An Able-bodied Seaman
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday November 20, 2000
Ioan Gruffudd's dashing performance as Horatio Hornblower has been attracting attention around the world, writes Judy Adamson.
EVEN when he's miles inland, Ioan Gruffudd still hears the sea. It's not because he hankers for life on the ocean blue since his star turn in the nautical miniseries Hornblower. It's because filming scenes in the chilly Black Sea gave him tinnitus.
"I have this constant seawash sound in my left ear now, so Hornblower is with me wherever I go," he jokes.
It meant he ended up in a Ukrainian hospital, exhausted, with a bald female doctor shoving cotton-tipped rods up his nose, but we all have to suffer for our art. And seeing that Gruffudd (whose name is pronounced Yo-in Griffith) now tells the story with relish, it can't be bothering him too much.
In fact, you get the impression it was all part of the adventure. Young lad goes to sea to portray a heroic 18th-century naval officer. Climbs flimsy rigging, fights gun battles, outwits the enemy, vaults on and off ships, dives into the freezing ocean ... and manages not to throw up when the real-life frigate he's on is rolling through heavy seas 10 kilometres off shore.
"Going up [the rigging] is fine; coming back down is much worse," he recalls with a chuckle. "But I loved the adrenaline and the rush of it. My personal safety was obviously paramount, but that little element of danger keeps you more alert. I had to act that I wasn't enjoying it - I was really acting hard at times, because it was very exciting."
The four-part series, based on Mr Midshipman Hornblower, the first of C.S. Forester's Hornblower books - begins this Sunday on the ABC. The epic undertaking took six months to prepare and film in 1998, and pre-production involved building a
46-metre timber frigate from scratch in a Turkish shipyard, recreating period naval costumes and settings and hiring the proverbial cast of thousands.
The most notable cast choice, apart from Gruffudd, is that of gruff-voiced Robert Lindsay as Hornblower's captain and mentor, Sir Edward Pellew. Lindsay is best known here for recent roles as Fagin in Oliver Twist and prime ministerial candidate Michael Brinn in Divorcing Jack, as well as the dodgy mayor with the facial twitch in GBH. There's not a tic to be seen here, though, as he delivers rousing war speeches to his men in a manner worthy of King Henry V.
The series director, Andrew Grieve, says that "every schoolboy", including himself, devoured all 11 Hornblower books as a lad. When he got wind that these films were to be made he tirelessly lobbied the producers (United Productions in England and A&E Networks in the US) for the job, even calling on his four years' experience in the merchant navy as a drawcard.
Grieve says part of his attraction to the stories stems from his love of them as a child, but coming back to them as an adult he was impressed in a different way.
"The books have got important things about loyalty and courage and self-effacement and good old-fashioned virtues ... honour, and all those concepts of keeping your word and not lying," he says. "And people are drawn to that - they aren't half as cynical as one might expect. Hornblower is also an attractive character. He's full of contradictions and is truly courageous, but only when necessary. He gets s--- scared most of the time, like the rest of us, but he's able to deal with it."
Despite his enthusiasm, Grieve signed up for a fairly tough job. Now, from the comfort of his London home, with the less demanding shoot for the second series of Hornblower films behind him, he can acknowledge just how arduous it was to make the four films. Much of the filming was done off the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine, where raw materials weren't readily available, the culture was alien and attitudes to work ranged from committed to indifferent.
There were also the logistical problems of filming on and around a real ship - the purpose-built frigate The Grand Turk, which was officially HMS Indefatigable onscreen, but had one side painted in French colours so it could double as the enemy. It also had to sail out of sight of land for much of the shoot and couldn't be used in bad weather, for obvious reasons.
"We did have some very bad storms and we almost lost the ship one night," recalls Grieve. "It was a close-run thing. A number of the mooring lines just kept snapping and we didn't have any crew ashore. There were five of us left trying to get lines into the ship to keep it near to the harbour wall, because if all the lines had broken at the same time she would have ended up on the rocks.
"At one moment there was only one line holding her, and we were using all the engines at once ... they were running all night. It gave you a pretty good sense of vulnerability in the face of the sea."
Not surprisingly, seasickness was a big problem. On some days the crew and extras were "chucking up all over the place" and couldn't exactly work at their best. "Some days we were swimming as well, other days jumping in to rubber boats and whizzing around," says Grieve. "It was incredible. Typically I would get back to the hotel and just collapse. It was pretty relentless, but by the same token very exciting. It's not every day you get asked to do something like that."
THE four Hornblower films are reported to have cost 12 million ($33 million) - at the time, the most expensive British miniseries ever made. It was released in the UK at the same time as the multisquillion-dollar Saving Private Ryan, and it irritates Grieve that people not only compared the two, but found the beautifully filmed, acted and scripted Hornblower wanting when they did.
"I was thinking, 'Hang on, what about comparing like with like?'," Grieve recalls. "A TV series is a totally different animal from a one-off film. They were saying, 'Why doesn't it look like Saving Private Ryan?'. The reason it doesn't is because Spielberg's salary was probably the size of our whole budget."
One thing about which everyone seems to agree, however, is the excellent performance of Gruffudd as C.S. Forester's gangly but heroic young naval officer. And with a name like Horatio Hornblower, he'd have to be heroic.
Gruffudd admits he'd never heard of the books before the audition came up for the series. He "swotted up" and could see that he was physically pretty close to the book's description of the young Hornblower - although he says Forester's character "is more of a mental hero" than is portrayed onscreen.
Just two years out of London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and with his only major role in English that of Jeremy Poldark in a 1996 film remake of the former TV hit, Gruffudd had it all to do to convince Grieve and Hornblower's backers that he was the man to step into Horatio's white stockings and don his cocked hat.
Grieve agrees that Gruffudd looked the part, but says the clincher came when the young Welshman - whose soft Cardiff accent is entirely missing in the series - did his screen test.
"He wasn't that well-known so there were reservations," Grieve says, "but the screen test was magnificent. When reservations were still raised, I'd say, 'Go and look at that screen test,' and then they'd say, 'My God, you're right.' So he won the part.
"I felt there were enormous risks [in this series] except with him. He really is a fantastic young actor. He grew into it because Hornblower starts off as a callow midshipman who doesn't know the ropes, and Ioan arrived not knowing anything much about it either. In Lieutenant Hornblower [the second instalment] he's three to four years older, he's matured and really evolved into what Hornblower has evolved into. It's brilliant. He's growing up with the series, if you like, and long may it continue."
Although the Hornblower films did not win a huge following in the UK - the network commissioned the series as four stand-alone films and screened each episode weeks apart - it was a huge success in the US. The four were screened every Sunday for a month and audiences doubled each week. The raving started and so did the accolades, including two Emmys (one for outstanding miniseries).
Gruffudd shot to fame and has since played the adult Pip in the recent TV adaptation of Great Expectations and Lt John Feeley in the Kosovo drama Warriors, both of which screened on the ABC late last year. He's also squeezed in three feature films (including the sequel to 101 Dalmatians) and the next two Hornblower films, which are in now in post-production.
Why all the fuss? Because the 27-year-old Welshman, in addition to being a fine actor, has cheekbones. And a broad grin. And rugby muscles. And a phone manner that's fairly awash with charm and modesty.
Girls across the English and Welsh-speaking world are agog, and Web sites dedicated to Gruffudd have sprung up everywhere. Gruffudd finds the adulation a bit embarrassing, and keeps his thinking down to earth by going to the pub and watching the footy with his mates, or escaping back to Cardiff to be with his family.
"I didn't know all those Web sites existed for a long while," he says. "It's only recently that I discovered them and it was a bit of a shock. Also the fan mail. It all seems extraordinary, and I suppose it is quite flattering, but it's only other people's perception of
you because they've seen you on television as a character. You have to keep all that at arm's length. But I am also eternally grateful because these people will help you get more work."
Watchingbrief
The show Hornblower
The feel A rattling good sabre yarn with great attention to detail. See preview, page 22.
The time Sunday, 8.30pm on the ABC.
Australian audiences will not see all four Hornblower films back to back. The ABC plans to show the first three in successive weeks and hold the fourth to screen before the second series next year.
Horatio: man or myth?
LET'S get one thing straight: Horatio Hornblower did not exist. Even though a detailed biography has been written (The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower), complete with an 1811 painting of Sir Horatio Hornblower, KB, the naval hero was created in the mind of English writer C.S. Forester.
Hornblower does bear the same first name as another famous mariner of the era, Admiral Lord Nelson, and in Forester's last two books his hero also achieves
the same titles. In addition, Hornblower, like Nelson, has an unhappy marriage and falls in love with a titled, married woman.
However, 10 years before he wrote his first Hornblower book in 1937, Forester (who also wrote The African Queen), bought the three-volume set of The Naval Chronicle, covering 1790 to 1820. In its pages were stories about strategy and officer adventures, and many of these, such as the use of fire ships, were fodder for the Hornblower "history".
The new Hornblower films begin with Horatio as an awkward 17-year-old, and are based on the book Mr Midshipman Hornblower. Our hero has plenty of learning - he is excellent at maths and fluent in French - but knows nothing about life, living on board a ship or commanding others. The fact that he is made Admiral of the Fleet in later life, and has more adventures than half the British Navy put together, gives you an inkling that he learns pretty fast.
The only other prominent onscreen recreation of the character is Captain Horatio Hornblower, a highly-regarded film that was created from three of the books in 1951 and starred Gregory Peck, Virginia Mayo and Christopher Lee.
And if you think the young Horatio's adventures are a bit over the top, England's National Maritime Museum assures us that Forester had to tone down actual events to work them into his books.
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald