Swimming with FDR

New York Times - Television, 24-30 April 2005
**Thanks, Jane

The respected actor Kenneth Branagh spends a lot of time being slung ignominiously over other actors' shoulders in "Warm Springs", a new HBO film in which he portrays Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the pre-presidential years when F.D.R. came to grips with his polio. Was that really Mr. Branagh being unflatteringly upended, or was some double brought in to endure the manhandling? "Oh, I was definitely the sack of potatoes," Mr. Branagh said with a laugh.

Giving a convincing portrayal of a man who has no use of his legs required a good bit of learning on Mr. Branagh's part, some of it done at Warm Springs, the natural wonder in Georgia that, in Roosevelt's time and now, drew people seeking some measure of healing from the mineral-rich water. Staff members and clients schooled him in things like how a person with no abdominal muscle strength would swim.

"People were unbelievably generous as I was in there trying to pretend to walk with leg braces and they were there with their leg braces and having to deal with very practical issues," he said. "People seemed very keen that we get it right."

The film, which has its premiere Saturday at 8 p.m., depicts Roosevelt's struggle to regain his sense of purpose after he was stricken by polio in 1921, just as his political career was about to hit high gear. Cynthia Nixon plays Eleanor Roosevelt, who had adjustments of her own to make.

Mr. Branagh, who is Irish, said he had some trepidation about portraying an American political giant. "What made it seem more doable," he said, "was the idea that this was a sort of secret part of F.D.R.'s life and that in fact I wasn't playing the great American icon, I was playing the man who then developed into the great American icon."


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