THE IMMINENT OPENING of the new Bond movie, starring the serviceable Pierce Brosnan, is a boost for British leading men. They have been relegated to the second tier lately, superseded by the Australians, who can smoulder without the burden of irony.
Tony Blair is the biggest British star in America (after Ozzy Osbourne). I am constantly asked to accept gratitude for the PM’s mystifying wonderfulness towards the US. Even opponents of Bush and his Iraq policy approve of Blair because they see him as a restraining influence. The British ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer, who goes home in March, has been wildly popular with his affirmative, Kenneth More-like bounce, but he has been the beneficiary of a golden period in Anglo-American relations.
Sir Howard Stringer, the chairman and CEO of Sony, is the hottest after-dinner speaker in New York and Hollywood. He is blessed with patrician height, plus a sense of humour that masks a shrewd avoidance of splashy magazine profiles and a keen ability for monster management (which so much of the entertainment world is about).
Anthony Hopkins is the biggest box-office Brit in Hollywood, but it is dispiriting that his reputation has been made on the doggedly British niche brands of serial killers and butlers.
Hugh Grant is big because he occupies the debonair David Niven slot, though I suspect he could do much more. “If you want depth, get a Fiennes brother,” he murmured to me at one of the Golden Globes thrashes. Perhaps, but Joseph Fiennes vanished after Shakespeare in Love (which is strange unless you agree with Gore Vidal that he played the bard like a Puerto Rican florist) and Ralph hasn’t had the movies he deserves since The English Patient. This could change after Maid in Manhattan, a Pretty Woman-style romp in which Wayne Wang had the sense to cast Ralph’s neurasthenic charms against Jennifer Lopez’s radioactive butt.
The jury is still out on Ewan McGregor. The promising Colin Farrell hit a snake on his ladder last week when his next movie Phone Booth, about a sniper, was pulled indefinitely by Fox on the grounds of excessive topicality.
Jeremy Irons’s prison pallor and pervy mole had fallen out of favour even before we were hit over the head with the new wholesome America. Gay, schmay — Rupert Everett should get big romantic leads. When he bursts into a breakfast diner with his hair jammed under a woollen beanie he has so much upscale sexual charisma that you think he has an entourage even when he’s all by himself at a table for one.
Hearteningly, unlike the men, British women are not held back on the second tier. Americans love all the Kates — Blanchett (who feels British even though she is, natch, Australian), Winslet, Beckinsale, Zeta-Jones and Reddy (the heroine of Allison Pearson’s hit novel I Don’t Know How She Does It).
Plum Sykes, the noodle-slim British journo and playgirl, got a $625,000 advance the other day for her first novel, Bergdorf Blondes, from Miramax books. It was a big lift for Plum, who hit town five years ago with her wilder twin sister Lucy and needed something to freshen her act. A rumour made its way through Manhattan recently that the Sykeses are a) not twins at all and b) not 31, but this was just an index of the town’s need for new angles. The book isn’t written yet but Miramax already plans a movie.
There was a real frisson among British actresses after the Texan Renee Zellweger did her astonishingly flawless crossover as Bridget Jones. Americans usually don’t achieve British class nuance as finely as this, so there was a sigh of relief when the Hollywood chick Kate Hudson bombed last month in The Four Feathers, playing a late-Victorian toff in an out-of-period, ersatz new-London blurt that sounded as if her voice coach was Guy Ritchie.
Mike Nichols is one American director who’s very partial to British actors. “I find them nicely odd,” he told me the other day. “Many British actors travel only when their gardening permits.” As self-protection, he notes, most British actors today can do an acceptable American accent, which was not true of the old-guard Hollywood Brits, who represented generalised piss elegance.
Daniel Day-Lewis displayed a reassuringly British brand of nutty angst when he dropped out for two years and went off to Italy to become a cobbler, but there is no trace of a nervous Nelly in his comeback role next month. He plays the carnivorous anti-immigrant villain Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese’s epic about the mean streets of 19th-century Manhattan. The word is that it’s a performance so intense, physical and immediate that it will haunt our dreams and nightmares. According to the historian Simon Schama, who had a sneak preview the other day, it is also something new: a performance as American as Brando with roots as English as Edmund Kean.
MY CHILDREN WERE born in New York, but I have nourished their ethnic roots by force feeding them the Famous Five and HMS Pinafore. I know I have succeeded when my computer screen pings with an instant message from my 12-year-old daughter: “Yo, Mom! Wassup!?” On Sundays we often go to an obscure English café downtown called Tea and Sympathy, where authentically scruffy Brits are hunched over flowery china tea pots on very small tables, their plates loaded with jam tarts and egg and cucumber finger sandwiches edged with whiskery parsley. Sometimes puzzled American cultural commentators will stumble in and misunderstand it as an exercise in shabby chic. In fact, it’s Narnia, the fantasy of vanished Britain.
Nigella Lawson’s cappuccino London has kissed goodbye to crumpets.
tina.brown@thetimes.co.uk
