Atlanta Journal Constitution, 24 April 2005
By Steve Murray
**Thanks, Katie

Best known for directing and starring in William Shakespeare's plays onstage and in film, Irish actor Kenneth Branagh came South for "Warm Springs," playing an American icon whose own story had Shakespearean elements.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born to wealth, married into more of it when he traded vows with distant cousin Eleanor and spent his early adulthood with a sense of carefree entitlement. Then, a little like the irresponsible Prince Hal, who became a strong king in "Henry V" (a role Branagh played in the 1989 film version he directed), he surprised everyone by maturing into a powerful national leader, deeply concerned about the welfare of the common man.

"Hal is a good parallel," says Branagh, who was attracted to the larger-than-life role without knowing much about the less well-known struggle the man went through in the years before his presidency. "Roosevelt came from immense privilege and was spoilt, an only child and a man who could say --- as he did to a colleague in his law firm at 25 --- that he wanted to be president. He presented it in a casual way, but a way bordering on arrogance."

It was as if he presumed the job of chief executive was simply an inevitable perk among the privileges he'd been born into. But that's not exactly how it played out.

"My goodness, what a traumatic way to have to reassess whether that was the way to live his life," Branagh says of the event that darkened the future president's world.

In 1921 at age 39, Roosevelt contracted polio and lost the use of his legs. The diagnosis threatened to end his political career and led him out of the national spotlight into the quiet backwaters of the segregated South.

"He went through a cycle of depression and despair and anger and apathy," Branagh says, referring to a period when Roosevelt almost literally tried to cut himself loose from the world. He left Eleanor at home in New York with their children and drifted around the Florida Keys in a houseboat, soaked in self-pity.

"He did go missing on that boat and was very solitary," Branagh says. "It took a long time before he began the single-minded focus on learning to walk again."

Roosevelt tried every possible remedy, from the physical program called the Alexander Technique to drinking the oil of monkey glands prescribed by charlatans. He finally found what looked like promising therapy in the naturally hot waters of Warm Springs, some 70 miles southwest of Atlanta.

Filmed on location

A warmly told and well-acted character study of a man who develops concern for others through his own misfortune, the HBO film focuses on this small but crucial period of Roosevelt's life. It was in the unlikely setting of Warm Springs that he ultimately found the physical and emotional resolve to become a nation's leader. It was shot on location there last year, as well as in Atlanta and Summerville.

It received a private premiere last Tuesday at the Carter Center, with director Joseph Sargent (who won a Director's Guild Award for his work on his last fact-based film for HBO, "Something the Lord Made"), actor Tim Blake Nelson (who plays the proprietor of the Warm Springs facility) and local dignitaries.

A four-time Oscar nominee, Branagh, 44, traveled to Warm Springs a few months before shooting to be fitted for the withered, prosthetic legs he wears in the film. He was, so to speak, warmly welcomed by townsfolk and was able to do some research.

"Their archive down there is extensive, so we saw photographs and footage that we never saw anywhere else," he says.

One thing surprised him: "Roosevelt had a deeply silly strain to him. There was always steel in there, but lots of appealing silliness comes across." Though he would later shepherd the country through the Depression and World War II with sober distinction, "the footage of him at Warm Springs shows he was happy being daft. It clearly endeared him to people enormously."

While he was down there, Branagh met some of the second- and third-generation makers of leg braces, related to those who had made them for FDR. He also started to understand the appeal of a place so far away from the hustle of Roosevelt's native New York.

"You get a sense of the relative isolation of the area. Something attracted him to that part of Georgia, something that spoke to him, because he'd been all over the country."

Roosevelt ultimately bought the Warm Springs facility and built a cottage there, dubbed the Little White House. It's where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 60 years ago, three months into an unprecedented fourth term as president.

Looking the part

While Branagh dealt with prosthetic legs and braces for his role, Cynthia Nixon, who plays Eleanor in the film, was equipped with fake upper teeth to simulate the first lady's overbite --- and make the "Sex and the City" veteran look a little more like the homely first lady. The first set were major chompers. "They were significantly bigger during the course of pre-production," Branagh says. "Eleanor herself was largely gifted in that area."

Both actors worked to create the couple's voices, familiar from historic film and tapes.

"FDR's voice was so distinctive, with that oratorical lift. And also there's a lot of footage with Eleanor with very old-fashioned, eccentric delivery," Branagh says. "We tried to imagine what life was like at home, with FDR coming down saying . . ." Here he launches into a comically pompous variation of Roosevelt's cadence in his "fear itself" speech: "I would like a cup of coffee with one sugar!"

For some scenes, the actor lay in bed with his own healthy legs hidden under the mattress, with the withered prosthetic ones visible on the sheets. "We had visitors to the set one day, and one of them said, 'Jesus, Ken, you've lost so much weight --- how did you do that?'"

A historic footnote: While Roosevelt turned Warm Springs into a second home, the waters never really helped build him back up, physically. But psychologically, the place allowed him become the man who led the country through two of the darkest periods of the 20th century.