When I, Claudius began its 13-episode run
in America as part of Masterpiece Theatre
in November 1977, censors at the Public Broadcasting Service cut roughly two
minutes from the first episode that they felt might raise hackles over racism (African dancers were shown dancing naked to celebrate a Roman military victory),
then braced themselves for a tidal wave of protests over what they did allow to pass: rampant adultery, nudity, incest, a nymphomaniacal empress, violence. Nothing
happened. Americans didn’t care much, it seemed, about the possibility of
ancient Rome corrupting contemporary national morals.
Instead, viewers (or, at least, those of PBS) took
to their hearts the kind of incessant, whiplash-inducing double-crosses they
wouldn’t see again for another two decades, on HBO’s The Sopranos. Powering this toga-and-sandal saga of ancient Rome
was a woman of infinite ingenious stratagems named Livia (also possessing the same name as the Mafia mama). But the ancient Roman
royal’s plotting left even the New Jersey matriarch far behind when it came to the
mystery behind the malevolence. There was little if any need to explain what
William Hazlitt called the quality of “motiveless malignity.”
You can keep Nancy Merchand’s Livia on The Sopranos, Kathleen Turner’s siren
Mattie Walker from Body Heat, or Joan
Collins’ minx Alexis on Dynasty (a
show patterned, creator Esther Shapiro later claimed, on I, Claudius). The Livia of television’s I, Claudius (as opposed to Alexander Korda’s aborted screen epic, a
story I related in a prior post) got
there first, by centuries.
I hadn’t realized, until I read Thomas Vinciguerra’s fine retrospective on the making of the show
in the Sunday New York Times, how
closely we came to missing out on the glories of the sly performance by Sian Phillips (pictured here) in the role. Poor thing—as nearly every actor you can
name does, she initially tried to fathom her character’s motivation, and was floundering
as a result.
Finally, director Herbert Wise took her aside and
said: “Just be evil. The more evil you are, the funnier it is, and the more
terrifying it is. ” As a result, she was able to go with the glories of
dialogue (written by scenarist Jack Pulman) such as the following,
featuring Phillips and George Baker as Tiberius, the son from a prior marriage
that Livia would love to replace current hubby, Caesar Augustus, as emperor:
Tiberius:
“Mother, I'm a happily married man. Julia doesn't interest me. She wouldn't
interest me if you hung her naked from the ceiling above my bed.”
Livia:
“She might even do that if I asked her!”
Tiberius:
“Aren't you forgetting something? She's still married to Marcellus, and
Marcellus is not dead yet.”
Livia:
“When I start to forget things, you may light my funeral pyre and put me on it,
dead or alive.”
Phillips might have played the Welsh mother in the Masterpiece Theatre version of How Green Was My Valley, Marlene
Dietrich in a one-woman show for the stage, and, in real life, the onetime wife
of Peter O’Toole. But for me and thousands of other I, Claudius fans, she’ll always be indelibly associated with the
greatest schemer in a society filled with voluptuaries of power.
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