Washington -- Kenneth Branagh, the man who would be king, knows that the best way to become a king is to kill one.
That's exactly what the young British actor-director has been doing. Two years ago the then-28-year-old's first movie, Shakespeare's "Henry V," went head to head with the great Laurence Olivier's 1944 classic, scoring -- in the opinion of many critics -- a clear victory.
Now Branagh has set out after both Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock in his second movie, "Dead Again," which opens this Friday. This film is a brilliant homage to "Citizen Kane" that alludes to many of that movie's most famous scenes -- only to redo them in witty and brilliant fashion. And Branagh also takes on the Hitchcock of "Dial M for Murder," "Vertigo" and "Rebecca."
Is there no limit to the ambition of Branagh, who -- at 30 -- is less than 10 years out of drama school?
"I'm happy to think that I'm in the traditions they [Olivier, Welles and Hitchcock] represent and like to think that we all steal and borrow from those we admire," he says. "I love them and I'm a traditionalist. I felt I was missing something I love in the movies I see nowadays. That's why I made 'Dead Again.' "
"Dead Again" is a dazzling thriller about reincarnation and gender transformation that is set partly in the late 1940s and partly in present-day Los Angeles.
"It's a whodunit and a whydunit," says Branagh, who plays two roles: a private detective named Mike Church (in the color film that takes place in the present) and a brilliant German-refugee conductor-composer named Roman Strauss (in the black-and-white 1940s segment). The classy cast includes Branagh's wife, Emma Thompson (who also plays two roles), Andy Garcia and Robin Williams, Hanna Schygulla and Derek Jacobi. It is a roller coaster of a movie that keeps the viewer guessing at every turn and never permits him to catch his breath until a logically inevitable -- in retrospect -- finale.
Whether or not the movie is a financial success, it likely will be the most talked-about and debated film since "Thelma & Louise" and it should make Branagh's stock, high since his nomination for several Academy Awards for "Henry V," higher than ever.
The Belfast-born Branagh has been on a collision course with destiny since he was the star student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London in the late '70s and early '80s. After graduation he became, at the tender age of 23, the youngest person ever selected by the Royal Shakespeare Company to star in "Henry V" and he went on to star in a highly acclaimed "Hamlet."
