Seattle Times, 28 April 2005
By Steve Hedgpeth, Newhouse News Service
**Thanks, Deborah

If you happen to see actor Kenneth Branagh in a library or bookstore, speak softly. He's likely researching a new role.

Think of Irish-born Branagh, and Shakespeare comes to mind. He made his reputation by acting in film adaptations of "Henry V," "Much Ado About Nothing," "Hamlet," "Love's Labour's Lost" and "Othello."

But in recent years Branagh also has been doing his share of historical/biographical roles, in the feature film "Rabbit-Proof Fence" and in TV films "Conspiracy" and "Shackleton," moving from Australian bureaucrat to cold-blooded Nazi to intrepid British explorer.

And now Branagh, 44, channels Franklin Delano Roosevelt in "Warm Springs," an HBO film premiering at 8:30 p.m. Saturday.

"I find a huge amount of pleasure in the researching of these roles," Branagh said. "I'm at a point in my life where I'm fascinated by history and politics, and these roles give me the opportunity to delve into that which I'm interested in. I spend months and months steeping myself in researching these roles, and I find that an amazing gift that's been given to me.

"When the role of FDR came up, it was, 'Where do you start?' You could spend the rest of your life in the library or bookstores, with acres and acres of biographies on the man. It's almost overwhelming."

Branagh is joined in "Warm Springs" by Cynthia Nixon ("Sex and the City") as Eleanor Roosevelt, and Kathy Bates, David Paymer, Tim Blake Nelson and Jane Alexander.

"Warm Springs," as with Dore Schary's "Sunrise at Campobello," deals with a pre-presidency FDR stricken by polio in the '20s. Though the disease left him paraplegic, FDR, in his late 30s at the time, refused to surrender to self-pity and set about to rehabilitate himself.

The title of "Warm Springs" refers to the recuperative waters of a spa in rural Georgia where FDR travels to undergo therapy. What follows is not just a journey of the flesh, but of the spirit.

While at Warm Springs, Roosevelt, born of wealth and a powerful family legacy, comes into contact with patients and townsfolk struggling to survive not just sickness, but poverty, racism and illiteracy. The experience will come to inform his politics.

"I liked this picture because it focused on a particular episode from FDR's life in which profound change of character occurs," Branagh said. "His education as a pragmatic politician came about when he had this experience at Warm Springs."

The movie was filmed in part at the real Warm Springs.

"You're in the presence of ghosts there," Branagh said. "There's something about walking in the footsteps of history. You just get chills when you walk into the same place that FDR walked into."

"Warm Springs" also explores Roosevelt's marital infidelity — he had an affair with his secretary, Lucy Harper — and its effect on Eleanor. She was deeply hurt by the betrayal, offering at one point to give her husband a divorce, but in the end the marriage survived.

"(FDR and Lucy Harper) slept together early on, and that was very threatening to Eleanor," Branagh said. "Here's this tub-thumping proto-feminist at odds with her idealism about romantic love. Nevertheless, there was a deep-seated companionship, a whole kind of soulmate thing, between FDR and Eleanor, despite the separate nature of their lives at times."

Branagh is full of praise for his film Eleanor, Cynthia Nixon.

"All I can say is that there are some people that when you act with them, there's some kind of simpatico. I must have known Cynthia in a previous life, because we got on from the get-go. She was a joy to work with, and we had a chance to portray that under-the-skin connection that FDR and Eleanor had."

Nixon approximates the former First Lady's squeaky voice and buck-toothed grin. "Fake teeth," she says. "They both had such a distinctive way of speaking. And we tried different teeth and different sizes and different levels of buck-toothedness ... I found that when I would have the teeth in it was much easier to sound more like her, because a lot of the way she spoke was trying to speak around her teeth."