Toby Schmitz takes the lead in Belvoir's Private Lives

THERE aren't many young actors with the style and charisma associated with the stars of yesterday.

Toby Schmitz

WHEN Toby Schmitz, one of the country's busiest theatre actors, finds himself in a taxi, this is how the conversation often goes:

Cab driver: So you're an actor.

Schmitz: Yep.

Cabbie: Would I have seen you in anything? Home and Away?

Schmitz (to himself): Same old conversation.

Schmitz (to the cabbie): No, I do theatre,

I do plays.

Cabbie: You been in Les Mis or Cats?

Schmitz: No.

Cabbie: Yeah, didn't think so. Not real plays.

THE actor and playwright recounts this apparently typical encounter with a biting irreverence worthy of Noel Coward. He is making the point that he refuses to be discouraged by the common view that treading the boards isn't a real job. Schmitz says with a certain ferocity: "You've gotta have some balls about it. You gotta have some claim on yourself as an actor and not get down when the cabbie or your mum say, 'What have you acted in?' You've gotta own it." This former party animal, who was once threatened with expulsion from the National Institute of Dramatic Art because of his drinking and tardiness, is now one of the leading theatre actors of his generation.

Yet on the day we meet, Schmitz looks more like a nerd crossed with a wannabe hipster than the upper-class gent he is about to portray in Coward's Private Lives. The actor is unshaven and wearing a black hoodie and Clark Kent-style glasses. He pads about the small terrace he shares with his actor girlfriend in vast, unlaced basketball boots that engulf his lower legs. Yet once the tape recorder is on and Schmitz's thoughts pour forth in a flash flood of words and droll asides, it's easy to imagine him in a silk dressing gown, dropping a confetti of bons mots while holding court in a Riviera hotel suite.

Schmitz's signature roles have ranged from focus-pulling comedy (simulating sex with a bunch of flowers in a production of Measure for Measure) to full-blooded tragedy (Hamlet for Brisbane's La Boite theatre). ABC critic Nigel Munro-Wallis declared this 2010 La Boite show the best Hamlet he had seen, adding that Schmitz, now 35, "brings to his part a fabulous combination of angst, moodiness and true edginess that will have even the most jaded of theatre patrons willing him on".

Next year Schmitz will cement his reputation as one of our finest actors in serious roles with Sydney Theatre Company and Belvoir that will be announced shortly.

But it's when the actor plays romantic and comic leads that he embodies the polished masculinity and verbal dexterity that also defined earlier generations of leading men; the suave, stylish, effortlessly articulate actors we rarely see on contemporary stages and movie screens. Last year, Schmitz starred as Benedick in a Bell Shakespeare production of Much Ado About Nothing - a role renowned for the verbal sparring between the ostensibly reluctant romantic hero and his seemingly imperfect match, Beatrice.

Again, the critics were impressed. The Age's reviewer wrote that: "Schmitz brims with feckless charisma, and brings a fantastically mobile comic intelligence to every expression and gesture. It's a performance packed with ado, most of it LOL funny."

Belvoir's artistic director Ralph Myers has cast the actor in his production of Private Lives because he reckons he was born to play the wealthy, wisecracking divorcee Elyot. In this frisky comedy of manners, which opens in Sydney later this month before touring to Wollongong and Canberra, Elyot and his ex-wife Amanda run into each other while on honeymoon with their new spouses. In spite of their volatile history and the marital vows they have just taken, they rekindle their feelings for each other - for better and worse.

Myers describes Schmitz as "very sharp, very funny, very droll, very much like Coward in many ways ... Elyot is a kind of personification of Coward; Coward wrote the role for himself to play and gave himself all the best lines. Toby is kind of him."

Simon Phillips directed Schmitz when he appeared opposite a cross-dressing Geoffrey Rush (playing Lady Bracknell) last year in a Melbourne Theatre Company production of The Importance of Being Earnest. The former MTC boss agrees Schmitz is an "innately elegant actor, which means that he's born to play that kind of role - loquacious and witty leading men of the 30s and 40s who have a kind of elegance as well as a sexuality about them. He's got those qualities as a person and as an actor."

Yet male characters such as Elyot are a dying breed in contemporary theatre and film, and this, in turn, begs the question: What has become of the suave, sophisticated leading man who made women swoon and men uneasy; screen and stage actors who had the good looks, charm and dashing qualities of matinee idols, but who also brought an edge and depth to their craft? From the 1920s to the 60s, actors who were charming, eloquent and wore a well-cut suit like a second skin held sway in Hollywood and beyond. Among them were David Niven, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Sidney Poitier, Peter O'Toole and Tony Curtis.

Astaire's physical grace was prized more than his looks, while Grant was a byword for debonair masculinity. O'Toole, meanwhile, amassed eight Oscar nominations while often playing characters who "embodied the roguish gentleman who looks as good crossing the desert on a camel as he does at high tea in his Plaza suite", as GQ magazine has put it.

Today, with the exception of George Clooney, Hollywood's leading men are cut from different cloth. This is partly because intelligent romantic comedies are out of vogue in the theatre and in film and partly because definitions of desirable masculinity have changed radically since Private Lives's Elyot could get away with likening women to gongs because they needed to be beaten regularly.

Myers attributes the near-extinction of suave leading men to audience demand for more psychologically authentic characters. He argues the disappearance of this archetype "is a great loss, in a way. Someone like George Clooney is a remnant of that sort of character ... I suppose there's a sort of fantasy element about that character. They're sort of dashing and they don't stand up to too much scrutiny. If you actually think about what James Bond does when you put it down on paper, it's all sort of terrifying. The sort of pleasure for us is seeing how charmingly he does that. I suppose that nowadays we have an expectation that things are more psychologically complete or plausible in the stories that we tell."

Phillips points out that our visually focused society is less impressed by articulate characters than it once was. "One of the things that defined attractiveness in a bygone era was articulateness. This was seen to be a very winning quality and I don't think things are being written from that point of view any more," he says. He has noticed that modern audiences are quicker to laugh at visual jokes than verbal ones. He also argues that while British playwright Tom Stoppard is still "inclined to write a male character of effortless eloquence and grace, a lot of the writing that is essentially about wit is diminishing".

Private Lives, which was first performed in 1930, is the most heavily subscribed show of Belvoir's season this year - it seems that even at a theatre that likes to accentuate its alternative credentials, there is a strong public appetite for Cowardian characters and their rarefied world of "cocktails, repartee and irreverent allusions to copulation" as the West End's playboy playwright once described it.

As if to satisfy unsated public demand for funny, charismatic leading men (and women), another of comedy's duelling couples returned to the stage last month when a reworked version of His Girl Friday opened at MTC. This satire about the zany imperatives of tabloid journalism was adapted from the 1928 play (titled The Front Page) and later hit film that starred Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Philip Quast and Pamela Rabe play the newspaper editor and gun female reporter who are divorced but aren't quite ready to say goodbye.

The film versions of Private Lives (1931) and His Girl Friday (1940) were vehicles for smooth and witty leading men in Robert Montgomery and Grant respectively, but today such films - and, therefore, such roles - are rare. Reviewing last year's comedy Bridesmaids and its plethora of fart jokes, film critic Sandra Hall lamented that "the decline of the Hollywood rom-com can be explained by the rise of the gross-out movie. Since American Pie and Farrelly brothers hits such as There's Something About Mary, the pitfalls of love and sex have been steadily upstaged by the cinema of bodily embarrassment."

In a similar vein, the website Tampa Bay Online asks why the rom-com genre "spent much of the last decade on life support". It partly blames Hollywood's present crop of leading men for the malaise.

The site argues these actors "couldn't woo their way out of a paper bag without a team of makeup artists and mind-numbing plot contrivances ... was there any romantic comedy released in the past decade that wouldn't have been greatly improved if it had starred Cary Grant instead?"

As Hollywood makes an increasing share of its income from non-English-speaking markets, it's no coincidence its big-budget projects increasingly are dominated by action, fantasy and children's films, which are bigger on visual effects than rapid-fire verbal combat between social sophisticates. Tellingly, nearly all the celebrities on Forbes's list of top-earning actors this year made their money from action and fantasy franchises and blokey comedies. Tom Cruise earned $US75 million ($72m) in the past year from Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, making the middle-aged action man with the reassuringly boyish features the world's highest paid actor.

But Review film critic Evan Williams believes the decline of the matinee idol and his classy successors can be traced to a broader factor - the rise of the women's movement. "I think it's no coincidence that the decline of the matinee idol coincided with the rise of feminism, with its insistence that a woman's worth, her sexual attractiveness, had nothing to do with conventional stereotypes of glamour," Williams argues. "When the same rule was applied to men, the result was that your typical matinee idol - dark, suave, gallant, square-jawed - lost much of his appeal.

"It was the end of the era of the Gables, the Astaires, the Errol Flynns and David Nivens. And films themselves were changing. The grittier, more realistic films of the late 20th century called for a different, plainer type of star - a Tom Hanks, a Dustin Hoffman, a Kevin Spacey." Williams muses that "Clooney may be the only surviving example of the traditional Hollywood leading man".

WHILE growing up in the 80s, Toby Schmitz knew he wanted to play Elyot. He recalls how "I read Private Lives when I was very young and that did it for me. He is urbane and witty. He has the gift of the gab. He's incredibly comfortable as well. One of the great facets of the play is that these people are so privileged; that they honeymoon in St Tropez and have a bolthole in Paris where they can escape their partners. So there's a fantastical element."

Although Coward's idiom is as upper-class English as a pheasant shoot, Myers's production will have the actors speaking with neutral accents and kitted out in modern dress. Schmitz admits he "feels challenged" about losing the tux and the cut-glass accent, but adds: "I'm just as excited as an actor to go, 'What will I be doing? What is the electricity that is going to happen?' I'm so looking forward to having some electric arguments going on stage between people who could feasibly choke each other to death as easily as they could wound each other with words."

Schmitz is alluding to how the revived romance between Amanda and Elyot can be stormy, even violent - they are a couple who can neither live with nor without each other. "All the great characters who have a bit of the matinee idol to them have something else to them as well, an edge, a darkness. Otherwise they'd just be fops," says the actor, whose performances are often charged with an unpredictable, what-will-he-do-next quality.

Before he trained at NIDA, Schmitz was educated in Western Australia. His parents run second-hand and remainder bookshops, and he attended Perth's elite private school Scotch College. He was a committed student until he enrolled in a university law course and discovered girls and the campus tavern. He started wagging classes and drinking excessively - so much so, he was turfed out of home and law school. "I just think I came home at 6am one too many times without my key," he says a little sheepishly. "I was clearly not attending lectures and clearly drunk and pissing in the kitchen sink perhaps. Can't remember - I was just drunk for two years.

"I was a ratbag to them [his parents] for a couple of years, I really was. But I'd been a very square student while at school ... I was pretty virginal as well, and suddenly your spots clear up, and man!" Having played up his former bad boy image, he then tamps it down, insisting it's "over-egged and slightly boring because it was never really that bad. I just drank a bit and was quite sort of rakish, really, but who wasn't in their 20s?"

After his "ratbag" phase he auditioned for NIDA and was accepted. He also flirted with stand-up comedy - he draws on these skills when he appears in a school blazer and with slicked back hair in the ABC's quirky celebrity quiz show Randling. "It's pretty cut-throat; I had all the confidence of a 19-year-old with three beers in him," he says of his stand-up days. Still, he sometimes wishes theatre patrons would behave more like unforgiving comedy crowds. The latter "are allowed to talk back a bit more and sometimes I wish they would talk back more in theatre".

Since graduating from NIDA in 1999, Schmitz has performed across the country in high-profile plays including David Williamson's The Great Man, Brendan Cowell's Ruben Guthrie, Tom Stoppard's Travesties and, most recently, a renovated version of Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude. This week he made a flying visit to Norway's International Ibsen Festival to perform in Belvoir's widely acclaimed reworking of The Wild Duck.

Accustomed as he is to the eight performances a week "slog" demanded by most Australian theatres, being flown across the world to do three performances of this show "feels really special".

Schmitz is startlingly frank about how professional envy is one of the hardest things about acting, a field in which your closest friends might score the roles you desperately wanted. Between shows, he channels his energy into writing plays, and he admits that without this, the bitterness of missing out on coveted parts "would just kill you. It's uncreative, you just don't feel like making anything or doing any good art when you're feeling bitter." He tugs at his sleeve, jokes: "You think you can - I'll do some revenge tragedy, I'll write some bitter art." He pauses for effect. "It's not good. You've got to find your tricks around it."

He is doing just that. In 2002, he was joint winner of the Sydney Theatre Company's Patrick White Playwrights' Award for his play Lucky and he has been shortlisted for the Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award. His latest work, I Want to Sleep with Tom Stoppard, was launched by the Tamarama Rock Surfers in Sydney's east on Wednesday. It's a comedy about an older actress who is aghast to learn her younger, actor lover plans to abandon his badly paid, insecure profession.

While he is conscious of the need to turn "professional jealousy" into a positive, Schmitz is also grateful he can make a living doing what he does. "I never expected to be here, I never expected to get roles," he says with sudden humility. "I'm very much the Perth kid who's quite amazed that I'm allowed to be here. I think remaining true to the 15-year-old dreamer in you helps."

He abruptly assumes his defensive stance again, daring the world - or at least, the odd taxi driver - to challenge his sense of validity as an artist.

"You've got to have some balls about it," he reiterates fiercely. "You've got have some claim on yourself as an actor."

Private Lives opens at Sydney's Belvoir Theatre on September 22 before touring to Wollongong and Canberra.