Actor takes up painting for 'Mr. Turner' movie

NEW YORK (AP) - Talk about suffering for your art.

Achieving his acclaimed performance as the masterful British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner in "Mr. Turner" took so much out of Timothy Spall, 57, the veteran actor found himself kneeling down at the artist's tomb in St. Paul's Cathedral when it was all over - and crying.

"I just knelt down, had a bit of a weep, and wiped it off on my elbow," he said. "It was quite a journey, you know."

A journey indeed. Working with the famously exacting director Mike Leigh, as he has a number of times, Spall was tasked with what he calls detective work, delving deep into Turner's art to ferret out Turner the man. The artist died in 1851 - "pre-psychoanalysis," Spall notes. "And he never really explained himself. He didn't want anybody to really know what he was up to."

This meant that Spall, aside from reading everything he could get his hands on, had to learn to paint himself.

"Mike said, 'Are you up for it? And I said, 'All right, if this is what it's gonna take," Spall recalls. "And we just went and looked at these paintings, and I kept saying, 'What IS that?' And I realized my job was to look at this massive explosion of genius and implode it all back in, right back to where it started."

So Spall studied - still life, real life, drawing in all its forms, even Greek and Roman architecture.

Often, films about famous artists have portrayed them as rarified geniuses. "Mr. Turner" is different - the movie, which has earned raves for both Leigh and Spall, depicts an unassuming son of a barber who simply worked and worked, all the time. Indeed, Turner produced a staggering 20,000 works on paper, and more than 300 oil paintings.