BEYOND OUR KEN The Guardian, January 2. 1998 By: Lyn Gardner Unlike his father -the longest-serving actor on Coronation Street -Linus Roache has never courted fame and fortune. Is that why Hollywood finds him irresistible? Here, in a hired room masquerading as a private sitting room in front of a roaring log fire that turns out to be gas-fired, Linus Roache and I are pretending to have a conversation that we both know is really an interview bound by rules and conventions. We are playing the game rather well. "I surprise myself", says Roache conspirato- rially. "I am quite good at this sort of thing, although I'm always saying I'm not." Good? He's a complete pro. I've always had a problem with actors who profess themselves horrified to discover they are suddenly famous. After all, you never hear bankers complaining that they've become rich or authors that they've got a three-book publishing deal. But Roache might be the genuine article, the reluctant star who really does feel ambivalent about fame. He has already turned his back to it once. When Antonia Bird's emotionally turbulent film Priest was released in 1994, the phone didn't stop ringing with Hollywood offers for Roache who made his feature debut as Father Greg, the troubled homosexual priest. Roache's response was to tell his agent he wasn't available and to head off for a trek through India. "I felt intimidated by the whole American thing", he says. "On one hand, I felt I couldn't afford to stop at that point in my career, but I also knew that it wasn't right for me at that time." Three years on, Roache feels more than ready to take on America. Which is just as well, because Iain Softley's version of Henry James's novel The Wings of The Dove -starring Roache as the poverty- stricken journalist Merton Densher in love with, and loved by, Helena Bonham Carter's manipulative Kate Croy -has been such a hit in the US that he is once again being besieged by American casting directors. He is well aware that it is the fate of any British actor with clipped vowels, a strange name and a Royal Shakespeare Company pedigree to be touted as the next Ralph Fiennes. But in this case the comparison may be examination. Anyone who saw the two of them play the good and the bad brothers Edmund and Edgar in Nick Hytner's 1990 production of King Lear for the RSC will know that Roache's Edgar was more than a match for Fiennes's coldly Machiavellian Edmund. If Roache has the talent to be a big-screen star, only time will tell if he has the temperament. There are, after all, only so many times you can turn your back on success and find it still comes knocking again. It is tempting to wonder whether the actor, who looks considerably younger than his 34 years and who would pass unnoticed in a crowd, has been left with the scars from his childhood. He is the son of the actress Anna Cropper and the actor William Roache, known to millions as Ken Barlow in Coronation Street, the man who famously went to court to prove he was not in the least bit boring. Linus shares his father's dislike of the tabloid press. "I don't know how they can be allowed to do what they do. There is such cynicism." he says with surprising anger. The young Linus appeared as Barlow's son for a few episodes of the Street when he was nine, shortly before his parents' acrimonious separation. Roache was estranged from his father for many years, but the two have long been reconciled. "Dad does all that celebrity thing brilliantly, and there's a lot of dignity in what he does, but it is really not me", says Roache, with the well-rehearsed air of one who has been asked about his father once too often, but is too polite to show how much it irritates him. Besides Priest, Roache had another brush with fame when he played Bob, the working-class cad keeping body and soul together in war-time Yorkshire, in the BBC series Seaforth. In a blaze of publicity, Roache quit the series after 10 episodes -an unpopular decision with the BBC, which had plans for a three-year run. Roache says he left because he felt the quality of the production faltered after the first few episodes and had lost its sense of direction. You wonder whether these are excuses or just another case of Roache spurning fame. Pushed, he says he very much resented being sold as a TV selebrity. His dad has entered the Guinness Book of Records for being the longest-serving actor in a TV soap. It's tempting to see Linus's reluctance to court fame or commit to the small screen as a reaction to his father's career. But, as he himself points out, it is his father's career that is the exception. "I'm the one who is the norm. An actor's life is one in which you go from job to job, and that suits me fine. I love the versatility." In fact, the emotial restraint of The Wings of The Dove couldn't be more different from the punchy Priest. Roache is taken aback to find that his performance as Merton Densher, a poor campaigning journalist persuaded by his lover, Kate, to pretend he is in love with a dying heiress, has attracted so much attention. "I found him a character who is hard to come to terms with because he is so fallible", says Roache, "He is someone without any real sense of purpose. He says himself that he is a man who doesn't really believe in anything, he lacks passion. He won't choose, and by not choosing he puts himself in a horrendous position. I've seen the film three times, and each time I've watched it I've desperately wanted him to do something different." It is a difficult role, but Roache brings to the part the ability to be both dashing and pathetic that marked his performance as the feckless, alcoholic ex-RAF pilot Freddie in Karl Reisz's revival of The Deep Blue Sea at the Almeida in 1993. He has the rare gift to be able to make you see the tragic in humanity's seriously flawed specimens. I think he has the potential to be a great actor, though whether he'll be an entirely happy one is another matter. At least The Wings of The Dove comes at a time in Roache's career when he is feeling more in control. "I wasn't ready to take the opportunities that came with Priest. But now I'm older and I've got things more in perspective", he says earnestly, "I'm not as driven by ambition, I don't feel the pressure so much. I know there's more to life than going from film to film." After The Wings of The Dove, Roache once again took time out, a move that might look like professional suicide but which, if repeated, could turn out to be his trump card: everyone always wants what is unavailable. For Roache, though, these sabbaticals are a psychological not a professional necessity. He puts his new-found serenity down to his involvement with the American guru Andrew Cohen, who preaches "personal liberation through meditation". Cohen's organisation, known as Face here in Britain, has been labelled by some as a cult. But Roache talks openly about his involvement with it and says that it has made him "less neurotic and more committed to work in a much less self-centered way." Maybe it's strange that someone who has been hounded by the tabloid press for his beliefs should be so eager to talk about them, but he is, and he doesn't sound dotty or deluded when he does so. In fact, for the first time during the interview, he relaxes. You get the feeling that this is the real Roache, not Roache the publicity machine. "I hit 30 and I started questioning the way I was living", he explains, "One of the things that had attracted me to acting was the thrill of abandon and letting go that it gave me. It was like surfing. I found myself wanting that experience more and more, but the more I hankered after it, the less it happened. Through Andrew, I realised I didn't need to act to have that experience, I could have it in life. I used to think that as an actor it didn't matter what I was like as a human being. I realise it does. I have found what I was looking for in the work in my life and that has brought me back to the work in a much more sane way." He says this with such sincerity that even I, hardened old cynic, wonder whether he might indeed have found a secret that would be good for all of us.