Thanks...  here's the article linked to in the above post:


The child star who considered himself at home playing Oliver
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent
(Filed: 17/09/2005)

It is one of the most famous child roles in the cinema but Barney Clarke has taken it all in his 12-year-old stride.

Stepping into the shoes of Oliver Twist and spending months away from home making a £33 million film, directed by the double Oscar winner Roman Polanski, has been made to look almost routine.

 
Barney Clarke was chosen from 800 hopefuls
Barney, from Hackney, north London said: "I wouldn't say the filming [19 weeks non-stop in Prague] was difficult. Roman is great and made it easy. It has just been really fun and I loved staying in a hotel with a swimming pool and room service."

Polanski was equally complimentary. "Barney is amazing: he is so intelligent and, happily, so uncute," he said. "And yet he has a melancholy about him.

"It's incredible how receptive he is. I only have to tell him once how to do something. I've never seen this in anyone so young before."

Off-screen, melancholia is not the most obvious of Barney's traits.

Often, a little bored during the weeks spent shuttling between hotel and film set, Barney would slip the attention of the tutor, chaperone and personal assistant assigned to him, and with the other young English boys in Fagin's team of pickpockets run amok in the hotel corridors banging on other guests' doors.

They even dropped water bombs on passers-by from Barney's window. The management was not impressed.

 
Barney's father, Ivan, a media buying executive who would fly to Prague at weekends with his wife, the comedy writer Julia Balloo, to visit their son, said: "They rang me and asked me if I could come out on an earlier flight.

"They threatened to throw the boys out of the hotel and we had to pledge better behaviour."

But it was not all fun for Barney; the pinched look of his Oliver was not achieved easily. "I wasn't allowed to eat sweets and chocolate because they said I had to keep my cheeks hollow," he said. "To make up for that Roman used to take us out go-karting. By the end we were beating him."

Polanski's decision, soon after winning an Oscar as best director for his last film, The Pianist, to remake the Dickens classic as an unashamedly family film seemed an improbable choice to many.

But he has revealed that Oliver Twist had always been a favourite book. He had identified with the orphan from the workhouse fighting to stay alive in Victorian London because of his own experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto. "My ambition is to make the film for my own children," he has said.

The result, a portrait of grinding poverty in Victorian London, is darker than many previous versions. Barney's Oliver is less angelic, less posh, than John Howard Davies's in David Lean's classic 1948 adaptation or Mark Lester's in Carol Reed and Lionel Bart's 1968 screen musical, Oliver!

Barney, who was chosen from almost 800 hopefuls, is hardly a screen novice. The former pupil at the Anna Scher theatre school in Islington played Bill Nighy's son in the film Lawless Heart before he landed the lead in Oliver Twist, which will be released on Oct 7.

Little, though, prepared him for the 12 months since he was picked by Polanski. His arrival at his secondary school last year was delayed until filming was over and he has recently been in the US - giving 60 press interviews in one day. This week Jeff Berg, one of Hollywood's most powerful agents, won a fight to sign him.

And the word from the Toronto Film Festival, where the film has been previewed, is that this Oliver Twist - and particularly Sir Ben Kingsley, as Fagin - is so good that it must be in Oscar contention next year.

For Barney, who reckons himself to be an unexceptional boy who likes swimming and has never read a word of Shakespeare, such acclaim can only help him in his ambition for a career as an actor.

"I would like to be in something I suppose any 12-year-old would, an action-packed adventure, doing things like jumping out of cars," he said.

i don't understand why detentions are used as a school punishment.

schools are theoretically supposed to be enjoyable places where pupils are introduced to the life of the mind.

so punishment consists of being made to remain longer at school?

that's a strange mixed message.

anyway, this article is from today's daily mirror : for those in the UK, i expect the print edition contains photos.

BARNEY DOUBLE

Why the new Oliver Twist is always getting into bother

By Antonia Hoyle

AT the very moment Barney Clarke was supposed to be having his photograph taken for Vogue magazine, he was in detention at school.

"I was messing around and not concentrating in class," admits the 12-year-old sheepishly. "So I was made to stay behind as a punishment."

Barney, by his own admission, is something of a naughty boy...

A naughty boy who is about to become a household name as the star of Roman Polanski's big budget movie, Oliver Twist, which opens at cinemas across Britain on Friday.

"Detentions normally last 45 minutes," he explains. "But the meaner teachers give you ones that last an hour and a half.

"Sometimes they send you out of class straight away.

"Other times they give you a tick on a board. Three ticks and you're out. There's probably still a long line of ticks next to my name."

A long line of ticks at school, maybe, but there'll be no shortage of gold stars elsewhere for Barney, whose first acting role was in a nursery school production of Red Riding Hood.

But despite beating off 800 other young hopefuls for the part of Oliver and earning a reported £50,000 for his role in this latest adaptation of Charles Dickens' classic novel, success clearly hasn't gone to the state schoolboy's head.

At home in Hackney, East London, where he lives with his parents and younger brother, making mischief is still very much on the agenda.

IN fact, he got into so much trouble during filming in the Czech Republic last summer that he was nearly thrown out of his hotel.

"One of my friends came over to visit from England," he says. "We told the receptionist there was a dog on the golf course. When he ran out to catch it, we pelted him with water bombs."

He smiles as he remembers other moments that drove hotel staff to distraction.

"There's one scene where I walk 70 miles to London," he says. "The make-up artist made my feet look bloody and blistered. After filming, I walked straight back into the hotel foyer and dropped my scabs all over the carpet.

"Also, me and the other actors my age would order ice cream on room service - and send it up to other guests' rooms at two in the morning."

Unfortunately, the hotel management didn't see the funny side, and told Barney he'd have to leave.

"They called my dad, who had to fly over specially to sort it all out," says Barney, a little sheepishly.

"He was disappointed at first, but he's OK about it now." Once his 47-year-old father Ivan had reined him in, Barney says he enjoyed filming.

Working alongside established stars such as Sir Ben Kingsley who plays Fagin and 72-year-old Oscar-winning director Polanski didn't scare him.

"Sir Ben Kingsley stayed in role even off set, so I always had to call him Fagin," he says. "I didn't get to know him until the party we had when filming had finished. He was really friendly then.

"I'd never heard of Roman Polanski before the audition but I liked him a lot - even when he told me I couldn't eat sweets so my face would look hollow.

"He made up for it by letting me go go-karting and play LaserQuest with the other boys.

"He bought me a Swiss army knife afterwards to say thank you. I bought him a Cuban cigar. He likes them a lot.

"He even lit up one during a scene where I get shot by Bill Sykes to make a proper smoky atmosphere."

And he adds excitedly: "The best scenes were the ones with stunts in them.

"There's one where I'm on the roof with Bill Sykes (played by Jamie Foreman).

"I was offered a stunt double, but turned it down. It was quite scary, but I had a harness on and it was fun.

"Then a magician came on set to show me and the other boys how to pick pockets. That was brilliant."

But it was hard work too.

"The worst part was doing the night-time scenes and having to be at work at two in the morning. I'm normally in bed by ten," he says.

Barney first realised he wanted to be an actor when he was just three years old and played the wood cutter in Little Red Riding Hood.

"I got involved in all the school plays after that," he says. "I was Cinderella's wicked stepmum once. I didn't have to wear fancy dress, but I did stuff tennis balls down my front to give me boobs."

He was such an enthusiastic actor that his advertising executive father and mother Julie, a 46-year-old comedy writer, let him attend the Anna Scher Children's Theatre in London when he was seven.

"I saw a version of Oliver Twist around that time," says Barney. "I thought it was a great story."

Today his peers at the theatre school are pleased for him, but he insists that the majority of his ordinary classmates have yet to hear about his success.

"I didn't tell them because I thought it would be weird," he says.

"But now posters are going up with my picture on they're beginning to realise."

It's clear that Barney doesn't quite see himself as a star just yet.

For the film's premiere in the Czech Republic, he wore a pair of Gap trousers and an old shirt.

"I'd feel a bit stupid dressed up in a suit," he says with a grimace. "My school uniform is about as smart as I get."

And he's determined that fame and fortune won't send him off the rails.

"I don't want to eat posh food or travel in limos," he insists. "It's not what I'm like."

Nevertheless, he hopes that his high-profile role as Oliver won't be his last.

"I love James Bond and Jackie Chan martial arts films," he says. "Indiana Jones is great too. I'd like to do loads of stunts in the future - jumping out of cars with guns and things like that."

But when the nation's cinema-goers finally get to see Barney in Polanski's stunning £33million film this weekend, the young star will be at home, either playing on his new Playstation or watching re-runs of The Simpsons.

He was provided with a tutor during the filming of Oliver Twist, but has already thrown himself back into his education.

HE recently started his first term at his new state school in north London.

"My favourite lessons are art and science," Barney says.

"I like art because you don't have to do very much and science because you get to make exciting mixtures with potions.

"You're only meant to mix certain ones, but I bung the whole lot together.

"My teachers are OK, but they'll probably be angry when I cause an explosion."

He may be well on the way to cinema stardom as Oliver Twist, but away from the bright lights, Barney Clarke is still just a mischievous, cheeky young schoolboy.

More of an Artful Dodger, really...


-Oliver Twist is scheduled for release on October 7


OLIVER'S ARMY:

DICKIE MOORE STAR of the 1933 production, the New York-based 80-year-old actor enjoyed a movie career spanning four decades.

JOHN HOWARD DAVIES APPEARED with Alec Guinness in 1948 at the age of nine. Went on to become the BBC's head of light entertainment.

BRUCE PROCHNIK JOINED the West End cast in 1962, when he was 12 and later starred in BBC serialisation of the classic tale. Now works in IT.

MARK LESTER PLAYED Oliver in Oscar-nominated musical in 1968 but when roles dried up, turned to drugs. Now a Cheltenham osteopath.

BEN RODSKA FAMOUSLY, the boy who wanted more - but despite rave reviews 20 years ago Oliver remains Ben's only major role.

SAM SMITH STARRED with Julie Walters in £5million adaptation for ITV in 1999. Now 15, he is still at school in North London.

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Just re-read this.

Water bombs on hotel staff, 'bungs the whole lot' of chemicals together in science class, hates dressing up in a suit, doesn't care for posh food or riding in limos, trailng his foot makeup thru the hotel lobby, and so on.

:laughing: I LOVE this kid.

I saw Barney in part of Oliver in Oliver Twist. Very good play !