As career choices go, actor Mark Strong’s decision to be an actor was notably downbeat. Thumbing through a prospectus, looking for “G” for German, he fell upon “D” for Drama. “I just saw this picture of a guy in a dinner suit and a girl in this fabulous white dress. The caption said, ‘Oberon and Titania’ and I just thought, ‘My God, you can actually go to university and do that?’”
Yet Strong’s career success has validated his snap decision. He’s made a career out of picking interesting parts, from serial philanderer Tosker in Our Friends in the North to a supporting role in George Clooney’s Syriana. And his profile is only set to rise with a part in the Channel 4 drama, Low Winter Sun, this autumn, as well as a role in the forthcoming Danny Boyle film, Sunshine.
However, just like his route into the business, everything about Strong remains resolutely low-key. He’s handsome, but not in a bleached-teeth Hollywood kind of way. Think 6ft 2in, broad- shouldered and bald, with olive skin matched with unusually pale hazel eyes from his half-Italian, half-Austrian parentage. His sartorial taste is similarly far from showy: “I just like simple, well-cut clothes: no great logos, no vivid colours. On shoots, people often try to get you into red shirts with big lapels or yellow trousers. I just refuse.” Luckily the clothes on this shoot fall into the camp of things that Strong would choose himself – muted greens and browns paired with inky denim. He insists that even when he’s acting, he needs to feel happy with the character’s clothes. “It’s important that they don’t look too far from your normal taste or you’ll just look wrong. I usually have a chat with costume and steer it in the right direction.”
Advertisement
It’s clear that behind his easy-going manner, Strong is a man who knows his own mind. A brief biography gives some clue as to why. Born in London just over 40 years ago, his Italian father ran off when he was just a toddler, leaving his mother, a young Austrian girl who had come to England as an au pair, to raise him alone. At the age of six, he was sent to a state-funded boys’ home from which he attended first primary school and then boarding school. Rather than any bitterness, his childhood seems to have fostered a certain self-sufficiency – something he’s clearly applied to his career. He seems remarkably canny at picking parts, not appearing to put a foot wrong in either television or film, while on stage he’s notched up a row of raved-about performances – in Patrick Marber’s Closer and Sam Mendes’s productions of Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night to name just a few.
Strong himself suggests that theatre is his first love. “It’s the immediate relationship that you have with the audience that you don’t have with film and television.” He talks fondly of working with Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh at Islington’s dinky Almeida theatre. “The dressing rooms are the size of a small toilet so I was literally rubbing shoulders with him.” He also explains that he loves the rehearsal process that theatre affords. “With the Sam Mendes play at the Donmar we had an eight-week rehearsal phase. You get the chance to extrapolate information about how the play and your character work, which is such a luxury.”
As professionally fulfilling as theatre may be, in the fashion stakes Strong admits that his best moments have been on the small screen. Playing gangster Harry Starks in The Long Firm was a highlight. “For me he was the epitome of style. Although it was set in the Sixties, he was a man of the Fifties so it was all very sharp and fitted.” However, his new character in Low Winter Sun is a close contender. “He’s a CID copper so it’s a long, well-cut Italian suit, but it fitted me perfectly. I love that kind of look.”
Low Winter Sun is on September 13 and 14, at 9pm, on Channel 4