Southcoast Today, 25 April 2005
By Luaine Lee, Scripps Howard News Service
**Thanks, Lena

Kenneth Branagh stars in "Warm Springs," a chapter in the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, premiering Saturday on HBO.

What most people know about Franklin Delano Roosevelt was that he was president for 13 years and responsible for many of the social reforms we enjoy today. But few understand that Roosevelt was an aristocrat who grew up on the right side of the tracks and suffered a severe disability.

Contracting polio when he was 39 made him a paraplegic. And while he was almost never photographed in a wheel chair, it was a tragedy that colored the rest of his life. HBO takes viewers through those cataclysmic early days of Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, in the film bio, "Warm Springs," premiering Saturday.

Irish actor Kenneth Branagh plays the young Roosevelt and redheaded Cynthia Nixon ("Sex and the City") portrays Eleanor.

After studying the man he was to play for months, Branagh says he sees the period before Roosevelt became president -- but after he was stricken with polio -- as pivotal in the Roosevelt's life. "It seemed to have had some quite profound character-changing aspects," says Branagh. "Not just the polio but (it) also deals with an estrangement that Franklin and Eleanor had as a result of an affair -- or at least a passionate liaison," he says. "... those personal dimensions of the story were fascinating."

Branagh and Nixon pored over newsreels, biographies and histories. "I was not aware of quite how privileged he was; that he was an only-child, that he went to school very, very late -- the disappointment of not getting into the very special club at Harvard. All of this was meat and drink to me as was listening to the speeches endlessly," says Branagh.

Nixon tackled her own research on Eleanor. "HBO got me a lot of film documentaries, but I also went to the Museum of Television and Radio," she says. "I watched a lot of footage of her later on television, listened to a lot of her on the radio, read a lot of biographies, read some stuff that she wrote."

The author of the film, Margaret Nagle, has a disabled brother who spent 20 years trying to learn to walk. "I'm very intimate with disability," she says. "And I'm intimate with the disappointments and the emotional roller coaster that is disability and how ... it takes a long time to accept it. ... And then I did extensive research. I went to the Roosevelt Library where there are 35,000 pictures of Franklin, but only two of him in a wheelchair."

Many films have been done about Roosevelt before: "Eleanor and Franklin," "Sunrise at Campobello," but none have dealt with this early time when Roosevelt sought a cure for his affliction in the healing waters of Warm Springs, Ga.

"In what was a seven-year search, to try and find a way to walk again. He traveled the country and he tried all sorts of cures, all sorts of what he, in some cases, thought was mumbo-jumbo," says Branagh. "He did come across very many different people with whom he had a lot in common, i.e. that had the same physical challenge. So he was able to talk to people in a way he hadn't before."

Branagh assumes what is called a "mid-Atlantic" accent to depict the president, not too distant from his carefully schooled British.

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."