“Elsinore,” named for Hamlet’s castle, opens on a production of that Shakespeare play at the National Theatre in London — but we see it from the bored, amused vantage of the backstage technicians, who get seriously jarred when the doddering actor playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father keeps forgetting his lines, and the actor playing Hamlet gets so pissed off that he stalks off the stage in mid-performance. The year is 1989, and that fiery young actor is Daniel Day-Lewis. (Walking off that stage, never to return to the production, is the first famous thing he did that seemed…extreme.) At first we think: Is this some weird theater biopic in which the young Daniel Day figures in? Yes and no.
The movie is not about him. It’s about another classy, dashing, well-known-at-the-time British actor — Ian Charleson (played by Andrew Scott), who was one of the two stars of “Chariots of Fire,” which had come out eight years before. He played Eric Liddell, the devout Scottish Christian who ran his Olympic races for the glory of God. That movie won the Oscar for best picture, so it placed Charleson, with his blond WASP handsomeness and slightly recessive severity, squarely on the map. As “Elsinore” opens, we see that he’s been trying to make good on it ever since.
