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<div><span><a href="http://www.bangkokpost.com/entertainment/entertainscoop/13696/the-actors-actor" target="_blank">http://www.bangkokpost.com/entertainment/entertainscoop/13696/the-actors-actor</a></span><br></div></div>
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<h2>THE ACTORS' ACTOR</h2>
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<h3>Recently honoured as a National Artist, Sorapong Chatri talks about his journey from tending cattle in Ayutthaya to becoming one of Thai cinema's greatest leading men </h3>
<dd>By: KONG RITHDEE
<dd>Published: 20/03/2009 at 12:00 AM
<dd>Newspaper section: <a href="http://www.bangkokpost.com/advance-search/?papers_sec_id=9">Realtime</a></dd></dd></dd></dl>
<p class="preParagraph">He came to the trade when he was 20, in 1969, and ever since Kreepong Tiamsawet - better known as Sorapong Chatri - has played a gamut of roles that read like the rainbow of humanity: he was a peasant, fisherman, elephant keeper, taxi driver, rickshaw driver, tuk-tuk driver, bus driver, truck driver, train driver, likay performer, warrior, photographer, policeman, hitman, spy, convict, soldier (land, air, navy), scientist, doctor, teacher, lawyer, gangster, pimp, prince, monk, thief, tramp, slave, hoodlum, politician, murderer, madman, blind man, crippled man, deaf, mute, hunchback, scar-faced, cross-eyed, heterosexual, homosexual, homophobic, ghost, werewolf, tribal chief, sorcerer... and more. The list is long, like life, like art. And at 59, after 500 films and 38 years as a professional actor, Sorapong Chatri still tells all directors: bring it on, bring it on.</p>
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<div class="articlePhotoLeft"><img alt="" hspace="3" src="http://www.bangkokpost.com/media/content/20090320/16712.jpg" vspace="3" border="1"></div>
<p>They will. Sorapong, recently honoured with National Artist status by the Office of the National Culture Commission, has had such a long and winding voyage through the evolution, or devolution, of Thai cinema that he now has his misgivings. </p>
<p>"There used to be more serious roles, socially relevant roles, roles that have something to do with poverty, injustice, struggle, national pride, because the country used to suffer and the movies used to be based on those sufferings. Now we have a developed society, a happy society. Without thinking about our problems, without the hardship, there won't be many good roles for actors,"says Sorapong.</p>
<p>In February Sorapong - fit, deeply tanned and with four grown children - won the Subannahongsa Award for best supporting actor for his role as a turbaned bandit of unspecified ethnicity in Ong-bak 2. Despite the fire burning in his gaze, the stately thief felt like Sorapong's minor, campy exercise compared to some of his powerhouse performances in the '70s and '80s, especially in the films by his mentor, MC Chatrichalerm Yukol: the savage pimp in Theptida Rongram (Motel Angel, 1974), the idealistic doctor in Khao Chue Karn (Doctor Karn, 1973), the ex-convict/taxi driver in Isarapharp Khong Thongpoon Khokpho (The Citizen 2, 1984), the hitman in Mue Puen (Gun Man, 1983), the drunken mahout in Khon Liang Chang (The Elephant Keeper, 1990).</p>
<p>And this too: the image of the young Sorapong on a buffalo in Cherd Songsri's Plae Kao (The Scar, 1977) has been seared permanently onto our retinas as a defining moment of cinematic bliss and heartbreak. In this tragic story set amidst the green paddies of old Bangkok, Sorapong also realised that acting could come very close to life - his life, that of a rustic young man with a prathom-4 education and no other skills.</p>
<p>"Than Mui [as MC Chatrichalerm Yukol is known] is my teacher, my master. Without him I would've had nothing, and I still serve him today," says Sorapong. "But in Cherd Songsri's films, from Plae Kao to Puen Paeng (1983) and Ploy Talae (1987), I found roles of country folk that were very close to my life, and I enjoyed them a lot."</p>
<p>Sorapong grew up tending cattle in a small district in Ayutthaya. After finishing por 4, he was ordained as a novice monk and moved to Wat Daodueng in Thon Buri. That's the life of a country boy, he said, going to the temple since the chance for education was non-existent. He studied Pali with the monks, though he admits he wasn't very good at it. When he was 18, he disrobed but continued to live at the temple, and soon he got a job holding the umbrella for a TV actor on Channel 7. Sometimes he held a reflex for the cameraman during shoots, or worked as loader on the set.</p>
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<p>Sorapong Chatri on the day he was honoured with the National Artist title last month. SANTIPONG SUEBSANTIWONG</p></div>
<p>That was in the late 1960s, the boom years of Thai cinema. Some 200 local titles were made each year, and screen heroes like Mitr Chaibancha, Sombat Metanee and Chaiya Suriyan were demi-gods in the collective fantasies of nationwide audiences, before TV later conquered them. Sorapong moved up from being an errand boy to playing an extra in feature films, and while on the set of Piak Poster's Tone, someone recommended him to meet an aristocratic director who had just returned from his studies in California. </p>
<p>"I went to see him, and there I met Than Mui, who was shooting a TV series," recalls Sorapong. "He asked me where I stayed, I said I was living at a temple. Then he asked if I could swim, I said yes. So he ordered me to jump into the river, because he was shooting a scene in which a man rescues a woman from drowning. So I jumped, still in my clothes. He shot the scene. That was my first role with the prince. Then I waited for my clothes to dry and took a bus back to the temple.''</p>
<p>Than Mui called Sorapong back to be in a few more TV dramas, and soon the prince told him to leave the temple and move to stay in his Wang Lavo compound on Sukhumvit soi 39. A year later, Than Mui put the young actor in the lead role, playing a scientist fighting a monster, in his feature film debut Mun Ma Kab Kwam Mued (literally, ''it comes with darkness''). </p>
<p>The 1971 sci-fi adventure, low-tech but high concept, marked the beginning of a 36-year collaboration between the blue-blooded director and the cattle boy from Ayutthaya that still continues uninterrupted. (Sorapong will soon appear in Than Mui's The Legend of King Naresuan 3, slated for release later in the year.)</p>
<p>''It was right after Mitr Chaibancha died falling from a helicopter, the industry was in a panic trying to find a new actor who could replace him and bring the audience to the cinema,'' recalls Sorapong. ''Each studio was told to groom new stars, so I got the chance to be on screen.''</p>
<p>But while Mitr in his peak was an icon, a megastar who drove fans to swoon and faint, Sorapong Chatri was slowly groomed into a different breed: a professional actor first, then a star. This had a lot to do with the fact that Thai cinema in the 1970s took an interest in reflecting social ills; politics, left and right, was the fabric of daily life, and the movies took it to task. </p>
<p>Sorapong's famous roles were those that allowed him the aura of dramatic gravity that seemed to be stem both from his humble origin and from the simmering turmoil of the decade. The fascist pimp in Motel Angel signified the violence not unlike the crackdown of the 1973 student uprising, while his role as an upright MP who was gunned down after winning an election in Surasee Phadham's Pu Tan Nok Sabha (literally ''the MP outside the Parliament,'' 1983, with a cameo by the late MR Kukrit Pramoj) was a brutal irony about our democracy, particularly our election system.</p>
<p>During the anti-communist years, Sorapong found himself a small cog in the Cold War by playing soldiers and mercenaries in perhaps 100 action films in which he fought the red menace in the jungle. Most of these were low-profile, though some were popular as they played to the national sentiment. ''In almost every film I played in the late '70s to the early '80s, you'll see that I always carried a machine gun, ready to fire'' he said. ''All actors carried machine guns in those films.'' </p>
<p>When the communists were defeated, action films faded, and Sorapong enjoyed a diversity of roles again. Between 1977 and 1990, the man starred, on average, in 30-plus movies every year, from realist dramas to madcap horrors and good old slapstick comedies.</p>
<p>Like most stars of his day, Sorapong didn't study acting. There were no talent workshops, no idol contests. The path along which he became one of Thailand's greatest actors was autodidactic, not in an intellectual but a homespun sense. ''I didn't go to drama school, there weren't any. Are there a lot now?'' the actor muses. ''What I did was simply look at the real world. All humans perform the same activities: eat, sleep, sit, stand, walk, speak, think, do. That's it _ like the monks say in their sermons. So that's all I have to do on screen.''</p>
<p>Sorapong watched Dustin Hoffman, Steve McQueen, Alain Delon, Charles Bronson, Robert DeNiro. He isn't familiar with the legendary Method _ the intense approach to acting in which an actor submerges himself completely in a role, as mythologised by Marlon Brando and DeNiro _ but during his long career Sorapong came up with his own immersion technique, Siamese-style, that manifests the kind of devotion we hardly expect from contemporary Thai actors. ''When the director wanted me to vomit, I told him to bring me liquor, egg yolks and some congee. I ate them all, and I vomited for the camera. When they wanted me to pee a lot in many takes, I drank lots of water. If they asked me to look like I'd eaten something poisonous, I drank a bitter potion. If they wanted me to look exhausted, I ran for half an hour before shooting. If I had to look like I hadn't slept, then I didn't go to sleep. If they wanted me to look like I'm dying, I'd stop eating and drinking hours before. I'd check if my lips looked dry and parched enough, or if my eyes were already sunken. Then we shot the scene.</p>
<p>''Once Than Mui wanted me to look like a man who'd spent every drop of his energy. I came to the set in the evening. I stayed up all night, and we started shooting at 6 the next morning, when I almost couldn't go on standing.''</p>
<p>Yet after all these years the man still stands tall, still a trusted actor even though showbiz has thawed into an era of short-lived shooting stars, and there's no secret why: Sorapong, a modest and cordial person who wais a young journalist to apologise when he's late for an interview, never forgets that hard work, respect and discipline are what's gotten him this far. He's a product of a period that taught him that stardom, like power, comes with responsibility _ to the audience, to the director, to the profession. In short, he takes his job seriously. </p>
<p>On stage at the Subannahongsa ceremony last month, Sorapong, in disarming fashion, lectured young stars (many, as it happens, from rich families) gathered in the hall that they shouldn't behave like angels, because they're not, and that they shouldn't come to the set late, and that they should work harder and be better.</p>
<p>''If I hadn't become an actor, what would I have turned out to be, with so little education?'' Sorapong asks, as if this is the question he's posed himself a thousand times.</p>
<p>''Maybe I'd be driving a taxi or a truck. Who knows? But I was lucky that I found acting, and I love it. The moment when the camera zooms into my face, the moment when I have to show all the emotions my character is feeling, the moment when everything seems to be quiet _ that's when I'm very happy.''</p>
<p>Today Sorapong lives with his second wife, Duangduen Jithaisong, at their house in Si Khiew district, near Nakhon Ratchasima. He has four children from a previous marriage, and when he's not shooting a new film, Sorapong dedicates himself to the mission of finding the money to build a giant Buddha image in Si Khiew that has already cost over 50 million baht. On set, Sorapong is known for showing up on time, and for spending a lot of time praying in his room as he waits for the shoot.</p>
<p>''No, I didn't think I would've spent my life as a monk if I hadn't started acting,'' he says laughing. ''But the faith has always been with me. It's very important to me, it's made me what I am today.'</p>