Paul Scofield

Watch what he does when asked a direct question. In A Man for All Seasons (1966), when Cromwell or Norfolk puts the oath to Thomas More, Scofield's eyes go somewhere else for a moment before he answers, as if he were checking the statute one last time, and the answer, when it comes, is quieter than the question. He never underlines. He never rushes. Other actors show you a man thinking; Scofield shows you a man who has already thought and is deciding how much to tell you.

He was a stage actor first and stayed one. He began professionally in 1940, went through Birmingham Repertory, and was doing Shakespeare at Stratford from 1946. More came to him in Robert Bolt's play in London in 1960 and on Broadway the following year, and by the time Fred Zinnemann filmed it in 1966 the part had been in his mouth for six years. It shows, in the best way. Afterwards he went back to the theatre, with major roles at the National in the 1970s, and let the films come to him: Peter Brook's King Lear (1971), the French King in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989), Judge Danforth in The Crucible (1996).

The voice is what everyone mentions, and rightly; it could go from a rumble to something near falsetto without visible effort. What interests us is how seldom he used the top of it. He said of More that "The way More sounded came out of my characterization of him as a lawyer. His dryness of mind, I found, led him to use a sort of dryness of speech." That is the whole method. He worked out who the man was and let the sound follow. The speech in the garden at Chelsea, explaining to Corin Redgrave's William Roper why you do not cut down the law to get at the Devil, tightened our throat, and it is a lecture on statute delivered without a raised voice.

Twenty-eight years later, in Robert Redford's Quiz Show (1994), he plays Mark Van Doren and the same stillness does something different. Here it makes dignity attractive rather than self-important, and it is the reason the film finds these people harder to judge than the fraud is to condemn. It is a supporting part and he does not push it forward. We could have watched a great deal more of him.

The complaint, and it is a fair one, is that there is not enough of him on film. The stage came first and he did not pretend otherwise, and screen stardom of the ordinary sort was never on offer to a man who always looked as though he was weighing what you had just said. If you have seen the two we have reviewed, go to Brook's King Lear next. If you have seen neither, start in the garden at Chelsea.