LAST DANISH FOR BRANAGH : HE SAYS GOODBYE TO PRINCE VIA MASSIVE `HAMLET' MOVIE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Since the first time he saw it performed as an impressionable English schoolboy, ``Hamlet'' has been Kenneth Branagh's obsession - if that's not too mild a word.

That first, loin-girding production happened back in 1977. Branagh was a lad of 15, and the mesmerizing lead actor was one Derek Jacobi, touring the provinces with the Oxford New Theatre.

Based on that revelatory outing, Branagh says, he resolved to become an actor, with the aim of one day performing his own ``Hamlet.'' Over the next two decades, he circled around Shakespeare's thorniest text, probing for soft spots.

Finally, he lunged for the jugular. Three years ago, he starred in a sellout production of the play with England's Royal Shakespeare Company, eventually logging more than 250 performances as the angst-prone Danish aristocrat.

Then, on Christmas Day, Castle Rock released a four-hour, uncut version of the epic in which Branagh gets triple billing as adapter, director and star. He'd been lobbying to make the film since he shook up Hollywood in 1989 with his directorial debut, Shakespeare's ``Henry V.''

Yet after finally being able to do his dream role before a potential audience of millions, Branagh insists this will be his last stab at the Dane. At 36, he's nearing the age when actors risk turning Shakespeare's ``sweet prince'' into a poster child for chronic arrested development.

So you might think Branagh would be feeling a bit wistful as he bids adieu to the alter ego who has consumed him for so long.

Guess again.

``No, it's not hard to let go, 'cause you never really had hold of it, you know,'' says Branagh, surprisingly cheerful at the prospect.

``It's a play about which, delightfully, it's impossible to be proprietorial. It always yields something. I've seen wonderful performances of the role, I've seen great productions. This is just another version of it. But I think it's the best `Hamlet' we can produce, this group of actors, this group of collaborators.''

Scrunched on a sofa in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, his legs drawn under him like a feline, Branagh is serenely meditative. Wearing black jeans and a dramatically cropped black shirt, he cuts a figure not substantially different from his fashionably angular profile in ``Hamlet.'' Only the peroxided Danish coiffure is gone, replaced by Branagh's normal reddish-blond tint, plus a beard that he's been growing for a recent film role.

If Branagh is willing to relinquish Hamlet, he's also prepared to concede that the devilishly complex part had eluded him until now.

Looking back on his past Hamlets, he says, ``as far as I can judge them, they definitely were deficient in some way.'' He was always, in his own words, ``a very hectic, younger Hamlet.''

It took an accumulation of life experience, a critical mass of ups and downs, for him to be able to tame the part. For Branagh, that point arrived not a moment too soon.

``This was the last age at which I thought I could possibly play it,'' he says. ``You know, you're halfway through this biblical `three-score and 10.' It's the age at which, many people told me, `Oh, that's when you first start really thinking that the clock is ticking slowly, and that you see that you've had at least a good part of the first half, and the second half's on its way.' ''

Branagh's denial that he (or anyone else) can own Shakespeare's subtlest creation isn't mere false modesty. Reared in the British tradition of repertory ensemble, where actors switch back and forth between lead and bit parts, Branagh sees himself simply as one in a long line of Hamlets extending back over nine or 10 generations - a temporary caretaker of a character who belongs to the ages.

Not coincidentally, in casting ``Hamlet,'' he saluted two of his most illustrious predecessors in the role: Jacobi, who plays Claudius, Hamlet's murderous, incestuous uncle; and the 90-something Sir John Gielgud, who has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo as Priam.

Jacobi, whose own Hamlet for London's Old Vic was widely considered the best since Richard Burton's, questions the idea there could be a ``definitive'' Hamlet.

``Hamlet is such an indefinable character, really, that in a sense anybody can play it,'' he says. ``It's the great personality part. It really depends on the look and the sound, and the mental and charismatic makeup of whatever actor is playing Hamlet. There are as many Hamlets as there are actors to play him really.''

The term ``father figure'' is kind of problematic in a story about a guy whose uncle murders his father, then marries the prince's widowed mom. Let's just say that Branagh looks to both Gielgud and Jacobi as ``mentors.''

It was Gielgud, after all, who critiqued Branagh's monologue from ``Hamlet'' when he was an anxious drama student at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Sir John's verdict: ``Too quick, much too quick.''

But that encounter began a 15-year professional friendship between the two men, which included collaborating on Branagh's Academy Award-nominated short film, ``Swan Song.''

``For me, it was important that Gielgud was in it (`Hamlet'), however briefly, because he is, I think, the Hamlet of the century,'' Branagh says.

According to Jacobi, it's ``absolutely characteristic'' of Branagh to tip his hat to fellow actors who've inspired him over the years.

``It's one of his great gifts, I think, that he, in a sense, acknowledges the past,'' says Jacobi, who directed his friend as Hamlet in a 1988 production by Renaissance Theatre Company, the classical troupe Branagh co-founded in 1987.

``When he formed (Renaissance) ...,'' Jacobi continues, ``his idea was to ask people who've been through the classical mill and done the big parts to come along and direct himself and others of his generation and pass on their own thoughts and feelings and ideas - as he will pass it on eventually. It's a central feeling of his that that classical tradition not be allowed to atrophy.''

Rejecting the cliche of Hamlet as a borderline manic-depressive, Branagh built his characterization around what he sees as the prince's very normal, human pain over the death of his father, which occurs prior to the opening of the play.

``He's in grief. He's bereaved. He's missing his dad. It's as simple as that on one level: He loves his father. Some people would argue about this, but I think there's enough text to support that they had a good relationship.

``And that's where we meet him - a man who otherwise, as described in the play, is full of life, vibrant, curious, not disposed to be melancholy, not an indulgent fellow, but who's interested in other people, who's generous and gracious. But in the midst of grief, the floodgates are unlocked on all those other feelings that we're subject to, that overwhelm the personality at moments of trauma.''

Branagh also wanted the movie to depict the ``isolation of leadership,'' and the way that rich, powerful people can be made to squirm when they're placed in a pressure cooker.

``It makes for an amazing amount of tension, and I think it gives an audience a precarious thrill,'' he observes. ``I think they like to know that that's one of the prices you pay for the privilege of that kind of position. There's a certain kind of grim comfort in that fact: `Well, we may not have palaces, we may not have people make our beds every day and loads of money, but at least we don't have to have video cameras up our noses every five seconds.' ''

By modern studio standards, attempting a full-length ``Hamlet'' might be taken as proof of insanity. But Branagh's gambit, like the prince himself, may be only mad ``north-north-west.''

By craftily casting marquee American actors in small, crucial roles - Charlton Heston as a majestic Player King, Billy Crystal as a cigar-chomping gravedigger - Branagh raised the movie's chances of holding its ground against an onslaught of holiday releases.

``There was no intention to make a long film for its own sake, but to make the film that we thought told the story the best,'' he says. ``It took a long time to convince people that the only way - the only reason, really - for doing another `Hamlet' was to do something that hadn't been done before. I stuck to my guns about that and eventually got lucky with Castle Rock.''

Now that ``Hamlet'' has wrapped, Branagh has ``no specific plans'' to do a fourth Shakespeare film. (In addition to directing the 1993 ``Much Ado About Nothing,'' he also played Iago in a 1995 version of ``Othello'' opposite Larry Fishburne.)

Eager to keep his Hollywood resume as varied as possible, he will be filming a John Grisham drama, ``The Gingerbread Man,'' with Robert Altman this winter, and aspires next to do a spy film, ``you know, code-breaking things and that kind of stuff.''

As for ``Hamlet,'' well, there'll always be another generation to worry about him.

``Yeah, it will be `cheerio,' '' Branagh says. ``You won't see me pulling on the black tights and the floppy white shirt anymore. I'll leave it to somebody else.''

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7 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Will power

Kenneth Branagh unleashes the full force of `Hamlet' with his four-hour, uncut version of Shakespeare's tragedy

(2) Sir John Gielgud, left, under Kenneth Branagh's direction on the ``Hamlet'' set, plays the role of Priam.

(3) Branagh says the four-hour film he also directed and starred in will mark his last performance as the mournful Dane whose ``To be or not to be'' speech is perhaps the most famous in the English language.

(4) Claudius (Derek Jacobi), left, and Gertrude (Julie Christie) wed as Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh) looks on in Branagh's epic-length ``Hamlet.''

(5--7) Branagh heightens interest in his ``Hamlet'' by casting high-profile actors in the small roles, including, clockwise from above left, Gerard Depardieu (Reynaldo), Charlton Heston (the player king), Jack Lemmon (Marcellus) and Billy Crystal (the gravedigger).