The Scene Stealers

By ELIZABETH GLEICK/LONDON

THE REAL THING Tom Stoppard His witty wordplay would make even the Bard proud

As attuned to the absurdities of modern life as anyone, the British playwright Tom Stoppard nevertheless cannot believe something he has heard about Shakespeare in Love. "Is it true that in America you can't see this film if you're 15?" he asks, his understanding of an R rating only slightly off. "That glimpse of nipple, and we lose 10 million viewers!"

He might well be confused. The unlikely hit Stoppard has co-written with Los Angeles screenwriter Marc Norman is indeed daring--but only in its literary aspirations. Shakespeare in Love boldly imagines young Will, played by Joseph Fiennes, struggling with writer's block and a script called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, until he falls in love with Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), who becomes his Juliet. Fact weaves with fantasy, verse with demotic dialect, low comedy with high passion; and as director John Madden puts it, "Who dares put words in Shakespeare's mouth and get away with it?" The answer is Stoppard, who says, "It never occurred to me to worry about Shakespeare's language butting up against mine. It's not a competition."

Still, the movie took a decade to happen. Norman, whose previous films include Cutthroat Island, got the idea in 1988 from one of his sons, who was studying Elizabethan drama, and eventually produced a script for Universal. In 1992 Stoppard--who wrote the movies Empire of the Sun, The Russia House and Brazil, among others--came in to do a rewrite. The film fell apart over casting and languished until Miramax bought the rights from Universal in 1997.

Though there is no dispute over the writing credits, Norman admits he is beginning to feel "burned" by hearing the movie repeatedly called Stoppardian. He says, "In terms of the story, structure and the language--I accomplished that in my screenplay." But both men confirm that many of the jokes that dazzle past--the Stratford-upon-Avon mug; the pub waiter offering a special of "pig's foot marinated in juniper vinegar served on a buckwheat pancake"--are indeed Stoppard's.

The final scenes are also Stoppard's, and, like his Will, he was rewriting the ending practically until the moment of filming. "We seemed to have a romantic comedy where the boy didn't get the girl," Stoppard explains. "This troubled people, but the whole point was that the experience led him to write the greatest love tragedy of all time, not the greatest love comedy." Instead of that final shot of the beach, he says, "I shouldn't be telling you these things, but in my first go I had a sort of ghostly Manhattan in my mind as she walked off--but that was a ghostly skyscraper too far."

The desire to hunt for Stoppard's touch is understandable. The playwright, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and educated in India and England, catapulted to fame with a different Shakespearean work: the 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an existential reimagining of two characters from Hamlet. Since then his work has been known for its wordplay and highbrow subject matter--such as chaos theory in Arcadia, or the life of poet A.E. Housman in The Invention of Love, now running in London. Many of his plays have been criticized for their emotional inaccessibility, but, says Stoppard a bit testily, "If people think it, then they think it. That's fine." In fact, romantic passion has long been a preoccupation: his 1982 play The Real Thing is as searing a testament to love and its uncertainties--can this be the real thing?--as anything Stoppard has ever written, until now.

Though he confesses he was initially reluctant to return to Shakespeare, Stoppard says he has been bowled over by the power of the Bard--and the theater--ever since his "first, deep" experience seeing Hamlet: "It alerted you. It jumped you into the central truth about theater, which is that it's an event and not a text." This, he is convinced, is why theater will endure and why he continues to produce a play every few years (of his next he will say only "19th century" and "Russia").

By now, Stoppard has won most awards out there, and he was knighted in 1997; but he is worried that his work is like "building sand castles"--with Shakespearean immortality far from guaranteed. "I'm thinking of the tide coming in and sweeping it all away," he admits. "History is stiff with writers who have been praised in terms exceeding anything my generation has received, and you think, 'Well, where are they now?' It's a chastening thought." But not one, fortunately, that keeps him from his desk for long.

THE DRAMA QUEEN Judi Dench Her commanding cameo adds a jewel to her crown

She has played all the great queens: Cleopatra, Gertrude in Hamlet, Queen Victoria in the 1997 film Mrs. Brown. She has great swaths of Shakespeare locked in her brain: all of Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream and "probably most of Measure for Measure." So, for British actor Judi Dench, figuring out how to inhabit the role of Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love was no great mystery. "I thought she would be a commanding person," says Dench, who is herself a rather gracious person, and all of 5-ft. 1-in. tall. "I thought that if she just glanced at you, you'd be pretty dodgy inside."

That is the sound of Dench understatement in action. When she appears onscreen as the regal, nay, godlike, Elizabeth--with skeletally white skin, burning eyes and all aquiver in that bejeweled and befeathered costume like some sort of monstrous dragonfly--multiplex audiences have erupted in cheers. With barely 10 minutes onscreen, she makes her terrifyingly omniscient Elizabeth pivotal to the film, with players and viewers alike perched breathlessly on her every word. Dench attributes this potency not to her own skill but to the deference the film's other characters show her. John Madden, who directed her in both Mrs. Brown and Shakespeare, knows better. "She has this amazing accessibility," he says. "She could make Attila the Hun seem sympathetic."

After 41 years on the English stage, after receiving the female equivalent of a knighthood in 1987--"Oh, don't call me Dame," she says, burying her face in her hands--it appears that Dench's American moment has arrived. Last year she received an Oscar nomination for Mrs. Brown; her Golden Globe nomination this year for Shakespeare puts her back in the Oscar game; and in April, she will appear on Broadway for the first time in 40 years, starring in David Hare's Amy's View, a 1997 London hit. She has even gone mainstream--playing M in the James Bond movies.

Dench, 64, may be one of Britain's hardest-working actors. She is currently filming her third Bond movie and starring in London's West End in the Peter Hall-directed Filumena, and she often stars in British sitcoms. But amazingly, Dench confesses that she still suffers from stage fright. "It's anxiety and fear that create adrenaline, which for me is petrol," she explains. Worst of all, she says, is actually watching herself onscreen. She has never seen some of her movies, and only watched Shakespeare in Love to prepare for a U.S. press junket. "I'm very squeamish about it," she admits. "Once I see it, I regret what I've left undone. It's why I love the theater." Going to see the Bond films, though, is different. "Oh, yes!" she says, speaking in actressy italics, as she tends to do. "It's so thrilling! It's absolutely wonderful! It's terribly exciting!"

Much of her squeamishness stems from a fundamental--and misplaced--insecurity about her looks. When asked to play Cleopatra in 1987, Dench, only half-joking, called herself a "menopausal dwarf." "I'm not a face that people want to film," she insists. "I faced that very, very early on." Now Dench may have to face an even more frightening fact: the camera loves her.