Chapter 18 Dougray Scott (excerpt)

In the summer of 1998 America was gripped by a series of macho action movies and by the real-life drama of a president's sexual shenanigans and his attempts to deny them. Then along came a film that served as a sweet and gentle anecdote to the violence, graphic sex and cynicism that was dominating the media. An old-fashioned romance, Ever After, was one of the season's surprise hits. It was a 'realistic' reinterpretation of the Cinderella story with Drew Barrymore as the heroine and Anjelica Huston as the wicked stepmother. But perhaps the greatest excitement centred on the handsome newcomer playing the prince. Before long he would be co-starring with Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 2, but at the time audiences were simply asking, 'Who is this guy?' There were appeals on the Internet for information about the charmer with the dark, brooding, Antonio Banderas looks. He had seemingly come from nowhere, another overnight sensation. He was playing a French prince and it was likely he must have come from France or Spain. In fact Dougray Scott hailed from the post-industrial wastelands of Fife, where he grew up plain Stephen Scott. He went to the local technical college and did the same introduction-to-drama course as Ewan McGregor, albeit a good few years ahead of him and without the immediate success.

There was a time when Dougray Scott found it so difficult to get work he might have given up, except there was nothing else he could do. 'I was unemployed, completely skint, but I just had a sort of belief, and a passion for it,' he says. In conversation, Scott has a distinctly laid-back manner. He seems relaxed to the point that he occasionally loses his train of thought when thinking about his answers to questions, questions like 'How old are you?' 'I should say I'm 28,' he says, 'but I'm not. I don't eh . . .' There is a long pause. 'Sorry, what did you say again?' This attitude belies a sharp mind and a solid Calvinist work ethic. He insists he is 30 at a time when he is 32. He was born in 1965 and was very aware he was older than some of the others in the emerging Scot Pack. 'I like being 30,' he says.

He had only a couple of scenes in Gillies MacKinnon's First World War drama Regeneration, which focused on the period that the war poet Siegfried Sassoon spent at Craiglockhart Hospital after refusing to fight, but it was a vitally important sequence. Scott was playing Robert Graves, the war poet and author of  I, Claudius. He argues with Sassoon James Wilby) over the latter's refusal to fight as a protest against the war. Scott delivers a performance of looks, awkward gestures and dramatic pauses, before spitting out the words 'We both know it won't end until there's not a cat or dog left to enlist.' It took most of the day to film the scene at a small loch near Glasgow - a bitterly cold winter day, with frost till noon, rain threatening to turn to snow and the actors' breath drifting from their mouths like smoke. That was the first time I had met Scott and I was impressed by his dedication, not just in going through repeated retakes on a freezing day - which is what actors get paid for - but by the extent of his preparations, which included reading all Graves's poetry, listening to recordings of his voice and even visiting his old school, Charterhouse -all for a single sequence.

With his looks and his determination, all Scott needed was the right break, and his first starring role in a film was already in the can. He was playing a coke-sniffing Scot in a film from the producers of Trainspotting. But, despite a big nationwide release, Twin Town singularly failed to repeat Trainspotting's success and grossed less than £700,000 in Britain. There was also what was supposedly a co-starring role with Mickey Rourke in the sequel to Nine 1/2 Weeks, but it went straight to video in Britain. He got another chance of stardom with the big-budget Hollywood disaster movie Deep Impact, in which he played the journalist boyfriend of Tea Leoni. Deep Impact was a big hit. His character survived the comet that was threatening to wipe out mankind, but suffered a slashing every bit as vicious as the girl in Psycho and was left mortally wounded on the cutting-room floor. 'I hadn't a very good time on that film,' he says. 'The script that I got sent before I went to do it was interesting. And then I got there and it changed and it kept on changing.' Although Deep Impact was a hit, it did little for Scott's career.

-end of excerpt-

© Brian Pendreigh, 2000

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