Lewis's performance, though, is a constant marvel. The actor makes Soames's emotional repression so palpable that it's hard to hate him even at his most heartless.
It is testimony to Lewis' extraordinary skill that his is the character we loathe at the outset of "The Forsyte Saga" and in whom we become most interested by the end.
It would be easy to dismiss The Forsyte Saga as "just" a soap opera with the emphasis on plot, but you could argue the same of The Way We Live Now. An epic story, it managed to look epic too. The Forsyte Saga, alas, did not.
