Profile : Acting on Instinct : Denholm Elliott has no ‘method’--except to wait for right offer

When director John Landis offered Denholm Elliott the meaty role of the sarcastic butler in 1983’s Eddie Murphy-Dan Aykroyd comedy “Trading Places,” Elliott wanted to accept immediately. But his agent told the accomplished British actor (“A Room With a View,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark”) to turn down the offer. It was the best advice Elliott ever heeded.

“My agent said, ‘If you accept the terms of the contract they are offering you, they will despise you. I know the Americans. You are not asking for enough money or first-class transportation or a very good hotel. Your per diem is ridiculous and your billing is non-existent.’ ”

So Elliott threw the “Trading Places” script into the garbage and booked a holiday in Morocco.

“Five days later they came back with double everything,” Elliott, 69, recalled with a sly grin. “I had a flight on the Concorde, the best hotel, star billing, everything. There’s sort of a gratitude in their eyes that you got twice the amount of cash out of them because they think they are buying something. If they think they got you cheap, they are worried about it.”

Nearly a decade later, the same kind of ploy worked with “A Murder of Quality,” PBS’ new two-part John le Carre mystery. Elliott stars as George Smiley, the British government super spy Alec Guinness brought to life a decade ago in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”

“Murder of Quality,” which premieres tonight, launches the 21st season of PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre.” Le Carre wrote the screenplay from his 1962 novel. This time around, Smiley is on leave when he’s asked by a former intelligence colleague (Glenda Jackson) to investigate the murder of a schoolmaster’s wife at an exclusive public school.

Anthony Hopkins was originally set to play Smiley, Elliott said. “He got the latest script and said, ‘This is not the script I read and I don’t like it.’ He refused to do it.”

And Elliott nearly did the same. With just three days until production was to start, the producers rang up Elliott, who was living for a year in Spain for “tax purposes.” “I told them, ‘I will lose my tax advantage.’ They came back the next day with twice the offer.”

It was an offer Elliott couldn’t refuse. Two days later, he was on location at a public school in Dorset, England.

The first day of production he was introduced to a gentleman named David Cornwell. “I thought he must be the headmaster,” Elliott said. “He kept telling me how to play Smiley, and I kept saying, ‘Who is this guy?’ I didn’t know why he was telling me how to play bloody Smiley and why I was having my pictures taken with him.”

Four days later, someone finally told Elliot that Cornwell is le Carre. “I didn’t realize his real name was Cornwell,” Elliott said sheepishly.

Elliott ultimately didn’t listen to Cornwell/le Carre’s advice on how to play Smiley. He also made certain he didn’t imitate Guinness. “I thought Guinness was brilliant as Smiley,” he said. “But I thought he was very, very dry. I decided to play him far more eccentric and with as much comedy as I could.”

Elliott doesn’t do a lot of preparation for his roles.

“I always think instinct is more interesting than anything you can think up,” he said, “I mistrust and am rather bored with actors who are of the Stanislavski (method) school who think about detail. God almighty. Children just do it when they act. I think we should too--jump in and do it.”

Elliott’s approach to acting didn’t go over well when he attended the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London in 1939. “I was asked to leave,” he said. “They said I had no talent.”

The budding actor was thrilled. “I disliked it intensely there. It was all filled with acting students who thought they were so grand and knew it all. It made me feel ridiculously stupid.”

Elliott again fell in love with acting at, of all places, a German POW camp in Poland during World War II. As a sergeant in the Royal Air Force, Elliott’s plane was shot down in 1942; he remained a prisoner for the duration of the war.

“I didn’t mind it much,” Elliott said. “The two things you worried about is that you were really hungry and you never knew how long you were going to be there.”

To pass the time, Elliott became “embroiled” in the camp theater. “The theater was a hut,” he said. “The prisoners rebuilt the seats out of packing crates.”

And the camp theater packed them in with productions of such plays as “Macbeth,” “Pygmalion” and Philip Barry’s “The Philadelphia Story.” Because there were no women prisoners, the actors played both sexes. “I played about half the men and half the girls,” Elliott said. “My Viola (of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”) is still talked about.”

“Masterpiece Theatre: A Murder of Quality” airs tonight and Oct. 20 at 8 p.m on KVCR, at 9 p.m. tonight and Oct. 20 on KCET and KPBS and at 8 p.m. Tuesday and Oct. 22 on KOCE.