Andrew Scott's Ian Charleson Biopic Elsinore Premieres — SkimNews
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- Elsinore, directed by Simon Stone and starring Andrew Scott as Ian Charleson, premieres at Telluride this weekend before opening the London Film Festival in October.
- Ian Charleson was 40 and dying of AIDS when he was cast as Hamlet in Richard Eyre's 1989 National Theatre production after Daniel Day-Lewis abruptly left the role, with the cast told his swollen face was from a sinus operation while he was actually suffering from septicaemia.
- Eyre's production ran for six weeks and was widely regarded as one of the finest Hamlets ever staged; the day after Charleson's final show, Ian McKellen refused his Evening Standard best actor award and gave the statuette to Charleson instead.
- Charleson died on 6 January 1990, eight weeks after closing night, having asked that AIDS be recorded as his cause of death—an unusually public act during a period of widespread stigma around the disease.
- Scott, who previously played Hamlet 150 times in London in 2017, said he was drawn to the role by the chance to 'play a part that Ian and his contemporaries would not have gotten while they were working actors,' emphasizing Charleson was 'trying to live—it's not about fetishising his death.'
- Charleson's film career included Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire (1981 best picture winner) and a role in Gandhi (1982 best picture winner), yet he repeatedly returned to the stage in Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Chekhov and Sam Shepard.
Why it matters: Charleson's final Hamlet—performed while secretly dying of AIDS and never preserved on film—has until now survived only in recollections and photographs, so Scott's performance offers the closest thing to a visual record of an event Eyre called 'like watching a man who had been rehearsing for playing Hamlet all his life.' Critics are heavily tipping Scott for a best actor Oscar nomination.
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