Gilliam's cult 1985 flick Brazil; the dictator Juan Peron opposite Madonna in 1996's Evita; the evil media mogul Elliot Carver in Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997. Even his portrayal of Davies is said to reveal the viper lurking under the vagrant: "coiled menace" is one of Pryce's fortes.

Still, so are comedy, tragedy and all points between: Jonathan Pryce CBE -- the honour was bestowed in 2009 for services to drama -- is nothing if not prismatic. Early on he won a Tony award for his role on Broadway in Trevor Griffiths's anarchic drama Comedians; his Hamlet at London's Royal Court theatre in 1980 won him an Olivier Award (it remains, for many, the definitive contemporary version). After consolidating his heavyweight credentials with Macbeth, and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, he underlined his versatility by playing everyone from Fagin in Oliver! The Musical to Keira Knightley's dad in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise to the US president in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Not bad for a bloke whose drama teacher once told him he wouldn't amount to more than playing bad guys in Z Cars, a 60s British cop show. Pryce has always attributed his professional eclecticism to his early days at the famously left-wing Everyman: "You'd be doing a straight play, then Shakespeare, then some kind of rock musical," he told The Times in 2009. "It gave you confidence, made you fearless."

Or at least it built on what was already there. Pryce had wanted to be a teacher before he got into London's prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on a scholarship. Once there, he had to support himself. His rather schoolmasterly demeanour undoubtedly helped his sales pitch as he went about London selling tacky velvet paintings door to door.

"My bestselling painting was probably the San Francisco bridge," he says, easygoing again. "I sold one to a famous actor I recognised in his sitting room as being part of a group of very radical left-wing actors. He did get me to make a very large donation when he realised what I then became."

He won't say who it was. Just that it wasn't a Redgrave. As much as Pryce turns out to love an anecdote -- Mitchell got to play Davies as Welsh only because he challenged the director to a tennis match and won; Pryce recently watched his youthful self in Brazil at a screening with his children and felt like Dorian Gray; he and his anti-royalist family had to grapple over whether he should accept the CBE -- he is careful not to be too indiscreet. When I ask what it was like working with Judy Davis on Dark Blood, a 1996 thriller that was shelved after the death of actor River Phoenix, he says: "I could do half a day on Judy Davis. But I'd be . . ." He draws a finger across his throat and smiles.

Though he has worked with several Australians -- Bruce Beresford directed him as Gustav Mahler in 2001's Vienna-shot Bride of the Wind -- Pryce has never been to Australia. "Crazy, isn't it? I've had a couple of opportunities to make films there in the past but both films have been cancelled."

Given the length of the flight he's pleased to have rediscovered the pleasures of reading -- William Boyd at the moment, with Philip Roth on the side -- and, a long-time insomniac, he has finally figured out a routine that knocks him out without drugs. "The last sleeping tablet I was prescribed had lethal side effects," he says with a shudder. "I'd go into the kitchen in the morning and there'd be all this detritus from where I'd been sleep-eating. Sleep-eating! I probably need some calming hobbies," he continues, eyes twinkling. "My work is my hobby; I never seem to stop. When I'm not working I'm staring into the middle distance."

He has just finished filming a British comedy drama called Hysteria, about the Victorian-era doctor who invented the vibrator as a relaxation implement for "hysterical" women. "It's all based on fact. Victorian doctors were doing everything from giving women hysterectomies to cure them or bringing them to orgasm manually. That was the problem; these male doctors kept getting cramp in their hands." He holds up a hand and wiggles it disconcertingly. "So they invented these machines. The first one was a sort of electric feather duster."

Comedy, he says, is the toughest of all acting genres; the toughest to get right. But what of the different media: would he rather do film (his recent roles have tended to be cameo appearances), musicals (he hasn't done a musical since 2006, when he replaced John Lithgow in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on Broadway) or theatre? Pryce smiles, pats the script on the desk to his left.

"Ah, I'm so grateful that G.I. Joe 2 is being made this summer," he says with a laugh. "I'm the American president again. Something happened at the end of G.I. Joe I that means he's back in G.I. Joe 2. I can't tell you any more, other than Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson is on board." He pats the script again. "I have the top-secret script right here," he says. "It will pay for the whole of next year, for the going to Australia and, in the second half of the year, doing Lear."

After years of mentioning it as a possibility, Pryce will finally play the monarch in King Lear (at the respected Almeida Theatre in north London's Islington), his first Shakespeare since doing Macbeth in 1986. It's a mind-boggling forward plan: G.I. Joe 2, The Caretaker, King Lear. But for now, before he goes into rehearsals for anything, the multifaceted Pryce is off on holiday to France, to relax and, presumably, stare into the middle distance. Does he go to France much? A scowl. "Yes, we're often in France." Where? "The south." Does he speak French? "Yes." You've gone all defensive, I say. Let's wind up. Pryce relaxes, stretches and gets to his feet with a little groan.

"Right," he says, shaking hands warmly. "I'm getting the bus. I've got my [free over-60s] bus pass. I've earned it. Public transport's a wonderful thing," he adds with a smile. "Even when people recognise me, they usually leave me alone."

The Caretaker, Adelaide Festival, March 8-15, 2012.