Paul Rhys acts his age

By Robert Butler

He was a drama student at RADA when he won his first movie role (“Absolute Beginners”) in 1986, but it was several years later, as Van Gogh’s younger brother in Robert Altman’s “Vincent and Theo”, that Paul Rhys wowed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Black hair flopping over a pallid face, fleshy lips and rheumy eyes flickering with emotion: here was a young actor as taut as a violin string. When he played a scene in a café opposite a young woman in a bonnet it was a toss-up as to who was the more feminine. On stage, as the poet A.E. Housman (in Tom Stoppard’s “Invention of Love”) or as Hamlet (where he looked as bleached as Yorick’s skull), his thoroughbred nerviness was matched by sudden shafts of sweetness. Rhys developed a nice line in real-life characters: another brother, this time Charlie Chaplin’s (opposite Robert Downey junior), Romantic composers (Beethoven and Chopin), even Labour’s “Prince of Darkness”, Peter Mandelson.