An amoral scoundrel, scheming his way to the top and grabbing sex and money as he climbs; it sounds like a story from our own age, but Joe Lampton, antihero of new series
Room At The Top, was originally embodied back in the cosy 1950s by Laurence Harvey, an actor whose sleazy lifestyle mirrored the character he played.
Writing in the Mail, Maureen Paton states Harvey’s stellar performance catapulted him to fame, but was so powerful it has inhibited anyone else from attempting the part – until now. In the two-part BBC4 drama charting Joe Lampton’s ruthless drive to sexual and business success, rising Mancunian actor Matthew McNulty, 28, challenges Harvey’s definitive interpretation. The love scenes are as daring and revealing as those in the original X-rated 1959 movie – but the story has a much more modern feel. ‘Our version is more realistic and goes deeper into the story’s time and place – the industrial North in the gritty, class-bound 1950s,’ says Mcnulty.
His character Joe gets on by ruthlessly exploiting his charms both to further his business career and keep two women simultaneously – his married mistress Alice, played by Red Riding star Maxine Peake, and Susan, played by Jenna-Louise Coleman of Waterloo Road and Emmerdale – the rich girl he dumps Alice to marry.
So does Matthew have anything in common with Joe?
‘Absolutely not,’ he insists. ‘Family life is my anchor. I’m actually shy and lacking in confidence’.
After losing his mother at 18, Matthew dropped out of his film studies degree course because the acting offers were flooding in, and he hasn’t stopped working since.
Constantly on the road as an actor, he is sustained by his schoolgirl sweetheart Katie, now his wife, and their two young sons. For a happily married man, how did filming the production’s sex scenes feel?
‘It’s always awkward doing love scenes. But I was lucky, as I knew Maxine well.’ (The two worked together on Channel 4’s Shameless and ITV1’s Moors Murderers drama See No Evil). ‘Also she’s a Northerner like me. We’re good friends’.
McNulty’s steady lifestyle is a million miles away from Laurence Harvey’s, too.
Harvey, actually a Lithuanian-born Jewish immigrant, adopted his screen name and the drawl and manners of an uppercrust Englishman. His good looks carried him to Hollywood superstardom.
Like Lampton, he slept his way to the top, marrying actress Margaret Leighton and Joan, widow of Hollywood producer Harry Cohn, before making Sixties model Paulene Stone his third wife, and mother of his only child, daughter Domino (who died of an overdose in 2005).
But Harvey’s womanising hid a very different persona. At a time when homosexual acts were still outlawed in Britain, bisexual Harvey had a secret string of male lovers.
After the death of one of the more durable of them, film producer James Woolf, in 1966, Harvey told Paulene, ‘No woman will ever be able to give me the love Jimmy gave me’. Harvey himself, a heavy smoker and drinker, died of stomach cancer in 1973 aged just 45.
Matthew McNulty feels that even today, coming out of the closet is still a problem for many gay actors.
‘There’s always the risk the work will dry up.’ For Laurence Harvey, the burden of hiding a secret that would have horrified his female fans may have proved too much to bear.
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