Glamor is back; so is sleazy Cecil

It’s not easy being the sleaziest guy on PBS.
Some people silently scowl at you; some aren’t silent. Just ask Mark Umbers, -whose third season of “Hotel Portofino” starts at 8 p.m., Sunday, July 28.(He’s shown here as Cecil Ainsworth, feigning contentment with his wife Bella.)
One friend-of-a-friend bumped into him in London, he told the Television Critics Associatio. “She couldn’t talk tp me,. She said, ‘I’ve seen your show. You’re very triggering’ And she just walked away.”
It’s logical to walk away from Cecil, but not from Umbers. In real life, he seems to be a charming chap. He’s not an elitist jerk, but he plays one on TV; he also has a jerk-adjacent resume — prep school and Oxford, majoring in Latin and in Greek literature and history.
Has that been helpful? “Not really,” said Umbers, 51. “I mean it’s made me very good at spelling. And when I get around to learnng Italian finally, it will make that a lot easier.”
“Portofino,” after all, is set in 1929 Italy. It’s what PBS programming chief Sylvia Buggs calls “a feast for the eye (on) the sun-soaked Italian Riviera.”
But the mood is darkening. In the U.S,. Wall Street is about to crash, in Italy, fascism has taken hold.
All of that contrasts sharply with the immense beauty of the setting (actually in Croatia) and some of its characters. “It’s a great pleasure for a writer to b e able to play with light and dark,” said Matt Baker, who started writing this in the darkest of times –winter in pandemic London.
He did lighten things a tad. The original plan, Umbers said, was to kill Cecil early in the second season. “There was a rape scene which we filmed, which was horrific, but mercifully that got cut and Cecil stayed in the show.”
He had become more interesting as he got less dangerous. “Everything he had of his own, he’s lost,” Umbers said in a separate interview. He’s not welcome in his family’s business or at the hotel (catering to British tourists) that his estranged wife Bella is building.
Ill-intentioned but ineffectual, he’s sort of a Wile E. Coyote – allbeit a handsome version. One theater reviewer wrote that he is “known throughout the western world as the most beautiful man ever seen.”
That description (written by an acquaintance, Umbers said, may be an exaggeration, but not by a lot. It’s easy to see why he’s been cast as young lovers in musicals.
“I didn’t have any training (in music),” he said. “In ‘My Fair Lady’ (as Freddy), I imitated a singer,, Vic Damone.”
A decade ago, he ws given the ultimate challenge – “Merrily We Roll Along,” the complex musical that had been Stephen Sondheim’s lone flop.
“It was an amazing experience; Sondheim was there some of the time.” The show was a success in London and in Houston; when it finally reached Broadway (with the same director, but different actors, it led the Tonys.
By then, Umbers was in Crotia, where he spends three months a year as scheming Cicil, whose saving grace is that his schemes rarely succeed.