As the hapless Mr Bean and successive generations of Blackadders, he is one of the country’s most popular comic actors.
But
while Rowan Atkinson’s success at making people laugh has seen him
become a hit with the public, he has revealed his peers refuse to take
him or his work seriously.
As
he dons the raincoat, trilby and pipe of Chief Inspector Jules Maigret
for ITV, Atkinson, 61, said his fellow actors often see comedy as just
‘farting about for money’ but insisted he is not reviving the detective
in an attempt to find artistic credibility.
While Rowan Atkinson’s success at
making people laugh has seen him become a hit with the public, he has
revealed his peers refuse to take him or his work seriously. Pictured,
still from Mr Bean's Holiday
He
said: ‘The one thing which I never wish it to be thought is that you
play serious roles in order to achieve some kind of acceptability that
you can’t get if you play comedy roles.
‘I
think that it’s quite weird the way the arts community still have a
long lasting cynicism of the artistic value of comedy, that comedy is
just farting about for money whereas as soon as you play a dramatic
role, “Ah ha, now you’re an actor, now you’re doing something of
meaning”’.
Mr Bean
attracted almost 19 million viewers at its peak, while Blackadder was
seen as an important enough part of national culture for a special film
was screened at the Millennium Dome to mark the year 2000.
But
it seems that this is no enough to impress Atkinson’s fellow thespians.
He said: ‘[They believe] art is something nobody laughs at and nobody
makes any money out of, which is an attitude I would dispute.’
This
year, Atkinson is taking on the rather more sombre role of Maigret in
two adventures. First comes Maigret Sets a Trap, on Easter Monday, in
which the detective is nearly thrown off his case for failing to catch a
killer who randomly murders women in Montmartre. Then later comes
Maigret’s Dead Man, featuring a series of low-life gangland killings.
While
the character has long been a favourite of both page and screen,
Atkinson has revealed that he never watched the Rupert Davies’ TV series
of the 1960s as, ‘we didn’t have a television at home until I was 14.
So that meant, for whatever reason, that I didn’t see much TV.’
Bringing his own incarnation to the screen was a challenge because the character is so understated compared to his normal roles.
He
said: ‘It’s not Henry V. And that I found very difficult. I’m used to,
in many ways you might say, milking every word for all the value,
whether it’s comic or serious, that you can get out of it.’
He
smoked real tobacco in his pipe – supposedly for ‘practical’ reasons –
but, a car enthusiast himself, was unsuccessful in his attempts to
convince producers that Maigret should finally be allowed to drive,
rather than using public transport of being chauffeured.
He even had to curtail his real life driving because of the insurance requirements, having to miss out of racing at Goodwood.
