10. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
Atkinson is the bumbling Father Gerald, who praises “the Holy Goat”, invites the happy couple to be “Johned in matrimony” and asks the groom to take his bride to be his “awful wedded wife”. Cutaways to the congregation’s reactions – Hugh Grant snickering, Simon Callow stifling a guffaw – do little to convince us that Richard Curtis’s script is top-tier stuff. At least Atkinson brings some typically subtle modulations, such as the vicar’s premature flickers of smugness when he wrongly believes his worst malapropisms to be behind him.
9. Never Say Never Again (1983)
Phoned by his agent on a Sunday night (“I didn’t think he worked Sundays,” the actor said at the film’s premiere, his lip curling), Atkinson was summoned to the Bahamas at 12 hours’ notice to play a brief scene opposite Sean Connery in this Bond reprise, which recycles the plot of Thunderball. As the Foreign Office’s Nigel Small-Fawcett, he adopts a clenched and jutting jaw for his exchange with Connery, as well as an air of haplessness that foreshadows the Barclaycard ads that were still a decade away.
8. The Lion King (1994)
As the hornbill Zazu, a red-and-yellow-billed major-domo to Mufasa, Atkinson was a kind of jumped-up Jiminy Cricket-style worryguts. Initially reluctant to do voice work (“I feel I’m a visual artist if I’m anything”), he was persuaded by Mr Bean co-writer Robin Driscoll to give it a go. Zazu’s big solo number, The Morning Report, was later included in the DVD Special Edition but was cut from the finished film. You can see why. Not that Atkinson would be sore, since he didn’t perform it anyway; Jeff Bennett stood in on singing duties.
7. Love Actually (2003)
As in Four Weddings, Atkinson introduces a hint of contained lunacy to a sober scenario, though in this case his character – a preening, over-fussy department store gift-wrapper – is firmly in control. It is Alan Rickman as his squirming customer who becomes flustered at the increasingly extravagant and interminable transaction, as Atkinson throws in decorative rosebuds and a cinnamon stick. “’Tis but the work of a moment,” he says proudly, expressing in that line the very art of the cameo.
Adapted from the 1990s Barclaycard commercials, which starred Atkinson as Richard Latham, a pompous but inept spy with delusions of being 007, Johnny English will be the pinnacle of films-spawned-by-ad-campaigns until we get to see the origin story of the Bisto mum. Two sequels, Johnny English Reborn (2011) and Johnny English Strikes Again (2018), were equally successful (the trilogy racked up a combined worldwide gross of $480m), but the best gags are in this first outing. They invariably involve Atkinson blundering into delicate situations: tap-dancing on the coffin at a funeral that he erroneously believes has been staged, for instance, or holding patients and doctors at gunpoint having failed to realise that the villain’s lair is next door to the hospital.
Not British cinema’s weirdest pairing of high-calibre arthouse director with popular comedian – that would be Peter Greenaway casting Jim Davidson as a security guard in A Zed & Two Noughts – but there is still an oddball frisson seeing Atkinson pop up in Nicolas Roeg’s suitably nasty spin on the Roald Dahl novel. As the sneering, officious manager of a seaside hotel, who is aghast to find a patch of rodent fur growing on the maid with whom he is canoodling, the comic isn’t too far from his discomfort zone.
4. Bean (1997)
“[Director] Mel Smith and Rowan Atkinson behind us,” wrote Alan Rickman in his diary after the premiere of the first Mr Bean movie, “so laughs are forced in order to send OK messages backwards. Ate whole packet of M&M’s.” The choice of snack is appropriate, since one uncharacteristically icky scene here involves Bean retrieving a misplaced M&M from the gaping chest cavity of an anaesthetised patient. The rest amounts to a gentle trot through tried-and-tested routines from the TV series (Bean wearing a turkey on his head, or popping an aeroplane sick-bag without checking to see if it is full). These are hitched to a mistaken identity plot, with “Dr” Bean dispatched to Los Angeles as an art expert. Assorted anxiety-dream-style set-pieces follow: he is called on to deliver an impromptu hour-long lecture on Whistler’s Mother (“Firstly, it’s quite big — which is excellent”) and accidentally destroys the painting before attempting a hasty felt-tip restoration.
Simon McBurney, of theatrical innovators Complicité, gets a story credit on this second Bean movie. Does that explain why it is such an unalloyed delight? Peppered with nods to Jacques Tati and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, it boasts joyful cameos from Jean Rochefort as a snooty maître d’ and Willem Dafoe as a pretentious auteur, as well as a finale in which Bean premieres his camcorder masterpiece to rapturous applause at Cannes. After the overcomplicated first film, Atkinson pares the character back to basics and rediscovers his (mostly mute) essence. One sequence, showing him adjusting his dance style to whatever happens to be blasting from a nearby speaker – classical piano, tragic arias, Mr Boombastic – resurrects the joy of the early, Slinky-limbed, putty-faced mime work that first made Atkinson a star.
2. The Tall Guy (1989)
Curtis hadn’t yet hit on his killer formula when he wrote his first and funniest film, about a bumbling American actor (Jeff Goldblum) falling for a cool-cat British nurse (Emma Thompson). Only once the nationalities were reversed in Four Weddings and Notting Hill did Curtis hit pay dirt. The Tall Guy wasn’t a smash, but it is funnier than all Curtis’s other films combined, especially once it hits its stride with the staging of Elephant!, an Andrew Lloyd Webber-esque musical about the Elephant Man. Atkinson is the almost-namesake Ron Anderson, the sadistic star comic who employs Goldblum as his onstage sidekick and punchbag, a function that Curtis himself fulfilled during his early performing days with Atkinson. Mel Smith, the comedian’s old Not the Nine O’Clock News compadre, directs amiably. And it is interesting that while Atkinson has prioritised slapstick in most of his big-screen roles (Bean, Johnny English), The Tall Guy remains the closest his movie-star self has ever dared get to Blackadder-esque disdain.
1. The Secret Policeman’s Ball (1979)
It is one of the enduring frustrations of British cinema that Atkinson never quite found the vehicle to marry his verbal sophistication with his physical pliability. Unless, that is, you count his appearances in this brilliant Amnesty International concert film. Not the Nine O’Clock News wouldn’t air until the end of the year, so Atkinson was very much the new boy in a cast of seasoned pros such as Peter Cook, Eleanor Bron and Clive James. There is a sense of him being officially anointed as he performs the Four Yorkshiremen sketch from At Last the 1948 Show alongside John Cleese, Terry Jones and Michael Palin. But it is his solo sketches that shine. His white-gloved concert pianist miming to Beethoven sonatas is a goofy treat.
The real genius, though, lies in his six-minute monologue as a severe, punctilious headteacher; it is still equalled in his career only by the most scathing moments of Blackadder. His pronunciation of the names on the register is peerlessly succulent (“Nibble … Sediment … Zob”) and there is so much else to enjoy, including his knack of silencing hecklers in character with an upturned chin; his withering asides (“Put it away, Plectrum … Yes isn’t life tragic?”); and his chilling comic rage as he orders Nibble to “Leave! Orifice! Alone!”
