Michael Keaton is the most mercurial of screen performers – that’s why, 40 years on, he’s so in demand

The actor is back on screen this week, albeit very briefly, as the Vulture in ‘Morbius’, having just played an opioid-addicted doctor in ‘Dopesick’. Geoffrey Macnab looks at what makes him so versatile and compelling to watch

Man of many parts: Keaton can turn on a dime, switching moods and personality (Getty)

Starring Michael Keaton, Michael Keaton, Michael Keaton and Michael Keaton,” trumpets the marketing for Harold Ramis’s 1996 comedy, Multiplicity. It’s a bravura performance, or series of performances, from the star and one that demonstrates why, more than 40 years after his big screen debut, Keaton remains so heavily in demand.

In Ealing comedy classic Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Alec Guinness famously took on nine different roles. In Multiplicity, Keaton plays the same character in multiple different ways. He is cast as Doug Kinney, an overworked construction administrator and family man whose life is spiralling out of control. Doug has no time for his wife and kids. A geneticist offers to solve his work/life balance problems by cloning him. We therefore get to see several variations on the same personality – the alpha male macho Doug, the shy, sensitive, good in the kitchen version and a drooling, dim-witted second-generation clone that has a far lower IQ than the other models.

As Multiplicity underlines, Keaton is the most mercurial of screen performers. He can turn on a dime, switching moods and personality, playing exuberant and abrasive characters one moment and very downtrodden and introspective ones the next.