Bring on the clown | Theatre

Every night in the West End of London a story is told about Nathan Lane. The journalist Toby Young, performing his one man play How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, regales his audience with the time he interviewed Lane for Vanity Fair. He asked the actor if he was Jewish, and after a long

This article is more than 19 years old

Bring on the clown

This article is more than 19 years oldA virtual unknown - in Britain, that is - has been flown in to rescue The Producers, set to be the biggest West End production this year. His rave reviews will not surprise Broadway, however, where he is theatre's hottest property

Every night in the West End of London a story is told about Nathan Lane. The journalist Toby Young, performing his one man play How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, regales his audience with the time he interviewed Lane for Vanity Fair. He asked the actor if he was Jewish, and after a long pause Lane snapped: 'Yes, yes. What of it?' Undeterred, Young blundered on, reminded Lane that he often played gay roles and asked him baldly: 'Are you gay?'

As Young recalls: 'His jaw hit the floor and, when he'd recovered his composure, he simply got up and left. When I returned to the office, Graydon Carter, the irascible editor of Vanity Fair , had already been given a flea in his ear by Lane's publicist. "What were you thinking?" he screamed. "You can't ask celebrities whether they're Jewish or gay. In future, just assume they're all Jewish and all gay, OK?"'

It would be a serious miscarriage of justice if Nathan Lane's epitaph in British theatregoers' consciousness was as the man who landed Toby Young in hot water with his editor. For in a week when the culture gaps between Britain and America have been much discussed, here's another: a performer few Britons have heard of is simultaneously the biggest star on Broadway. Only now, finally, Britain is starting to get it. Nathan Lane is a name half-glimpsed on a billboard or in the entertainment listings of newspapers. He is still on the periphery of our vision, almost focused and almost famous, but come Tuesday he will step magnificently centre stage.

Lane, a chubby yet athletic 5ft 7ins, will tread the historic boards of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane when the curtain goes up on The Producers, Mel Brooks's blockbuster musical and the British theatre event of the year. According to last week's Mail on Sunday, the 48-year-old will become the West End's highest ever earner on £38,000 a week, and by the end of his run in the show on 8 January will have trousered nearly half a million pounds.

The show, which was famously turned into a 1968 film starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, is the story of two impresarios who deliberately set out to stage a sure-fire flop, Springtime for Hitler, featuring a chorus line of goosestepping Nazis, only to find it is a smash hit. The £5 million production of The Producers at Drury Lane threatened to go in the opposite direction when its star, Hollywood warhorse Richard Dreyfuss, left just a week before the first preview.

It was then that Lane, planning to relax in the exclusive Hamptons on Long Island after his record-breaking run in The Producers in New York, got the call. Reluctant at first, the king of musical comedy was persuaded to break off his holiday and reprise his role as Max Bialystock by a reported £100,000 down payment, plus a salary of £360,000 and a share of box office takings. This is far in excess of the alleged £7,000 a week earned by his co-star, the British comedian Lee Evans. The last-gasp rescue mission began to pay off immediately with thunderous standing ovations at preview performances. Lane had saved The Producers.

But who is this man hastily inserted in the ubiquitous advertising posters, delighting sell-out audiences with his vaudevillian comic timing rather than his Hollywood credentials?

As he prepares for his West End debut proper, how much longer can he remain the least known celebrity in Britain?

Lane was born in Jersey City to a blue collar Irish Catholic family - he has described it as 'bad Eugene O'Neill'. He was named Joe Lane after his uncle, a Jesuit priest, but when applying for an Equity card found there was already a Joe Lane in the actors' union, so registered as Nathan Lane (after the Guys and Dolls character Nathan Detroit). In a 2001 interview he said: 'People always think I'm Jewish and changed my last name from Rabinowitz.'

Lane's father, Daniel, was a truck driver and promising tenor who went blind and drank himself to death when Lane was 11. His mother Nora was a manic depressive, incapacitated for long periods, leaving her youngest son to do the household chores. His brother Dan, 13 years his senior, became a surrogate father and took him to the theatre as escapism. He has another brother, Bobby, nine years older.

The young Lane earned a drama scholarship in Philadelphia but he arrived to discover not all his expenses were covered, so he turned back the same day. Instead he took a series of odd jobs including a bail interviewer, telemarketer and singing telegram, while trying to find acting work in New York. In an age dominated by film and television, Lane made his name in the small theatres off Broadway, chalking up impressive performances not just in musicals but traditional British classics.

On Broadway itself his star rose and dazzled in Guys and Dolls, in which he played Nathan Detroit, and he won Tony awards as Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Max Bialystock in The Producers, in which he partnered Matthew Broderick, husband of Sex And The City star Sarah Jessica Parker. It was the hit of the decade, doing a record-breaking £2m in sales on its opening day, and assured Lane's place in the pantheon of American theatre greats. But at a price: the punishing role ravaged his vocal chords and prompted one producer to observe, 'seeing him after a performance, it's like he's gone 10 rounds with Joe Louis'.

His stage persona has been described as 'funny on top, bleeding underneath'. The Boston Globe elaborated: 'Bombastic but fleet-footed, subtle yet outrageously funny, the kind of old-fashioned stage virtuoso who makes 'em laugh, breaks their hearts, belts it to the second balcony, and brings cheering crowds to their feet.' Terrence McNally, the writer who describes Lane as his muse, said he has not developed as a performer because he did not need to. 'I don't think he's gotten better. He was touched with genius in the theatre from the very beginning. Nathan was born for the stage and most truly exists there.'

Lane's film career has been less memorable and explains his relative anonymity on this side of the Pond. He has voiced The Lion King and Stuart Little films, while his biggest role came as Robin Williams's boyfriend in The Birdcage in 1996. He has admitted disappointment that young directors tend to stay away from theatre so do not spot him, and has also tried and failed to get various TV projects off the ground.

The perception of Lane as a loner, killing himself six nights a week on stage instead of cultivating family life, fuelled the 'sad clown' cliche. 'I'm still the fat kid from high school who never had a date,' he said. He was 21 when he told his mother he was gay. Her reply was: 'I'd rather you were dead.' Lane shot back: 'I knew you'd understand.'

However, she was not too ashamed to loyally attend all his performances, and tell him he was the best in the cast. Lane came out publicly in 1998 - two years after he took umbrage at Toby Young's sexuality question - and was criticised by the gay lobby for being reticent for so long.

In the nearest thing to a definitive interview, running to almost 8,000 words in the New York Times magazine in September 2001, he told Alex Witchel: 'We're talking about someone's life, not a to-do list. From the time I told my mother, I've been living openly. But really, I was born in 1956. I'm one of those old-fashioned homosexuals, not one of the newfangled ones who are born joining parades. My family referred to them as "fags", and that was it. And yes, career-wise, I didn't want to be branded as a big fruitcake and that's all I could do. On a personal level, I don't immediately open up to anybody, even about what colours I like, much less something like this. I am my mother, OK? Just without the housedress and slippers.'

Broderick told the New York Times: 'Nathan is shy in some ways, which I am, too. When he first meets somebody he's quiet, sceptical almost. He has a darkness to him, I guess. I love being around him, but he does get unhappy. He'll get quiet usually and say he's tired. He won't go out after the show. Then the next day he'll get better, but I don't really know why.'

Lane has the face of a clown but insisted to one interviewer: 'I am not a sad clown. I am not a sad clown.' Perhaps not any more. He once joked darkly that if The Producers went full circle and was turned back into a film, his part would be snatched away and given to Danny DeVito: 'That'll be my luck. Then you'll find me on a tall building.'

In fact there will be a movie, which starts production in February, and happily the part has gone to Lane (reunited with Broderick), so he gets another shot at the Hollywood big time. His wintry gloom is set to lift. He has a steady boyfriend, too. At last, a richly deserved springtime for Nathan.

Nathan Lane

Real name: Joseph Lane
DoB: 3 February 1956 (Jersey City, New Jersey)
Education: St Peter's Preparatory High School, Jersey City
Roles include: Voice of Timon in The Lion King; Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls; Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

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