Relish/Journal Now, 28 April 2005
By Tim Clodfelter
**Thanks, Jude

Kenneth Branagh knew a little about Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he was asked to play him in the HBO movie Warm Springs, which airs 8 p.m. Saturday.

"I knew he had polio, and I knew he was the longest-serving president in the United States," Branagh said. "I'm personally fascinated by history and by the Second World War. I'm particularly aware of and interested in his relationship with (Winston) Churchill, which was a very extraordinary one."

According to the film's producers, Branagh was their first choice for the role, even though he wasn't available because he was scheduled to be filming Mission Impossible III.

"When Ken wasn't available because of that, we really did go back (to a list of candidates), and we weren't sure," said Colin Callender, one of the film's producers. "There was nobody else that we had as a backup. And we put the movie on hold."

Then the start date for filming Mission Impossible III was pushed back and Branagh became free.

The fact that Branagh was British didn't deter the film's creators from considering him a top choice.

"He is the quintessential actor, who can do virtually anything," said Joseph Sargent, who directed the film.

That included replicating Roosevelt's distinctive speech pattern.

"That mid-Atlantic accent... came very easily for Ken," Sargent said. "Well, any accent comes easy for Ken. But in this case, it was a transition that was easy for me to acknowledge as being right on."

The similarities between Roosevelt's mid-Atlantic accent and Branagh's British accent helped him capture Roosevelt's voice, Sargent said.

When it came time to prepare for the role, Branagh learned more about Roosevelt than he could have imagined, from his family background to his school years. And he immersed himself in Roosevelt's speeches and biographies.

"There's an enormous amount of film to be seen and an enormous library of books to be read, many taking on - thank God - very, very specific areas of his life."

Branagh knew nothing about the part of Roosevelt's life that formed the basis of the movie.

In 1924, only a few years after a crippling bout with polio that left him unable to walk, Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, visited Warm Springs, a health spa in rural Georgia. The resort's waters, which were filled with minerals, were reputed to have healing properties. Roosevelt saw the spa as his best chance to regain the ability to walk unassisted. The movie examines this period of Roosevelt's life, one of the most turbulent in his relationship with Eleanor, played by Cynthia Nixon, a Sex and the City veteran.

Eleanor Roosevelt was concerned that her husband's expectations of Warm Springs were too high and that he was spending too much time at the spa. Roosevelt spent years at Warm Springs, coming home only at holidays.

"About the Warm Springs period I knew nothing at all," Branagh said. "And, in fact, we talked to somebody who had been on a picnic with him many, many moons ago, who was actually down there while we were there."

In his research, Branagh discovered that he and Roosevelt shared a passion for the works of William Shakespeare.

"At times of crisis, (he) did quote the St. Crispen's Day speech from Henry V, the great speech about being at the wrong end of long odds," Branagh said.

One defining aspect of Roosevelt's life and career, Branagh said, was his ability to ignore the odds. That included his determination to recover his motor skills even though the therapeutic treatments at Warm Springs had no discernible effect on him.

"You could say he's like the poster boy for denial," Branagh said. "He just wouldn't acknowledge it."

Though Roosevelt's experience at Warm Springs didn't result in a miraculous recovery, it did give him a personal connection with people in dire straits. The story of his attempts at recovery ran in newspapers and led other polio victims to come to Warm Springs. In most cases - but not Roosevelt's - the spa did have therapeutic effects.

The story of how Warm Springs changed Roosevelt and helped him become an inspiration to others is a story that "you could describe as, if not Shakespearean, certainly very bloody impressive and maybe even epic," Branagh said.

Roosevelt's desire to not be thought of as a man with a disability led to a sort of nationwide cover-up of his condition. Margaret Nagle, the screenwriter of Warm Springs, saw evidence of that when she began doing research on the script. "I went to the Roosevelt Library, where there are 35,000 pictures of Franklin, but only two of him in a wheelchair," she said.

The movie doesn't shy away from Roosevelt's disability, showing him in his wheelchair and showing aides carrying him up stairs and off trains.

In one scene, Roosevelt expresses his fear of being trapped if a fire broke out in the hotel he was staying in.

Warm Springs also details the rise of Eleanor Roosevelt as a prominent political figure in her own right. With her husband out of the public eye during his treatments, she became the family's spokeswoman.

The fact that she was one of the most visible first ladies in American history didn't necessarily help Nixon.

"I watched a lot of footage of her later on television," she said, "read a lot of biographies, read some stuff that she wrote. But I think one of the things that Ken and I talked about a lot was that it's very hard to play people ... in their personal, domestic moments when there is such a superabundance of footage of them making speeches. We know what they're like when they're in public, but you have to extrapolate from that what they're like at home."