You Know The Face...

And The Name Is Melissa Leo!

2008-10-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

She's getting a lot of Oscar buzz for her role in the indie "Frozen River"which is another in a long line of working class women she's played like...

...Benicio Del Toro's wife in "21 Grams"

...or Kay Howard, one of the gazillion characters on the genius nineties ensemble police show "Homicide: Life On The Streets"...

... and I remember seeing her on the first season of ABC's "Young Guns" knock-off "The Young Riders".

This year, she got a similar "character actor gets lead in indie" bump that Richard Jenkins got with "The Visitor", with "Frozen River".

It seemed like in the seventies, actresses like Leo could count on a low budget regional film to have a lead in (maybe directed by Martin Ritt, or on a larger scale, Robert Altman), while playing support in a gritty crime drama on TV or having a recurring role in "All In The Family". These days, even the indies are looking for stars who want to stretch, so the Melissa Leo's of the biz have to play support in the more character-driven pieces as well.

Which is why "Frozen River" is nothing short of a miracle for the over-forty character actress set.

The New York Times did a great write up on Leo last summer. Let's read and hope they don't sue me.

A Leading Role, With Room to Stretch

By KAREN DURBIN
Published: July 27, 2008
EARLY one especially fine morning last month in Central Park, New Yorkers kept stopping to watch Melissa Leo shoot a scene for a movie called “Veronika Decides to Die.” There wasn’t a lot to see, just Ms. Leo on a park bench trading lines with the English actor David Thewlis, who, like her, is known as an actor’s actor, which is to say, immensely talented and insufficiently famous. The movie, based on a Paulo Coelho novel and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, is an indie aimed for release next year. Ms. Leo does a lot of those, and her part is secondary. She does a lot of those too. But, she said later of the character she plays, “It’s a pretty classic supporting role, with several scenes throughout and her own arc in the film.”

That is larger than some of her parts, but her fans have long been hungry for more than a few scenes and the occasional arc. This week they are going to get it. Ms. Leo is, hands down, the unequivocal star of “Frozen River,” the first feature by the writer and director Courtney Hunt, opening on Friday. A drama with the plot and pace of a thriller, the movie is about a number of things, but they all revolve around Ray Eddy, an upstate New York working-poor single mother whose gambler husband has run off with the money she’d been saving for the down payment on a bigger, handsomer trailer home to replace the rusted hulk she’s been raising their two sons in. Faced with a particularly grim Christmas, Ray decides to join Lila, a local Mohawk woman, in the dangerous but lucrative business of smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States from Canada, across the ice-bound St. Lawrence River.

Awarding Ms. Hunt the grand jury prize for best feature at the Sundance Film Festival this year, Quentin Tarantino, one of the jurors, said, “It took my breath away, and then somewhere around the last hour it put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame."

The women’s scary night trips across the ice in Ray’s beaten-up car could justify some of that hyperbole. But the biggest thrill for many fans will be watching Ms. Leo perform with enough room to explore one of the complicated, surprising women she’s so good at sketching in smaller roles. Ray is vulnerable to life’s punches, but she’s no sentimental construct. For one thing she’s a bigot, though not overtly — at least toward most of the people she and Lila shovel into the trunk of her car. But she’s furious at having to transport a Pakistani couple she suspects of being Muslim terrorists and soothes her conscience by treating them horribly. At the same time she embodies the almost invisible heroism of someone continually pecked at by poverty. She not only keeps going, but her dogged problem-solving concentration also makes it clear that the thought of quitting doesn’t enter her mind.

There’s also the weird pleasure of seeing how bad Ms. Leo is willing to look for the camera. Ray is old and haggard before her time, her gullied face framed by terrible hair, crimped and dyed a harsh, aging red with bangs that coil wormlike across her forehead but telegraph the message: I’m still trying.

“That was mine,” Ms. Leo said proudly. “Successful or not, Ray’s hair and mascara say that she’s a woman, and she cares to be pretty. It’s something she did in high school when she met her husband, and it worked then, so maybe it’ll work now.”

This may be Ms. Leo’s first starring role, but she has been in 70 film and television productions since 1984, when she made her debut on the soap opera “All My Children.” She’s also packed in a substantial amount of Off Broadway theater. And the work shows no signs of drying up. So far this year she’s done eight features, a short film and an episode of “Law & Order.”

The role that put her on the map, though, was in the groundbreaking NBC police drama “Homicide: Life on the Street.” Always in man-tailored pants but sporting a curly, light-red mane halfway down her back, Ms. Leo’s wry, sardonic cop, Kay Howard, was the squad’s avenging angel. Ms. Leo appeared in 76 episodes from 1993 to ’97, only to have network executives replace her with a series of more glamorous female characters. Fans still gripe about this on the Internet. At the time she issued a statement saying she was “surprised and saddened,” adding, “There were not enough women like Kay on TV, and now there are none.”

Her independence has deep roots. When she was 9, she and her mother moved from the Lower East Side to Putney, Vt., and eventually to London, where, at 15, she remained on her own to study acting for two years before coming back to get her high school equivalency diploma and enroll at Purchase College.

“My mom was a ’70s mom,” she said of her mother’s willingness to let her stay in London. “She paved a road that no one had yet walked. To get the hippie out of certain characters is probably the most difficult thing for me. I was not a hippie by choice but by birth.”

Ms. Leo, 47, has long lived in Ulster County, near Woodstock, N.Y., with her son by the actor John Heard, and now on her own. She’s a familiar presence at Woodstock’s indie-oriented film festival, and is part of the loose network of artists, performing and otherwise, who have gravitated there.

She explains her résumé by saying, “I do the work that’s in front of me.” But when there’s a part that excites her, she goes after it. One of her most memorable performances was in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “21 Grams,” in which she played the steadfast wife of Benicio Del Toro’s tormented ex-convict and former junkie. Even after submitting two taped auditions, Ms. Leo said, she probably wouldn’t have landed the role if she hadn’t offered to fly herself to California to audition in person.

That perseverance paid off with “Frozen River” as well. Not in the usual sense of a star attaching herself to an indie project in order to attract investors; she doesn’t have that kind of draw, she said, adding with a grin, “Maybe next week.” Instead, Ms. Leo agreed, as she has on other occasions with novice directors, to appear in a short film by Ms. Hunt, who was hoping to make a calling card to raise money for the feature.

“I didn’t realize she had a full-length script until after the short was finished,” Ms. Leo said. At which point enlightened self-interest kicked in. It took four years and a lot of bad meetings before the money was raised, and more than once Ms. Hunt nearly gave up. So Ms. Leo would call every so often and ask, “We still making our movie?”

The answer may have come slowly at times, but it was always, “Yes.”

Watching Leo in films like this or the honest work she's done in television is watching a tireless artist practicing her craft. The Academy should, at the very least, recognize the need for low-budget, gutsy storytelling that Melissa Leo produces in everything she does.

And The Name Is Harvey Korman!

2008-05-31T11:13:00.000-07:00

Another giant of showbiz (both physically and talent-ly*) has passed... how could you not recognize Harvey Korman from "The Carol Burnett Show"...
... Or the way he effortlessly meets the bar Mel Brooks sets in "Blazing Saddles"...
... and watch what he does in this You Tube clip here. The guy was a frickin' genius.

But I have a confession to make. For awhile, it seemed like it was fashionable in comedy to make fun of "The Carol Burnett Show", Korman and Tim Conway for being old-fashioned, out-of-date and a little contrived.

"C'mon they crack each other up everytime?"- the argument tended to go.

"Really? Harvey Korman, a decades-long professional, can't keep a straight face for one take?"

I have since gotten over this young comic wannabe's cynicism. Guys like Korman and Conway are national treasures who need to be celebrated. If I learned one thing living in LA, it's that I tend to take these talented people who I admired as a kid for granted. One of the reasons for this site is to balance out the snarky stuff I tend to automatically say on the other site with heartfelt, somewhat snarky tributes to some people who don't get a lot of recognition unless they die.

And these guys deserve more than that.

Let's take a look at what The New York Times wrote about Harvey Korman...

Harvey Korman of ‘Burnett Show’ Dies at 81

By BRUCE LAMBERT
Published: May 30, 2008

Harvey Korman, the award-winning comedic actor who rose to fame playing second banana to Carol Burnett on her television variety series and who starred in hit movies like “Blazing Saddles” and “High Anxiety,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 81.

The cause was complications from the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm four months ago, his family said in a statement released by the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center.

A tall man known for his outlandish characterizations, Mr. Korman was nominated for seven Emmys for his television work and won four. He also was nominated for four Golden Globe awards, winning one.

“Everything he did on ‘The Carol Burnett Show,’ especially the Mother Marcus character, was a special favorite,” his daughter, Katherine Korman, said in an interview on Thursday. Mother Marcus, which he played in drag, “was a Yiddish grandmother based on his own real-life grandmother,” she said.

Mr. Korman also considered Hedley Lamarr, his role in the 1974 film “Blazing Saddles,” as one of his favorites, she said.

A native of Chicago, Mr. Korman studied drama there and then tried, unsuccessfully, to break into show business in New York City.

"For the next 13 years I tried to get on Broadway, on off-Broadway, under or beside Broadway," he said in an 1971 interview.

Eventually he gave up and returned to Chicago, but he later went to California to try again. After subsisting as a car salesman and movie doorman, in the mid-1960s he began getting minor movie parts, doing voice-overs as the Great Gazoo on “The Flintstones” and winning a TV spot on “The Danny Kaye Show.”

The Kaye show, which he joined in 1964, proved to be a springboard. It went off the air in 1967, but Mr. Korman soon landed a job on the Burnett show, which turned into his breakthrough. He was a natural fit with Ms. Burnett, and their weekly comedy sketches won high ratings for the show and a national audience for him.

Their performing partnership lasted for a decade, and both of their television careers faltered after they split. He became the host of “The Harvey Korman Show,” which ended after one season. Ms. Burnett acquired a new cast member in Dick Van Dyke, but that partnership did not have the same chemistry. Her show ended soon after.

Crediting Ms. Burnett for giving him an opportunity, Mr. Korman once said: "We were an ensemble, and Carol had the most incredible attitude. I’ve never worked with a star of that magnitude who was willing to give so much away."

Ms. Burnett “loved Harvey very much," according to her assistant, Angie Horejsi, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Korman’s career was far from over after he left the Burnett show. He appeared as a guest star in dozens of television series, specials and movies as recently as 2004. His roles covered a range of styles and included voice-overs in “Garfield and Friends,” Bud Abbott in “Bud and Lou,” co-host of “The Flintstones’ 25th Anniversary Celebration” and a guest appearance on “ER.”

Mel Brooks cast him not only in “Blazing Saddles” and “High Anxiety,” but also in “History of the World: Part I” (1981) and “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” (1995). His film career also included “Huckleberry Finn” (1974), “The Pink Panther Strikes Again” (1976), “Curse of the Pink Panther” (1983), “The Flintstones” (1994) and “The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas” (2000).

Mr. Korman reunited with a Burnett alumnus, Tim Conway, and toured the country to give live performances, reprising skits from the old shows as well as creating new material. “They had a private jet and went all over,” Katherine Korman said.

Mr. Korman had two children, Maria and Christopher, by his first marriage, to Donna Elhart, and two more children, Katherine and Laura, by his second marriage, to Deborah Fritz.

Even when off stage and off camera, Mr. Korman still loved to clown, his daughter Katherine said. “He was always funny in real life,” she said. “He would like to see how far he could push the limits, making people laugh. If he were here now, he would want us to be joking.”

Give it up for one of the last of the greats.

*look it up.

And The Name Is Sydney Pollack!

2008-05-28T09:08:00.000-07:00

This is the first time I've ever posted the same posts in two different blogs and the reason is that Pollack was both a very good director and a great character actor! Sydney Pollack was one of those guys (like Coppola and Scorsese) who I assumed would be around forever. I love some of the movies he directed and some I don't, but he was one of the most solid character actors and film buff/film fan/film supporters show biz has ever seen.
As much as I enjoy "Three Days Of The Condor", "The Yakuza", and "Tootsie", there are many more of his films that I think are okay ("The Electric Horseman", the "Sabrina" remake) or not very good at all ("Out Of Africa" makes my teeth itch... or maybe it's just that my teeth are prone to itchiness). But have you seen him in "Death Becomes Her"? "Husbands and Wives"? "The Player"? An episode of "The Sopranos" playing an oncologist in a prison hospital for murdering his wife?

In each one, he is unmistakable. A big guy, lots of presence, but really showing what he's got in the quiet moments.

His last role was in a film he co-produced with the late Anthony Minghella, "Michael Clayton". His part as the head of a law firm, who probably knows what's going on, but has long ago made his peace with the gray areas of law is truly great, subtle acting.

Here he is winning an Emmy (he got his start directing television) for an episode of the Bob Hope Chrysler Theatre.

And here's the obit from the New York Times...

Sydney Pollack, Film Director, Is Dead at 73

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

Published: May 27, 2008

LOS ANGELES — Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay as director, producer and sometime actor whose star-laden movies like “The Way We Were,” “Tootsie” and “Out of Africa” were among the most successful of the 1970s and ’80s, died Monday at home here. He was 73.

The cause was cancer, said the publicist Leslee Dart, who spoke for his family.

Mr. Pollack’s career defined an era in which big stars (Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty) and the filmmakers who knew how to wrangle them (Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols) retooled the Hollywood system. Savvy operators, they played studio against studio, staking their fortunes on pictures that served commerce without wholly abandoning art.

Hollywood honored Mr. Pollack in return. His movies received multiple Academy Award nominations, and as a director he won an Oscar for his work on the 1985 film “Out of Africa” as well as nominations for directing “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) and “Tootsie” (1982).

“Michael Clayton,” of which Mr. Pollack was a producer and a member of the cast, was nominated for a best picture Oscar earlier this year. He delivered a trademark performance as an old-bull lawyer who demands dark deeds from a subordinate, played by George Clooney. (“This is news? This case has reeked from Day 1!” snaps Mr. Pollack’s Marty Bach.) Most recently, Mr. Pollack portrayed the father of Patrick Dempsey’s character in “Made of Honor.”

Mr. Pollack became a prolific producer of independent films in the latter part of his career. With a partner, the filmmaker Anthony Minghella, he ran Mirage Enterprises, a production company whose films included Mr. Minghella’s “Cold Mountain” and the documentary “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” released in 2006, the last film directed by Mr. Pollack.

Mr. Minghella died in March, at the age of 54, or complications from surgery for tonsil cancer.

Apart from the Gehry documentary, Mr. Pollack never directed a movie without stars. His first feature, “The Slender Thread,” released by Paramount Pictures in 1965, starred Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft. In his next 19 films — every one a romance or drama but for the single comedy, “Tootsie” — Mr. Pollack worked with Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Nicole Kidman, Ms. Streisand and others. A frequent collaborator was Robert Redford.

“Sydney’s and my relationship both professionally and personally covers 40 years,” Mr. Redford said in an e-mailed statement. “It’s too personal to express in a sound bite.”

Sydney Irwin Pollack was born on July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., and reared in South Bend. By Mr. Pollack’s own account, in the book “World Film Directors,” his father, David, a pharmacist, and his mother, the former Rebecca Miller, were first-generation Russian-Americans who had met at Purdue University.

Mr. Pollack developed a love of drama at South Bend High School and, instead of going to college, went to New York and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. He studied there for two years under Sanford Meisner, who was in charge of its acting department, and remained for five more as Mr. Meisner’s assistant, teaching acting but also appearing onstage and in television.

Curly-haired and almost 6 feet 2 inches tall, Mr. Pollack had a notable role in a 1959 “Playhouse 90” telecast of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” an adaptation of the Hemingway novel directed by John Frankenheimer. Earlier, Mr. Pollack had appeared on Broadway with Zero Mostel in “A Stone for Danny Fisher” and with Katharine Cornell in “The Dark Is Light Enough.” But he said later that he probably could not have built a career as a leading man.

Instead, Mr. Pollack took the advice of Burt Lancaster, whom he had met while working with Mr. Frankenheimer, and turned to directing. Mr. Lancaster steered him to the entertainment mogul Lew Wasserman, and through him Mr. Pollack landed a directing assignment on the television series “Shotgun Slade.”

After a faltering start, he hit his stride on episodes of “Ben Casey,” “Naked City,” “The Fugitive” and other shows. In 1966 he won an Emmy for directing an episode of “Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater.”

From the time he made his first full-length feature, “The Slender Thread,” about a social work student coaxing a woman out of suicide on a help line, Mr. Pollack had a hit-and-miss relationship with the critics. Writing in The New York Times, A. H. Weiler deplored that film’s “sudsy waves of bathos.” Mr. Pollack himself later pronounced it “dreadful.”

But from the beginning of his movie career, he was also perceived as belonging to a generation whose work broke with the immediate past. In 1965, Charles Champlin, writing in The Los Angeles Times, compared Mr. Pollack to the director Elliot Silverstein, whose western spoof, “Cat Ballou,” had been released earlier that year, and Stuart Rosenberg, soon to be famous for “Cool Hand Luke” (1967). Mr. Champlin cited all three as artists who had used television rather than B movies to learn their craft.

Self-critical and never quite at ease with Hollywood, Mr. Pollack voiced a constant yearning for creative prerogatives more common on the stage. Yet he dived into the fray. In 1970, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” his bleak fable of love and death among marathon dancers in the Great Depression, based on a Horace McCoy novel, received nine Oscar nominations, including the one for directing. (Gig Young won the best supporting actor award for his performance.)

Two years later, Mr. Pollack made the mountain-man saga “Jeremiah Johnson,” one of three closely spaced pictures in which he directed Mr. Redford.

The second of those, “The Way We Were,” about ill-fated lovers who meet up later in life, also starred Ms. Streisand and was a huge hit despite critical hostility.

The next, “Three Days of the Condor,” another hit, about a bookish C.I.A. worker thrust into a mystery, did somewhat better with the critics. “Tense and involving,” said Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun-Times.

With “Absence of Malice” in 1981, Mr. Pollack entered the realm of public debate. The film’s story of a newspaper reporter (Sally Field) who is fed a false story by federal officials trying to squeeze information from a businessman (Paul Newman) was widely viewed as a corrective to the adulation of investigative reporters that followed Alan J. Pakula’s hit movie “All the President’s Men,” with its portrayal of the Watergate scandal.

But only with “Tootsie,” in 1982, did Mr. Pollack become a fully realized Hollywood player. By then he was represented by Michael S. Ovitz and the rapidly expanding Creative Artists Agency. So was his leading man, Dustin Hoffman.

As the film — a comedy about a struggling actor who disguises himself as a woman to get a coveted television part — was being shot for Columbia Pictures, Mr. Pollack and Mr. Hoffman became embroiled in a semi-public feud, with Mr. Ovitz running shuttle diplomacy between them.

Mr. Hoffman, who had initiated the project, argued for a more broadly comic approach. But Mr. Pollack — who played Mr. Hoffman’s agent in the film — was drawn to the seemingly doomed romance between the cross-dressing Hoffman character and the actress played by Jessica Lange.

If Mr. Pollack did not prevail on all points, he tipped the film in his own direction. Meanwhile, the movie came in behind schedule, over budget and surrounded by bad buzz.

Yet “Tootsie” was also a winner. It took in more than $177 million domestically and received 10 Oscar nominations, including for best picture. (Ms. Lange took home the film’s only Oscar, for best supporting actress.)

Backed by Mr. Ovitz, Mr. Pollack expanded his reach in the wake of success. Over the next several years, he worked closely with both TriStar Pictures, where he was creative consultant, and Universal, where Mirage, his production company, set up shop in 1986.

Mr. Pollack reached perhaps his pinnacle with “Out of Africa.” The film, based on the memoirs of Isak Dinesen, paired Ms. Streep and Mr. Redford in a drama that reworked one of the director’s favorite themes, that of star-crossed lovers. It captured Oscars for best picture and best director.

Still, Mr. Pollack remained uneasy about his cinematic skills. “I was never what I would call a great shooter or visual stylist,” he told an interviewer for American Cinematographer last year. And he developed a reputation for caution when it came to directing assignments. Time after time, he expressed interest in directing projects, only to back away. At one point he was to make “Rain Man,” a Dustin Hoffman picture ultimately directed by Mr. Levinson; at another, an adaptation of “The Night Manager” by John le Carré.

That wariness was undoubtedly fed by his experience with “Havana,” a 1990 film that was to be his last with Mr. Redford. It seemed to please no one, though Mr. Pollack defended it. “To tell you the truth, if I knew what was wrong, I’d have fixed it,” Mr. Pollack told The Los Angeles Times in 1993.

“The Firm,” with Tom Cruise, was a hit that year. But “Sabrina” (1995) and “Random Hearts” (1999), both with Harrison Ford, and “The Interpreter” (2005), with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, fell short, as Hollywood and its primary audience increasingly eschewed stars for fantasy and special effects.

Mr. Pollack never stopped acting; in a recent episode of “Entourage,” the HBO series about Hollywood, he played himself.

Among Mr. Pollack’s survivors are two daughters, Rebecca Pollack and Rachel Pollack, and his wife, Claire Griswold. The couple married in 1958, while Mr. Pollack was serving a two-year hitch in the Army. Their only son, Steven, died at age 34 in a 1993 plane crash in Santa Monica, Calif.

In his later years, Mr. Pollack appeared to relish his role as elder statesman. At various times he was executive director of the Actors Studio West, chairman of American Cinematheque and an advocate for artists’ rights.

He increasingly sounded wistful notes about the disappearance of the Hollywood he knew in his prime. “The middle ground is now gone,” Mr. Pollack said in the fall 1998 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly. He added, with a nod to a fellow filmmaker: “It is not impossible to make mainstream films which are really good. Costa-Gavras once said that accidents can happen.”

Again, this has hit me like a ton of bricks. The talent pool just got a little shallower. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends.

And the Name Is Richard Jenkins!

2008-05-20T21:48:00.000-07:00

Lately he's been on the "First time this character actor has ever played a lead" pr train, for his role in an indie called "The Visitor"...
...but you might remember him from the "Charlize Theron wants another Oscar" Oscar bait/revisionist 70's agitprop drama "North Country"...
...and if you watched the "not television" channel you probably caught him as the dead father in "Six Feet Under".

But to me, he has always been a comedic secret weapon, because no one ever expects him. Just watch him in "Flirting With Disaster" (the best thing about that movie), "Intolerable Cruelty" or even the "Fun With Dick And Jane" remake and see a guy who plays everything so real, you don't realize how funny he's being until a scene or two after.

Hey, let's see what the interview conducted in the New York Times with Jenkins has to say...

Stretching for a New Film Role: The Lead
By JEREMY W. PETERS
Published: April 6, 2008

PROVIDENCE, R.I -

MOST of the time when people recognize him on the street, they ask if he was their high school classmate. No, he politely responds in his distinctive, gravelly baritone. Richard Jenkins is an actor — one you did not go to high school with, unless you happen to be from DeKalb, Ill., but have probably seen a dozen times on screens big and small. Try to place exactly where you saw him, though, and you might find yourself at a loss.

He has played characters created by John Updike and the Coen brothers. He was the psychiatrist in “There’s Something About Mary” who pretended to listen as Ben Stiller’s character droned on about his romantic problems. In “Flirting With Disaster” he was the gay federal agent who ran through the desert in his underwear after inadvertently eating a meal laced with drugs. He’s been the ghost of an undertaker who gets pulverized by a bus in “Six Feet Under” and Woody Allen’s doctor in “Hannah and Her Sisters.”

But now, after playing supporting roles for the better part of three decades, he is finally getting his shot at being the leading man.

In “The Visitor,” a new film by Thomas McCarthy that opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, Mr. Jenkins plays Walter Vale, a lonely, bored and widowed economics professor who finds his orderly life shaken and then transformed by two illegal immigrants he discovers in his Manhattan pied-à-terre.

Vale is in many ways a reflection and creation of Mr. Jenkins himself. Both are contemplative and earnest men, making it difficult to tell where Mr. Jenkins ends and Vale begins.

That is because Mr. Jenkins worked directly with Mr. McCarthy, who wrote the script with the actor in mind, to shape Vale’s character development. The actor and director collaborated on the character’s every trait, from the lines he speaks to the glasses he wears.

“I understood this man,” Mr. Jenkins, a slender-framed man of 60, said in an interview here at a cafe just a few blocks from Trinity Repertory Company, the theater where he spent almost 20 years as an actor and, eventually, artistic director. “I understood his reluctance to reach out, to become part of things.”

By his own admission Mr. Jenkins sometimes requires a jump-start to get into first gear. He’s perfectly content in his comfort zone. He often needs a little motivation from his wife, he said, even for the littlest things, like trying a new restaurant or taking a vacation someplace they have never visited.

Mr. Jenkins’s role in “The Visitor” began to take shape about four years ago, when he and Mr. McCarthy first sat down over lunch to discuss the possibility of working together.

“About a year and a half later he called me and said: ‘I wrote this script. Would you take a look at it?’ ” Mr. Jenkins recalled. “He sent me the script, and I read it, and I just loved it. I mean, I just loved it. And I said to him, ‘Nobody’s going to give you any money to do this movie with me in the lead.’ He said: ‘That wasn’t my question. My question was, do you want to do it?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”

Mr. McCarthy, an actor who made his directorial debut in 2003 with “The Station Agent,” did not see Mr. Jenkins’s lack of star power as a problem; he saw it as an asset. “I felt like I needed an actor who could really vanish into the role and maybe someone who wasn’t immediately recognizable as a Hollywood star,” Mr. McCarthy said in a telephone interview. “He could really play the everyman, the average American, and be really believable.”

A Hollywood stereotype Mr. Jenkins is not. For the last four decades he has lived in the Providence area, where he and his wife, Sharon, raised a son and a daughter. Ms. Jenkins, a dancer turned choreographer and his wife of 39 years, still works with Trinity Rep, where Mr. Jenkins got his start as a professional actor right after college in the Midwest. He spent 14 seasons with the theater and later four years as its artistic director, making time for the occasional small part in films like “And the Band Played On” and “Wolf.”

Mr. Jenkins, whose taste in cars tends toward Toyota Camry hybrids, tries as hard as he can to stay out of the limelight. That has been difficult lately. He is about to embark on a publicity tour for “The Visitor,” and it’s a part of the actor’s life he finds a little awkward. “I don’t do this,” he told a reporter as he fidgeted nervously with a piece of paper during an interview over lunch. “I’ve been fortunate. I’ve been able to do lots of different things. And I don’t know why, but I have.”

He seems truly at home at Trinity Rep, which is housed in a majestic, renovated theater in downtown Providence. On a recent visit there the staff welcomed him with warm embraces and gleeful greetings. A black-and-white picture of him still hangs on a wall in the lobby.

“This is just a great little space,” he said, standing in the aisle of one of the auditoriums and taking in the smell of freshly cut wood from the set. “I love coming back here. I love the feeling.” The four seasons he spent as the theater’s artistic director seem to have carried over to his career as a screen actor. Mr. McCarthy recalled a scene in “The Visitor” in which Mr. Jenkins’s character tries to flirt with the mother of Tarek, one of the immigrants who has been living in his apartment. Vale, a creature of strict habit, arrives wearing new glasses.

Those spectacles — with sleek, thin frames compared with the big, clunky pair he wore earlier — were Mr. Jenkins’s idea and written into the script at his suggestion to show how the straight-laced Vale is taking baby steps toward loosening up. “It’s a lovely touch,” Mr. McCarthy said, “and it really reveals a lot about the character.”

Mr. McCarthy said Mr. Jenkins connected with his role at a level of intimacy he has rarely seen from actors. The night he screened “The Visitor” for Mr. Jenkins and his wife, Mr. McCarthy said, the bond of actor to character was obvious.

“He didn’t say anything for a long time,” Mr. McCarthy said. “Then he finally said, ‘I’ve been waiting my whole career to do a movie like this.’ And he said it in such a way that was so honest. For me, those are the moments you live for.”

I think it takes an independent writer/director like Thomas McCarthy to bring to the viewing public what someone like Jenkins is capable of. One thinks of Robert Altman shooting the film version of "Secret Honor" and making the actor Phillip Baker Hall suddenly visible to critics and art house audiences. Or Woody Allen putting the heretofore unknown Wallace Shawn in "Manhattan" as almost a sight gag, but giving Shawn a second career as an actor (in addition to Obie-award winning playwright).

And those are moments I live for.

And The Name Is Richard Widmark!

2008-03-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

Richard Widmark, who passed away on Sunday, March 24th, was an actor whose privacy offscreen fueled his intensity on...
...he got his start as a go-to for crime heavy, forties/fifties film noir in such films as "Kiss Of Death", "Night & The City" and "Pickup on South Street" ...
...eventually he would move on to become a great all-around actor/star and appear in a lot of the classic westerns of the time including "How The West Was Won", "The Alamo", and a film he researched and helped make, John Ford's "Cheyenne Autumn"...

...in the sixties he moved on to more relevant material like Don Siegel's "Madigan", which Siegel did as a dry run (along with "Coogan's Bluff") for "Dirty Harry"...

... and yet he still had time for bad guys like "Ratchett" in "Murder On The Orient Express".

"Murder..." was the first thing I ever saw him in and I distinctly remember Albert Finney as Hercules Poirot, after a terse exchange with Widmark, saying he would not help him because he did not like his face. Widmark sets this up beautifully in his performance.

From The New York Times obituary...

Richard Widmark, Actor, Dies at 93

By ALJEAN HARMETZ
Published: March 26, 2008

Richard Widmark, who created a villain in his first movie role who was so repellent and frightening that the actor became a star overnight, died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 93.

His death was announced Wednesday morning by his wife, Susan Blanchard. She said that Mr. Widmark had fractured a vertebra in recent months and that his conditioned had worsened.

As Tommy Udo, a giggling, psychopathic killer in the 1947 gangster film “Kiss of Death,” Mr. Widmark tied up an old woman in a wheelchair (played by Mildred Dunnock) with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoved her down a flight of stairs to her death.

“The sadism of that character, the fearful laugh, the skull showing through drawn skin, and the surely conscious evocation of a concentration-camp degenerate established Widmark as the most frightening person on the screen,” the critic David Thomson wrote in “The Biographical Dictionary of Film.”

The performance won Mr. Widmark his sole Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor.

Tommy Udo made the 32-year-old Mr. Widmark, who had been an established radio actor, an instant movie star, and he spent the next seven years playing a variety of flawed heroes and relentlessly anti-social mobsters in 20th Century Fox’s juiciest melodramas.

His mobsters were drenched in evil. Even his heroes, including the doctor who fights bubonic plague in Elia Kazan’s “Panic in the Streets” (1950), the daredevil pilot flying into the eye of a storm in “Slattery’s Hurricane” (1949) and the pickpocket who refuses to be a traitor in Samuel Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street” (1953) were nerve-strained and feral.

“Movie audiences fasten on to one aspect of the actor, and then they decide what they want you to be,” Mr. Widmark once said. “They think you’re playing yourself. The truth is that the only person who can ever really play himself is a baby.”

In reality, the screen’s most vicious psychopath was a mild-mannered former teacher who had married his college sweetheart, the actress Jean Hazelwood, and who told a reporter 48 years later that he had never been unfaithful and had never even flirted with women because, he said, “I happen to like my wife a lot.”

He was originally turned down for the role of Tommy Udo by the movie’s director, Henry Hathaway, who told Mr. Widmark that he was too clean-cut and intellectual. It was Darryl Zanuck, the Fox studio head, who, after watching Mr. Widmark’s screen test, insisted that he be given the part.

Among the 65 movies he made over the next five decades were “The Cobweb” (1955), in which he played the head of a psychiatric clinic where the staff seemed more emotionally troubled than the patients; “Saint Joan” (1957) , as the Dauphin to Jean Seberg’s Joan of Arc; John Wayne’s “The Alamo” (1960), as Jim Bowie, the inventor of the Bowie knife; “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961), as an American army colonel prosecuting German war criminals; and John Ford’s revisionist western “Cheyenne Autumn” (1963), as an army captain who risks his career to help the Indians.

The genesis of “Cheyenne Autumn” was research Mr. Widmark had done at Yale into the suffering of the Cheyenne. He showed his work to John Ford and, two years later, Ford sent Mr. Widmark a finished screenplay.

Mr. Widmark created the role of Detective Sergeant Daniel Madigan in Don Siegel’s 1968 film “Madigan.” It proved so popular that he later played the loner Madigan on an NBC television series during the 1972-73 season.

As his blonde hair turned grey, Mr. Widmark moved up in rank, playing generals in the nuclear thriller “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” (1977) and “The Swarm” (1978), in which he waged war on bees. He was the evil head of a hospital in “Coma” (1978) and a United States Senator in “True Colors” (1991).

He was forever fighting producers’ efforts to stereotype him. Indeed, he became so adept at all types of roles that he consistently lent credibility to inferior movies and became an audience favorite over a career that spanned more than half a century.

“I suppose I wanted to act in order to have a place in the sun,” he once told a reporter. “I’d always lived in small towns, and acting meant having some kind of identity.”

Richard Widmark (he had no middle name) was born on Dec. 26, 1914, in Sunrise, Minn., and grew up throughout the Midwest. His father, Carl Widmark, was a traveling salesman who took his wife, Mae Ethel, and two sons from Minnesota to Sioux Falls, S.D.; Henry, Ill.; Chillicothe, Mo.; and Princeton, Ill., where Mr. Widmark graduated from high school as senior class president.

Movie crazy, he was afraid to admit his interest in the “sissy” job of acting. On a full scholarship at Lake Forest College in Illinois, he played end on the football team, took third place in a state oratory contest, starred in plays and was, once again, senior class president.

Graduating in 1936, he spent two years as an instructor in the Lake Forest drama department, directing and acting in two dozen plays. Then he headed to New York City in 1938, where one of his classmates was producing 15-minute radio soap operas and cast Mr. Widmark in a variety of roles.

“Getting launched was easy for me — too easy, perhaps,” he said of his success playing “young, neurotic guys” on “Big Sister,” “Life Can Be Beautiful,” “Joyce Jordan, M.D.,” “Stella Dallas,” “Front Page Farrell,” “Aunt Jenny’s Real Life Stories” and “Inner Sanctum.”

At the beginning of World War II, Mr. Widmark tried to enlist in the army but was turned down three times because of a perforated eardrum. So he turned, in 1943, to Broadway. In his first stage role, he played an Army lieutenant in F. Hugh Herbert’s “Kiss and Tell,” directed by George Abbott. Appearing in the controversial play “Trio,” which was closed by the License Commissioner after 67 performances because it touched on lesbianism, he received glowing reviews as a college student who fights to free the girl he loves from the domination of an older woman.

After a successful, 10-year career as a radio actor, he tried the movies with “Kiss of Death,” which was being filmed in New York. Older than most new recruits, he was, to his surprise, summoned to Hollywood after the movie was released. “I’m probably the only actor who gave up a swimming pool to go out to Hollywood,” Mr. Widmark told The New Yorker in 1961.

He had never expected 20th Century Fox to pick up the option on the contract he was forced to sign to get the role of Tommy Udo. During the seven years of his Fox contract, he starred in 20 movies, including “Yellow Sky” (1948), as the blackguard who menaces Gregory Peck; “Down to the Sea in Ships” (1949), as a valiant whaler; Jules Dassin’s “Night and the City” (1950), as a small- time hustler who dreams of becoming a wrestling promoter; and “Don’t Bother to Knock” (1952), in which the tables were turned and he was the prey of a psychopathic Marilyn Monroe.

A passionate liberal Democrat, Mr. Widmark played a bigot who baits a black doctor in Joseph Mankiewicz’s “No Way Out” (1950). He was so embarrassed by the character that after every scene he apologized to the young actor he was required to torment, Sidney Poitier.
In 1990, when Mr. Widmark was given the D.W. Griffith Career Achievement Award by the National Board of Review, it was Mr. Poitier who presented it to him.

Within two years after his Fox contract ended, Mr. Widmark had formed a production company and produced “Time Limit” (1957), a serious dissection of possible treason by an American prisoner of war that The New York Times called “sobering, important and exciting.” Directed by the actor Karl Malden, “Time Limit” starred Mr. Widmark as an army colonel who is investigating a major (Richard Basehart) who is suspected of having broken under pressure during the Korean War and aided the enemy.

Mr. Widmark produced two more films: “The Secret Ways” (1961) in which he went behind the Iron Curtain to bring out an anti-Communist leader; and “The Bedford Incident” (1964), another Cold War drama, in which he played an ultraconservative naval captain trailing a Russian submarine and putting the world in danger of a nuclear catastrophe.

Mr. Widmark told The Guardian in 1995 that he had not become a producer to make money but to have greater artistic control. “I could choose the director and my fellow actors,” he said. “I could carry out projects which I liked but the studios didn’t want.”

He added: “The businessmen who run Hollywood today have no self-respect. What interests them is not movies but the bottom line. Look at ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ which turns idiocy into something positive, or ‘Forrest Gump,’ a hymn to stupidity. ‘Intellectual’ has become a dirty word.”

He also vowed he would never appear on a talk show on television, saying, “When I see people destroying their privacy — what they think, what they feel — by beaming it out to millions of viewers, I think it cheapens them as individuals.”

In 1970, he won an Emmy nomination for his first television role, as the president of the United States in a mini-series based on Fletcher Knebel’s novel “Vanished.” By the 1980s, television movies had transformed the jittery psychopath of his early days into a wise and stalwart lawman. He played a Texas Ranger opposite Willie Nelson’s train robber in “Once Upon a Texas Train,” a small-town police chief in “Blackout” and, most memorably, a bayou country sheriff faced with a group of aged black men who have confessed to a murder in “A Gathering of Old Men.”

“The older you get, the less you know about acting,” he told one reporter, “but the more you know about what makes the really great actors.” The actor he most admired was Spencer Tracy, because, he said, Tracy’s acting had a reality and honesty that seemed effortless.

Mr. Widmark, who hated the limelight, spent his Hollywood years living quietly on a large farm in Connecticut and an 80-acre horse ranch in Hidden Valley, north of Los Angeles. Asked once if he had been “astute” with his money, he answered, “No, just tight.”

He sold the ranch in 1997 after the death of Ms. Hazelwood, his wife of 55 years. “I don’t care how well known an actor is,” Mr. Widmark insisted. “He can lead a normal life if he wants to.”

Besides his wife, Ms. Blanchard, Mr. Widmark is survived by his daughter, Anne Heath Widmark, of Santa Fe, N.M., who had once been married to the Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax.

Well into his later years, the nonviolent, gun-hating Mr. Widmark, who described himself as “gentle,” was accosted by strangers who expected him to be a tough guy. There is even a story that Joey Gallo, the New York mobster, was so taken by Mr. Widmark’s performance in “Kiss of Death” that he copied the actor’s natty posture, sadistic smirk and tittering laugh.

“It’s a bit rough,” Mr. Widmark once said, “priding oneself that one isn’t too bad an actor and then finding one’s only remembered for a giggle.”

In the early eighties, I was obsessed with a movie* called "Fade To Black" that had the mighty Dennis Christopher in it as a movie fan who goes nuts and begins killing off everyone who's bullied him**, in disguise as various evil movie icons, like Cagney in "White Heat", Dracula and The Mummy. Tommy Udo from "Kiss Of Death" was the one I hadn't heard of. But seeing clips in "Fade To Black" made me realize how great Widmark is in the part, And then seeing the whole film later on confirmed that for me.

He will be missed.

*hard to believe, I know.
**it took a while for me to understand this wasn't a good lifestyle choice.

And The Name Is Ivan Dixon!

2008-03-21T02:36:00.000-07:00

Sadly, Dixon passed away Sunday, March 17th. Reading his obituaries, it seems that most people remember this actor from...
... either playing Kinchloe in "Hogan's Heroes" or maybe as the moral center of the movie "Car Wash"...
... I also remember him in one of the more emotional episodes of "The Twilight Zone" for me, "The Big, Tall Wish"...
but did you know he produced and directed one of the most controversial of the blaxploitation era films "The Spook Who Sat by the Door"?

Yeah, neither did I. Shot, according to the author of the book, in Chicago outside without permits, this film tells the story of how an African-American who is recruited (and more importantly trained) by the C.I.A. for show, quits and takes his training to Chicago to form a revolutionary army out of the gangs there.

Dixon went from this to directing mostly TV, paving the way for African- American television actor-turned-directors like Thomas Carter, Eric Laneuville and Kevin Hooks.

Let's see the New York Times has to say...

Ivan Dixon, Actor in ‘Hogan’s Heroes,’ Dies at 76

By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: March 20, 2008

Ivan Dixon, an actor and director who was best known for playing Sgt. James Kinchloe on the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” but whose films included vivid portrayals of black struggles in the American South and insurrectionist inclinations in the North, died on Sunday in Charlotte, N.C. He was 76 and lived in Charlotte.

The cause was complications of kidney disease, said his daughter, Doris Nomathande Dixon.

Ms. Dixon said her father was always pleased to be recognized as Sergeant Kinchloe, the American radio technician in a World War II German P.O.W. camp who could adeptly mimic his captors. But he was most proud, she said, of the 1964 movie “Nothing but a Man,” in which he starred, and of the 1973 film “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” which he directed.

In “Nothing but a Man” Mr. Dixon played a young black railroad worker who gives up his job to marry a minister’s daughter, played by Abbey Lincoln, and then runs into trouble for not knowing his place in the Deep South. In a 1991 article on the history of black films, Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that “Nothing but a Man” was “way ahead of its time.”

“Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln give tough, moving performances as a couple making their way in a white world without apologies to anyone,” he wrote. “No thoughts of integration for them. They demand their own lives and are willing to fight for them.”

“The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” based on the novel by Sam Greenlee, tells the tale of Dan Freeman, the first black officer in the Central Intelligence Agency. After five years of menial assignments, Freeman quits, takes what he has learned about terrorist tactics and goes to Chicago, where he tries to put together a black guerrilla operation.

Although “The Spook” aroused controversy and was soon pulled from theaters, it later gained cult status as a bootleg video and, in 2004, was released on DVD. At that time Mr. Dixon told The Times that the movie had tried only to depict black anger, not to suggest armed revolt as a solution.

Mr. Dixon directed scores of television shows, including episodes of “The Waltons,” “The Rockford Files,” “Magnum, P.I.,” “Quincy” and “In the Heat of the Night.” In 1967 he played the title role in a CBS Playhouse drama, “The Final War of Olly Winter,” about a veteran of World War II and the Korean War who decides that Vietnam will be his final war. For that role he received an Emmy nomination for best single performance by an actor.

Ivan Nathaniel Dixon 3rd was born on April 6, 1931, in Harlem, where his family owned a grocery store. Besides his daughter, Doris, who lives in Charlotte, Mr. Dixon is survived by his wife of 58 years, the former Berlie Ray; and a son, Alan, of Oakland, Calif.

Mr. Dixon graduated from North Carolina Central University in 1954 with a drama degree. His big break came in 1957 when he appeared on Broadway in William Saroyan’s “Cave Dwellers.”

Two years later he played Joseph Asagai, the charming, mannerly Nigerian student visiting the United States in Lorraine Hansberry’s “Raisin in the Sun,” the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway.

What I liked in Dixon's performances was his intensity. He always had something going on in his eyes, something that let you know he (the character) was thinking, taking what was going on, making his mind up.

Yes, even "Hogan's Heroes", as much as the part would allow.

My thoughts and prayers go out to his family.

And The Name Is Paul Scofield!

2008-03-20T06:28:00.000-07:00

Another of the greats passed away this week, as we mourn the loss of Paul Scofield. His Oscartm-winning performance in "A Man For All Seasons" is probably his best known...
...but he was also a great foil for the mighty Burt Lancaster in "The Train"...
...probably the first time I saw him was as Ralph Fiennes father in Robert Redofrd's best directorial effort* "Quiz Show"...
...and Branagh-philes (all seven of you) will remember Kenneth finding space for him in "Henry V" as King Charles I of France.

A picky actor in terms of parts (he was someone who resisted playing against his range), he did only a few films, but the ones he did were cherce.

From the New York Times...

Paul Scofield, British Actor, Dies at 86
By BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE
Published: March 21, 2008

Paul Scofield, the renowned British actor who created the indelible role of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s “Man for All Seasons” and then recreated it on film in 1966 with an Oscar-winning performance, died on Wednesday near his home in southern England. He was 86.

Mr. Scofield had been hospitalized with leukemia, his agent, Rosalind Chatto, said in announcing his death.

Mr. Scofield was regarded by critics and his peers as one of the greatest actors in the English-speaking world, one who had brought freshness and power to Hamlet, King Lear and many other classic roles.

But he might have been better known to the public if he had been less withdrawn. He seldom gave interviews and never appeared on television talk shows. A shy, reclusive man, he refused to accept the knighthood that was offered him in the 1960s.

He became so used to being described by journalists as a private person that he once joked, “I half-expect people to phone me and say, ‘Hello, is that Paul Scofield, the very private person?’ ”

He was a wide-ranging actor who, thanks to his bearing and height — he stood six-foot-two — could project power and authority in one role and an air of inscrutability in the next. As early as 1949, the critic Harold Hobson wrote that all of Mr. Scofield’s performances had “something of the other world about them: invariably he looks as if he has been reading ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and seen ghosts at midnight.”

John Gielgud admired Mr. Scofield’s stillness and sense of mystery — “a sphinx with a secret,” as he put it. Peter Hall, who directed Mr. Scofield as Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” in London in 1979, said of him that there was always tremendous tension beneath the surface, “like a volcano erupting.”

To the director Richard Eyre, Mr. Scofield was “the best there has ever been.”

Mr. Scofield’s looks and voice were distinctive. Over time his stony face became more lined, giving the impression of a fissured cliff. The voice put the film director Fred Zinnemann in mind of “a Rolls-Royce being started.”

But the voice was adaptable. When Mr. Scofield played Othello, or Captain Shotover in Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” the voice rumbled majestically; when he played the title role in an adaptation of “Don Quixote,” it became a tormented falsetto. He was, he said, “prepared to sound ugly as long as the meaning is fresh.”

Mr. Scofield was physically adaptable, too. That was the case with the character he rehearsed while still playing Hamlet in 1956 — the “whiskey priest” in Graham Greene’s “Power and the Glory.” Peter Brook, who directed, described in his memoirs how the role had eluded Mr. Scofield until “Hamlet” closed and he cut his mane of hair.

“The door opened, and a small man entered,” Mr. Brook wrote. “He was wearing a black suit, steel-rimmed glasses and holding a suitcase. For a moment we wondered why this stranger was wandering on our stage. Then we realized it was Paul, transformed. His tall body had shrunk. He had become insignificant.”

The following performance in “The Power and the Glory” is remembered as one of his finest.

But the role that brought Mr. Scofield international renown was that of Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons,” which opened in London in 1960. The mix of moral strength, intelligence, melancholy and wily grace he brought to Henry VIII's Roman-Catholic lord chancellor, who went to his death rather than acknowledge the king’s claim to be the supreme head of the Church of England, won him a Tony Award for his Broadway debut in the role in the 1961-62 season. That was followed by an Academy Award as best actor when Mr. Zinnemann directed him in the movie version of the play in 1966.

As powerful as those performances were, many critics and colleagues thought he was even greater in other roles. In an opinion poll in 2004, members of the Royal Shakespeare Company rated his 1962 performance as King Lear as the greatest in a Shakespearean play.

There were many others: his titanically angry Timon of Athens in 1965, his brooding Uncle Vanya in 1970, his warm, doting Othello in 1980, his darkly embittered Salieri in “Amadeus.”

When the National Theater in London staged Zuckmayer’s “Captain of Köpenick” in 1971, with Mr. Scofield as Voigt, an ex-jailbird who poses as a military man, every part of him seemed to be acting, from his adenoidal voice to his dropped eyelids, from his slumped shoulders to feet that shuffled, danced or trudged, depending on the state of the character’s private war with German bureaucracy.

Despite his international fame, when the curtain fell, Mr. Scofield hopped the commuter train back to his family. He did not often mix socially with theater people. At home, only 10 miles or so from his birthplace, was his wife, the former Joy Parker, an actress he married in 1943 and remained with for 65 years, until his death; a daughter, Sarah, and a son, Martin. They all survive him.

“I decided a long time ago I didn’t want to be a star personality and live my life out in public,” Mr. Scofield once said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to wave personality about like a flag and become labeled.”

He could not avoid a public face, but he preferred to reserve it for his audiences. Stints as a director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and as an associate director of the National Theater were unfulfilling. He became a Commander of the British Empire in 1956 and, in 2001, a Companion of Honor, a title only about 65 living people now hold. But after years of refusing to discuss the matter, he acknowledged in 1996 that he had rejected knighthood.

“I have every respect” for people who are offered a knighthood, he said. “It’s just not an aspect of life I would want. If you want a title, what’s wrong with Mr.?”

Paul Scofield was born David Scofield on Jan. 21, 1922, in the Sussex village of Hurstpierpoint, where his father became the headmaster of the local school. At 13, as a student at Varndean School in nearby Brighton, he made his theatrical debut on the school stage, as Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet.” “I had to wear an embarrassing blond wig,” he said. “But it was a turning point because thenceforward there was nothing else I wanted to do.”

He enrolled at a small school attached to the Croydon Repertory Theater in 1939, later moved to the Mask School in London, and then fled with his fellow students when the school was evacuated to Bideford, Devon, during World War II. He was exempt from military service because of deformed toes.

His big break came in 1944, when, at 22, he was asked by Barry Jackson to join one of Britain’s most important companies, the Birmingham Repertory Theater. The next year, a 20-year-old director and enfant terrible named Peter Brook arrived at Birmingham, and a rare collaboration was struck.

Mr. Brook was introduced to Mr. Scofield by Mr. Jackson. “As we shook hands, I looked into a face that unaccountably in a young man was streaked and mottled like old rock,” Mr. Brook wrote in his memoirs, “and I was instantly aware that something very deep lay hidden beneath his ageless appearance.”

It was the start of a partnership that was to culminate in Mr. Scofield’s Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962, a character that, as redefined by Mr. Brook and his leading actor, was far from the majestic victim of theatrical tradition. For once, audiences could see the cruel daughters’ point of view. Here was a choleric, willfully arrogant, dangerously mercurial, semi-retired tyrant undergoing painful emotional re-education.

“This production brings me closer to Lear than I have ever been,” the critic Kenneth Tynan wrote.

The Brook-Scofield partnership led to a series of brilliant Scofield performances in Birmingham and at Stratford. Soon he was ready to storm London, and he did so first as Alexander the Great in Terence Rattigan’s “Adventure Story,” then in Mr. Brook’s production of Jean Anouilh’s “Ring Round the Moon,” in which Mr. Scofield played twins: one a heartless rogue, the other a retiring, ingenuous fellow.

By the early 1950s Mr. Scofield was established as the leading actor of his generation, the natural successor to the ruling triumvirate of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Gielgud.

It was inevitable that when Mr. Brook wanted a Hamlet that was strong enough for the West End as well as for a groundbreaking visit to Moscow during the cold war, he should turn to Mr. Scofield, and that Mr. Scofield should respond with a portrayal of the prince that was even deeper and more wounded than the one he had given to acclaim seven years before.
It was inevitable, too, that Mr. Scofield came to the attention of Hollywood. He made his screen debut in 1956, playing King Philip of Spain opposite Olivia de Havilland in “That Lady.” His performance won him a British academy award.

But Mr. Scofield resisted the temptation to move to Hollywood. “Something told me, ‘Don’t go,’ ” he recalled. “Very, very few English actors managed to work successfully in Hollywood — the Basil Rathbones and Cary Grants.”

After “A Man for All Seasons” his film appearances were sparse. In 1971 he played the title character in film version of Mr. Brook’s “King Lear”; in 1973 he played opposite Katharine Hepburn in an adaptation of Edward Albee’s “Delicate Balance.” There were television movies, like a 1985 rendering of “Anna Karenina” with Jacqueline Bisset and Christopher Reeve. But Mr. Scofield remained largely a man of the stage.

When he took on a role, Mr. Scofield said, he listened only to an inner voice. Sometimes that led to disasters, as when he agreed to play a newspaper editor in Jeffrey Archer’s play “Exclusive” in 1989 and ended up assailed by critics for contributing little more than “a ridiculous nasal whine,” as one said, to a resounding flop.

His rehearsals were painstaking but ultimately based on instinct. Technique is “what you find yourself doing,” he said. He would arrive at rehearsals without preconceptions, trusting that he would discover some aspect of the character on which to build a performance — a voice, a walk, perhaps a hairstyle or a key phrase. As Mr. Brook noted, “On a simple word like ‘night’ he’ll pause, stirred up in some mysterious inner chamber, and his whole nature will respond.”

In the 1980s and ’90s, Mr. Scofield took fewer and fewer roles on the stage. But he did turn in some striking performances in television and feature films, notably opposite Mel Gibson as the Ghost in Franco Zeffirelli’s “Hamlet”; as the American professor Mark Van Doren in Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show” (1994); as Judge Thomas Danforth in “The Crucible” (1996), with Daniel Day-Lewis; and as both the wealthy grandfather and the amoral great-uncle of the title character in a 1994 television version of Dickens’s “Martin Chuzzlewit.”

His last great stage performance, in Mr. Eyre’s production of Ibsen’s “John Gabriel Borkman” at the National Theater in 1996, was a critical triumph. He then largely slipped out of public view, going for long walks in the Sussex hills, baking bread at home and occasionally visiting the Scottish island of Mull, where his daughter, Sarah, lived. He had come to a point, he said, where he found little work that attracted him.

And then there was his native caution. “As you get older,” he said, “the more you know, so the more nervous you become. The risks are much bigger.”

The little acting (you know what I'm talking about if you've ever seen me onstage) I've done, involves a technique of finding a voice or some kind of music that resonates for me when I think about the character. Seeing the amazing work Scofield produced from his painstaking process makes me admire what he accomplished all the more.

Yeah, that's right. I just compared myself to Paul Scofield.

Seriously, my thoughts and prayers got to his friends and family.

And my apologies for bringing any suggestion that what I did onstage was "acting", to a tribute to the memory of one of the profession's masters.

*it says so on the dvd cover!

And The Name Is Harriet Sansom Harris!

2008-03-12T15:06:00.000-07:00

She has been on a gazillion sitcoms in the past 20 years or so...
but her first starring part was as one of an ensemble of "Mrs. Buchanans" with the mighty duo of Eileen Heckart and Judith Ivey...
...and I first noticed her on one of the first "X-Files" episodes I'd ever seen "Eve"...
... and when in New York, you can probably catch her on Broadway in a show like the revival of "The Man Who Came To Dinner"...
...but I can't imagine you've missed her turn as the smilingly manipulative Felicia Tilman on "Desperate Housewives".

She is one of those women like Heckart or Christine Baranski or Holland Taylor who are the female equivalent of a Welles or Vincent Price. Actresses who love dialogue and who's eyes spark knowing they've got good lines and can project them to the back row of another theater in another town. Not to knock Glenn Close, but can't you see Harris (or Baranski or Taylor) playing Cruella Deville?

Let's see what she has to say about herself in this interview stole- ahem- borrowed from Talkin' Broadway.com. This was written around the time she was in the Broadway version of "Thoroughly Modern Millie"...

Spotlight On Harriet Harris

by Nancy Rosati

As one of today’s most versatile actresses, Harriet Harris is equally at home in the theatre, on film, or on TV. She played Maggie Cutler opposite Nathan Lane in the recent Roundabout production of The Man Who Came to Dinner and all of the female roles in Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, Off Broadway and in Los Angeles. Television audiences have seen her in numerous productions, including The Five Mrs. Buchanans, Ally McBeal and in her recurring role as Bebe Glazer, the no-nonsense agent on Frasier. Her recent movie credits include Nurse Betty and Mrs. Jankis in last year’s thriller Memento.

This season Harriet is taking on a new challenge - musical comedy. She currently plays villainous Mrs. Meers in Thoroughly Modern Millie at the Marquis Theatre. Harriet has already received the Drama Desk Award for Featured Actress in a Musical, and is currently one of the nominees in a tight race for the Featured Actress Tony Award.

I met Harriet in her dressing room at the Marquis Theatre, less than a week after opening night and before she learned of her nominations.

Nancy Rosati: Where did you grow up?

Harriet Harris: In Fort Worth, Texas. There’s a lot of indigenous theater there now, but when I was growing up, the only place to see anything was the Casa Mañana Theatre that Billy Rose started. That burned down and the community wanted a theater again so they commissioned Buckminster Fuller to build this big geodesic dome, which was theater in the round. That’s where I grew up watching musicals. It was so exciting and it’s something I’d never been able to do until now. When I was little I thought, “What could be more fun than that? What could be more exciting than theater?”

NR: Then you went to Julliard and you were only 18. What was that like?

HH: I think I didn’t know any better. Coming from Texas, I didn’t think that many people wanted to be actors. Everybody wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer. There were only about three people that I knew who wanted to be actors, and none of them seriously wanted to do it. I was the only person, so I thought that was great because I didn’t want to have to be competitive. (laughs)

NR: (laughing) You didn’t want to be competitive so you picked Juilliard?

HH: One of my godmothers told my mother that if I was going to do this, I might as well do it right. Apparently this was a good place to go so I auditioned for it. I got in and that made things very simple. I had a perfectly awful grade point average so I don’t know where else I would have been accepted. I was lucky.

NR: Since you really didn’t know what to expect, were you ready for it?

HH: I’m glad I went so young. Had I known more about the world, I think I would have gotten less out of the school. You have to change the way you talk, you change the way you walk. It’s all in an effort to be able to be more of a chameleon ultimately, but people who are in their twenties really have an identity by the time they’re in that school. I just didn’t care. It was all sort of make-believe to me. I didn’t care if I sounded like me or like somebody else. It just didn’t matter to me. I thought, “Whatever I can do that will make me a better actor, I will do.” A lot of people have said that the training at Julliard prepares you to be a terrific actor but sometimes it robs you of individuality.

I loved Julliard. I had big problems sometimes when I was there but I really do think that we were well trained. We left able to do just about anything we wanted to - (laughing) outside of musical comedy of course!

NR: You’ve done film, theater, and TV. Where did you start? What did you go into right after school?

HH: I went to a company that was founded by John Houseman and Margot Harley called The Acting Company. Margot still runs it today. The very first Acting Company was the first graduating class from Julliard. They wanted to keep the group together. Now, years later, it’s people from training schools all over the country and people who’ve had careers and are interested in touring. I thought it was a great opportunity and it was very worthwhile.

NR: You also work on Frasier from time to time. Doing a show like that must be an incredible experience.

HH: It is fun. They’re very smart and very funny. As a group they get along incredibly well together. After all these years, they have pretty much the same sensibility of how they’re going to go about doing something. In fact, they’ve had that from the first year. They were very well suited to each other and I think a lot of that has to do with Jeff Greenberg who cast

it. He’s just brilliant.

NR: Are you going to do any more episodes?

HH: I’m here in New York now. I only do them once or twice a year. I won’t be doing one this year.

NR: I know you’ve done other TV shows. Do you have a favorite?

HH: Any time you’re working it is fun. Some jobs are more fun than others. Frasier is fun to do because until recently one of my best friends was writing on the show. I’ve done a lot of plays with David Pierce. I knew Kelsey (Grammar) from Julliard. John (Mahoney) and I did a play together in Chicago. Peri (Gilpin) I knew from a long time ago. Jane (Leeves) is really the only person I’d never met and she’s great.

NR: How about Paul Rudnick?

HH: I love him.

NR: The story is that he wrote a lot of the roles in Jeffrey for you.

HH: Yes. I was doing a play with Chris Ashley, who directed Jeffrey. When Paul had the first reading they asked me to come in and read these three parts and it worked out really well. Then Paul told me he was going to write more parts for me. When I was offered it, I just thought, “This is irresistible. I have to do this.”

NR: Recently you also did Rude Entertainment with Paul. What’s he like to work with?

HH: He’s so funny. He’s very sweet. He’ll try to discover what’s funny about you and make changes in your character. When we were doing Rude Entertainment he would bring in all these new scenes and we would talk about them. A lot of things that I would suggest, or somebody else would suggest, would either be in the play, or Paul would think of a funnier version of what we had suggested. He does that a lot. He’s so funny that he’s not threatened by anybody else’s ideas. Either he says, “Yes, that’s the best thing” or he says, “Yeah, and we could do this....” I think the more and more work he’s done, the more confident he is about listening to others’ ideas.

NR: You also worked with Nathan Lane in The Man Who Came to Dinner. What was that like?

HH: He’s wonderful. He was so sweet to me and so generous. I thought he was great in the play. It was a joy to watch him work. This isn’t news to anybody but he really is brilliantly funny. He’s funny in rehearsal, he’s funny as he’s making remarks about things. He’s just a deeply comic person. It’s fascinating and wonderful to watch how he thinks and works. He’s such a craftsperson. Some things he works on and refines and some things, the very first time you see them, you don’t understand how they can possibly get any better. Sometimes they maintain that very high level, and sometimes he exceeds himself. He’s so quick and so witty.

It’s really fun to be around him.

NR: People started giving him a hard time near the end of The Producers when he was having vocal problems.

HH: I saw him do that and he was spectacular. I was so thrilled with his performance. I couldn’t believe how good he was. I don’t think that people were intended to do that role eight times a week. If anybody could do it, Nathan would be the person, so I don’t know if it can be done.

NR: Now Brad (Oscar) gets a chance to find out.

HH: I bet he’s going to be terrific because he was so good in his other part, but I think it’s very different when you create something. Just getting this show up [Thoroughly Modern Millie], which is such a joy to do, is such hard work to rehearse it and get it to the point where you’re open. You’re exhausted. When you open, you’re so thrilled, particularly when it’s going well, which (knock wood) so far this show is. You’re so grateful to have the opportunity and so grateful to have a job. Everybody’s so wonderful but it doesn’t mean that you’re not really tired and really scared and really nervous. (laughs) It’s that whole anxiety about, “Is the soufflé going to fall, when it’s taken months and months to get it ready?”

NR: It’s taken this show a long time to get here. I know you weren’t in the company the entire time.

HH: No. I did one of the first readings. My friend Edward Hibbert did one of the readings too, playing my part, or what might have been his part. When Edward and I were in Los Angeles doing Jeffrey, Richard Morris, who wrote the original screenplay for Millie, came to see Jeffrey. He suggested to Dick (Scanlan) that I might be the right person to play Mrs. Meers.

That was how it began. I did the very first workshop around five or six years ago and that was really, really fun. At that point, I enjoyed it so much that I hoped it would happen but it didn’t pan out. All these years later I’m getting to do it and I’m thrilled.

NR: You’re not generally a singer, but now you’re standing there, center stage, belting away. What is that like?

HH: It was terrifying - just the idea. I kept thinking, “Someone’s going to tell me to forget it - you’re not going to be able to do the songs.” But my gosh, you can’t be in a musical and not sing! That would just be horrible. People were very nice and I kept saying, “Don’t you want me to go to a coach?” They said, “No, you sound great. Don’t worry about it.” I think now that we’re open I’ll go get a teacher. In order to get another job doing this kind of thing, I think I should probably be better trained. This was just lucky. It’s a good thing I didn’t have to audition for it!

NR: You got a love letter from John Simon the other day.

HH: Well, that’s nice.

NR: You didn’t read it?

HH: No.

NR: He called you a “comic genius.”

HH: Somebody told me that. People call you all sorts of things at different times in your life. (laughs) You never know. You can’t get stuck on any of them. I think we got a whole bunch of good reviews and I’m real happy about that. It’s a great show and a great cast.

NR: Are you thinking about possible Tony nominations?

HH: I don’t know. We were doing the cast recording the other day and I just thought, “I can’t believe I’m in this situation.” I can’t believe I’m in a Broadway musical. I can’t believe that I’m doing a cast album like I used to listen to when I was a little kid. It’s just absurd. My gosh, I’m going to be able to send this to my niece and she’ll be able to put it on her CD player and listen to her aunt in this musical.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. I think it’s great that the show got so many Outer Critics Circle nominations. If we get some nominations, it’s great, but even without them, there are 1600 people who stand every night. This is wonderful. If there are other things that come ... I certainly think Sutton (Foster) will get a nomination. I think the show should get one. I have no idea how any of that works. I wish the ensemble was eligible for a nomination.

They’re fabulous.

NR: Tell me about previews. I understand you were making a lot of changes.

HH: My song changed SIX TIMES! The melody changed, the lyrics changed. There were many versions.

NR: It has to be difficult rehearsing new things all day and then trying to do them before an audience at night.

HH: There was one day when they changed the song. I was supposed to do it that night and it was brand new. I went up. What are you going to do? It’s embarrassing but it’s not like I had a chance to rehearse it. It’s not like it sank in overnight, but it was necessary for them to see it, to see if they were on the right track with it. Even though I went up in it, they said, “That was great. We’re closer.” I thought, “We’re closer???” I was terrified.

NR: Plus you were probably exhausted.

HH: Yeah, but it sounds so contrary to complain about being tired when you’ve got the coolest job there is. I feel like all of us here have the absolute best job we could possibly have, and possibly the best job we may ever have. This is such a fun show, but it really is like staying up all night after a party. You are tired the next day. Just because it was a great time, it doesn’t mean you don’t pay for it someway, but it really is fabulously fun.

NR: Before I let you go, I wanted to ask you about Memento. The concept of that film is so fascinating. Can you tell me a bit about doing it?

HH: I only worked two days on it and I was astonished by it. It was so peculiar reading the screenplay that it really did tax you. My reaction was that if it was a play, it would be excruciating, but as a movie, it’s going to be fascinating because of the point of view. I like that movie as much as any other movie I’ve seen in the past five or six years. I was so proud to be part of it.

I thought Chris (Nolan) just did an amazing job. He’s a wonderful director. He’s really fun to work for and very clear. It was very low budget so we couldn’t do a lot of takes. We pretty much got whatever he used in two or three takes. One of the scenes that Stephen Tobolowsky and I did, Chris said, “I should have written this but I didn’t have a chance to get around to it. This is the idea. Why don’t you all do something and show me?” So, we did this thing and he said, “Yeah. That’s what I would have wanted anyway.” I don’t want to make it sound like we wrote a scene - it was all Chris. He gave us the idea and the scenario. I thought Guy (Pearce) was just stunning. He’s so talented.

NR: Anything you haven’t done? It doesn’t seem like it.

HH: Oh yeah, there are tons of things. There are lots of different kinds of parts I’d like to do. Until recently, I haven’t been right for them, and suddenly I am. I think when I was a younger actress, I worked a lot, but I had to play really eccentric parts. (laughing) Now that I’m older I’m playing really eccentric parts again but they’re more fun. The Six Feet Under episode I got to do just a little while ago was wonderful because she was a very off-centered woman. I like playing people that have problems. My friend Lisa Banes in California likes to play heroes. We’ll read things and I’ll say, “Oh, Lisa, this is so your part.” She’ll say, “Harriet, look at this. This is such a loser. You should play her.” Of course I always think, “Lisa, you’re right. This is a great part!” Then she sighs and says, “Think of what you’ll have to wear.” I think those parts are the most interesting. It would probably be good for me to play a hero although ... (laughs) I don’t think I have one in me!

NR: Hopefully you’ll be in this show for quite awhile and you won’t have to worry about that just yet.

HH: I hope so. I love this. Thanks so much.

I wish Harriet the best of luck with her Tony nomination. Her scenes as Mrs. Meers are clearly audience favorites in an extremely impressive musical debut. It’s hard to imagine anything this woman can’t do.

I would also wish her well, except the Tony she was up for a few years ago, she won. So congrats six years ago, Harriet Sansom Harris!

She is so great in comedy, but watch what she does in parts like her appearance in "Memento" and "The X-Files". She is always someone that makes whatever I see her in that much better than if she weren't in it at all.

And The Name Is Danny Huston!

2008-03-08T17:01:00.000-08:00

Man, doesn't this guy look like The Joker when he smiles? Although you know the face, you might not know he's from one of the big showbiz dynasties- namely The Hustons (Walter, John, Anjelica... ring a bell?)...
...so far he's had kind of a classier Peter Lorre career, playing sleazy friends, like here in "The Constant Gardener"...
...or weirdos like Clive Owens' ministry friend in "Children Of Men"...
...but did you know he also played Orson Welles in the little seen "Fade To Black"?
...or a vampire king in "30 Days Of Night"?

Danny Huston was one of those guys I'd heard of twenty years ago because I was reading a lot about John Huston back then and had managed to see an interview done with Danny about his father. At the time, Danny Huston sounded a lot like his dad. Like a clone. A clone that did a really good John Huston impression.

Also at the time he had directed a film from a script by his father, an adaptation of Thornton Wilder's novel "Theophilus North" entitled "Mr. North" and I mostly thought of him as a director... until it seemed like he dropped off the face of the earth (or the earth as defined by show business).

But let's let his own official website tell the story...

Danny Huston - son of legendary director John Huston and the half-brother of Angelica Huston - has firmly assured his place in the family business. He started his career as a painter but soon gravitated towards directing. However, it was as an actor in the indie movie Ivansxtc (2000) that Danny gained international recognition.

Danny has gone on to establish himself as the actor of choice for some of the most interesting and well respected directors in the business with his performances in 21 Grams (2003) appearing with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, The Aviator (2004) starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and as Nicole Kidman's husband in Birth (2004). His performance alongside Rachel Weiss and Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener (2005) earned him a Satellite Award.

Danny chalked up what must be his most terrifying performance as the sadistic Arthur Burns in the critically acclaimed movie The Proposition (2006) starring Guy Pearce. He recently got to play one of his heroes, Orson Welles, in the movie Fade to Black and can be seen in Sofia Coppola's soon-to-be-released, Marie-Antoinette.

Danny has just completed filming on The Number 23 for director Joel Schumacher.

The thing I like about his acting is that, for a character actor he has a ton of presence. He is someone that once you see him, it's very hard to forget him, which works especially well when he's a villain. If one was looking for, dare I say, an Anthony Zerbe of the 21st century, Danny Huston would be a pretty good match. And yet, there is a great delicacy to his acting that shows itself in films like "Children Of Men" and "21 Grams", which is one of the reasons why I'm reminded of Peter Lorre. Before he became his own caricature, Lorre was an actor who could bring this sensitivity to his roles, even the villains, which always made him someone you couldn't take your eyes off of.

I could totally see Huston in a remake of "M". He is someone you definitely want to look for in a film.

And The Name Is Patti Deutsch!

2008-03-05T06:56:00.000-08:00

You may remember her as one of the celebs on "Match Game "and "Tattletales"...
...but these days she does so much voicework let's call this special blog entry "You Know the Voice..."

In the seventies, I would routinely skip school if I thought someone cool was on "The Mike Douglas Show" or "Dinah". Ditto game shows, specifically the ones I've mentioned, as well as "Celebrity Sweepstakes" and "The Gong Show".

Ah, the salad days.

Patti Deutsch was one of those people I recognized pretty early on. She has a great scratchy voice and deadpan face that lights up with a sly smirk when she says something weird to fill in the blank on "Match Game". In the seventies, comically unique personalities like Deutsch seemed to have a home on television, whether it be game shows, talk shows (she was on Johnny Carson quite a bit) or variety programs.

Let's see what the easily manipulated Wikipedia has to say...

Patti Deutsch (born December 16, 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a comic actress who was a frequent panelist on Match Game. More often than not, her answers would not wind up matching the contestants' answers. She was best known, however, for her wry and somewhat outlandish answers to questions. For example: "John said, 'Instead of sleeping in bed tonight, I think I'll sleep on the (blank)'"; the contestant's answer was "floor", while Patti answered "A red moth-eaten sofa that was rejected from the homeless shelter". Patti Deutsch thus became a fixture in the challenging "number-six seat," so called by the panelists because it was tough to come up with something clever after five panelists had their chance. Episodes of Match Game featuring Deutsch continue to air on GSN.

Voice work
Deutsch also performs voice work in cartoons and movies. Recent works include Monsters, Inc. and The Emperor's New Groove. She also made a cameo role in the 1983 movie Mr. Mom, playing "The Deli Girl". She also had a show in 1979, titled Grandpa Goes to Washington, but it only ran for about one month.

Improv and later career
She was a member of the improvisational comedy group Ace Trucking Company. Fellow members of Ace included Bill Saluga and Fred Willard, among others. It was during this time, that Patti met her husband, Donald Ross. Deutsch has done commercials for M&M Meat Shops, a Canadian food retailer.

Personal life
Deutsch married comedy writer Donald Ross in 1971. Together they have one son, Max, born 1975. On occasion Patti Deutsch would appear on the Match Game show with her husband Donald. She and Donald also appeared on the game show, Tattletales.

Later on, when I moved to LA and worked as an assistant manager at The Nuart, she would come in with her husband or her friend Jennifer Darling (who played Peggy Callahan, the secretary on "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Bionic Woman"). Incredibly funny, she and her husband were always nice enough to stop and talk to an obnoxious fan who wanted to ask about seventies game shows.

Although I have no idea who that handsome, dashing young man was, it was cool that Patti and Donald would take the time to do that.

If you're driving down the road and here a woman with a scratchy voice selling you something, chances are good that'll be Patti Deutsch, one of the greats.

And The Name Is Roy Scheider!

2008-02-11T09:06:00.001-08:00

He has been in some of the most important films of the seventies...
...one of his first big movie appearances was as Gene Hackman's partner in "The French Connection"...
... and it would surprise me to know that you hadn't seen him in "Jaws"...
...but my favorite film he ever did was "All That Jazz". At 47. Amazing.

He passed away on Sunday 2/10. Here's the obituary from The New York Times...

Roy Scheider, Actor in ‘Jaws,’ Dies at 75

By DAVE KEHR
Published: February 11, 2008

Roy Scheider, a stage actor with a background in the classics who became one of the leading figures in the American film renaissance of the 1970s, died on Sunday afternoon in Little Rock, Ark. He was 75 and lived in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

Mr. Scheider had suffered from multiple myeloma for several years, and died of complications from a staph infection, his wife, Brenda Siemer, said.

Mr. Scheider’s rangy figure, gaunt face and emotional openness made him particularly appealing in everyman roles, most famously as the agonized police chief of “Jaws,” Steven Spielberg’s 1975 breakthrough hit, about a New England resort town haunted by the knowledge that a killer shark is preying on the local beaches.

Mr. Scheider conveyed an accelerated metabolism in movies like “Klute” (1971), his first major film role, in which he played a threatening pimp to Jane Fonda’s New York call girl; and in William Friedkin’s “French Connection” (also 1971), as Buddy Russo, the slightly more restrained partner to Gene Hackman’s marauding police detective, Popeye Doyle. That role earned Mr. Scheider the first of two Oscar nominations.

Born in 1932 in Orange, N.J., Mr. Scheider earned his distinctive broken nose in the New Jersey Diamond Gloves Competition. He studied at Rutgers and at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., where he graduated as a history major with the intention of going to law school. He served three years in the United States Air Force, rising to the rank of first lieutenant. When he was discharged, he returned to Franklin and Marshall to star in a production of “Richard III.”
His professional debut was as Mercutio in a 1961 New York Shakespeare Festival production of “Romeo and Juliet.” While continuing to work onstage, he made his movie debut in “The Curse of the Living Corpse” (1964), a low-budget horror film by the prolific schlockmeister Del Tenney. “He had to bend his knees to die into a moat full of quicksand up in Connecticut,” recalled Ms. Siemer, a documentary filmmaker. “He loved to demonstrate that.”

In 1977 Mr. Scheider worked with Mr. Friedkin again in “Sorcerer,” a big-budget remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 French thriller, “The Wages of Fear,” about transporting a dangerous load of nitroglycerine in South America.

Offered a leading role in “The Deer Hunter” (1979), Mr. Scheider had to turn it down in order to fulfill his contract with Universal for a sequel to “Jaws.” (The part went to Robert De Niro.)

“Jaws 2” failed to recapture the appeal of the first film, but Mr. Scheider bounced back, accepting the principal role in Bob Fosse’s autobiographical phantasmagoria of 1979, “All That Jazz.” Equipped with Mr. Fosse’s Mephistophelean beard and manic drive, Mr. Scheider’s character, Joe Gideon, gobbled amphetamines in an attempt to stage a new Broadway show while completing the editing of a film (and pursuing a parade of alluring young women) — a monumental act of self-abuse that leads to open-heart surgery. This won Mr. Scheider an Academy Award nomination in the best actor category. (Dustin Hoffman won that year, for “Kramer vs. Kramer.”)

In 1980, Mr. Scheider returned to his first love, the stage, where his performance in a production of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” opposite Blythe Danner and Raul Julia earned him the Drama League of New York award for distinguished performance. Although he continued to be active in films, notably in Robert Benton’s “Still of the Night” (1982) and John Badham’s action spectacular “Blue Thunder” (1983), he moved from leading men to character roles, including an American spy in Fred Schepisi’s “Russia House” (1990) and a calculating Mafia don in “Romeo Is Bleeding” (1993).

One of the most memorable performances of his late career was as the sinister, wisecracking Dr. Benway in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” (1991).

Living in Sag Harbor, Mr. Scheider continued to appear in films and lend his voice to documentaries, becoming, Ms. Siemer said, increasingly politically active. With the poet Kathy Engle, he helped to found the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, dedicated to creating an innovative, culturally diverse learning environment for local children. At the time of his death, Mr. Scheider was involved in a project to build a film studio in Florence, Italy, for a series about the history of the Renaissance.

Besides his wife, his survivors include three children, Christian Verrier Scheider and Molly Mae Scheider, with Ms. Siemer, and Maximillia Connelly Lord, from an earlier marriage, to Cynthia Bebout; a brother, Glenn Scheider of Summit, N.J.; and two grandchildren.

He always seemed to me to be a combination of street smart, but very sophisticated as well. Watch him in Coppola's Grisham movie "The Rainmaker" as Wilfred Keeley the head of the insurance company that's being sued and see a great actor sketch in blase evil with just a few strokes.

He will be missed and my thoughts and prayers go to his family and friends.

And The Name Is Barry Morse!

2008-02-05T07:29:00.000-08:00

Barry Morse passed away in London on Saturday. Like a lot of the stalwarts of Sci-Fi/Fantasy, he was stage trained, Morse at RADA. I think it helps to have training in parsing Shakespeare's language in order to sincerely speak the technobabble ("The Positronic matrix is destabilizing Captain!") a lot of science fiction requires.
Of course you older folk out there* will remember him fondly as the relentless, original Gerard in the original "The Fugitive". Morse could always be counted on in later interviews giving a classicist's spin on what the show was really all about (inevitably bringing up Inspector Javert from "Les Miserables"... which, to be fair, is exactly what Roy Huggins, the creator, meant to be invoked.).
I remember catching Morse in a particularly creepy "Twilight Zone" ("A Piano In The House") as a particularly sadistic theatre critic (Charles Isherwood, anybody?) who buys his wife a player piano for her birthday. This being the Twilight Zone, the piano has a magical ability to make people reveal their true selves- the selves they keep buried from the public, their friends, etc. At his wife's birthday, he uses the piano to strip away everyone's defenses... not of course realizing it can used on him as well. The critic's comeuppence is played beautifully by Morse. It shows what that show could do for actors who were up for the demands of really well-written morality plays. The first time I really noticed him was in "Space 1999" as Prof. Victor Bergman, the kindly space know-it-all who provided all the exposition at the end to explain the hallucinogenic whatsit that Martin Landau, Barbara Bain and the sacrificial British lamb of the week had to deal with that episode. Man, that show. Dry, weird, British.

I liked Morse especially in one of my favorite British horror anthologies "Asylum"**. Morse's segment has him working with the mighty Peter Cushing. Morse plays a crooked immigrant tailor who is ordered to weave a coat from a magic fabric in order to bring Cushing's son back from the dead. Things do not work out so well for Morse or Cushing, but Morse again is on fi-yah as he cowers (almost Peter Lorre-liketm) throughout the episode looking like a character who was doomed from the second he appeared on screen.

Here's the obituary from the New York Times today...

Barry Morse, Who Played the Dogged Detective in ‘The Fugitive,’ Is Dead at 89

By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: February 5, 2008

Barry Morse, famous for his portrayal of the cold-hearted detective who relentlessly pursues the wrongly convicted Richard Kimble for four seasons in “The Fugitive,” one of the biggest TV hits of the 1960s, died Saturday in London. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by Robert E. Wood, a friend and a co-author of Mr. Morse’s autobiography, “Remember With Advantages: Chasing ‘The Fugitive’ and Other Stories From an Actor’s Life,” (McFarland & Company, 2007).

The slim, angular-faced Mr. Morse was trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and played hundreds of roles on stage and screen in his seven-decade career but never quite escaped his role in “The Fugitive.” As Lt. Philip Gerard, he hounded David Janssen as Richard Kimble, the doctor from the fictional town of Stafford, Ind., who was convicted on flimsy evidence of murdering his wife. For 120 episodes, from 1963 through 1967, Lieutenant Gerard pursued Dr. Kimble, who had escaped — on the lieutenant’s watch — when the train taking him to death row derailed. The innocent doctor’s only hope was finding the real killer, a one-armed man.

Gerard actually appeared in only 37 of the episodes, but his image was used in the opening credits, and the threat of his sudden appearance was never far from the mind of the fugitive or the audience.

For years after the series ended, Mr. Morse joked that “he was the most hated man in America,” Mr. Wood said of his friend on Monday. “Little old ladies would come up to him in airports and whack at him with their purses, screaming, ‘Why didn’t you leave that man alone?’ ”

“When Barry went into a restaurant or a hotel,” Mr. Wood continued, “people would say, ‘Oh, you just missed him, lieutenant; he went that-a-way.’ ”

Though proud of the series, Mr. Morse was glad to take on many other roles. By his own estimate, he performed in 3,000 stage, screen, television and radio productions, in England, Canada and the United States.

In the 1970s, he co-starred with Martin Landau in “Space 1999,” a science-fiction television series, made in England, about life on a lunar base. In it, he played Prof. Victor Bergman, the avuncular heart of the community. The series, syndicated in many countries, retains a cult following.

Two years ago, Mr. Morse played the president of Russia in the TV espionage thriller “Icon,” for the Hallmark Channel. Last year, in the film comedy “Promise Her Anything,” he played the ghost of a great-great-great grandfather who returns to a small Canadian town.

Mr. Morse appeared in many other television productions, including “The Outer Limits,” “The Untouchables,” “Naked City,” “The Defenders,” “Wagon Train,” “The Martian Chronicles” and “War and Remembrance.”

In 1969, when Mr. Morse played dual lead roles in the Broadway production of “Hadrian VII,” The New York Times drama critic Clive Barnes called him “a pure delight.”

Herbert Morse (he changed his name to Barry) was born on June 10, 1918, in the slums of London’s East End, a son of Charles and Mary Hollis Morse. His parents owned a tobacco shop.

When he was 15, Mr. Morse received a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1941, after several years with touring companies throughout England, he made his West End debut in a play called “School for Slavery.”

Two years earlier, he had married Sydney Sturgess, a Canadian actress. They had two children, both of whom became actors. Ms. Sturgess died in 1999. Mr. Morse’s daughter, Melanie, died in 2005. He is survived by his son, Hayward, of London; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

The family moved to Canada in the early 1950s, and Mr. Morse joined the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Among his roles in dozens of productions, Mr. Morse wrote, narrated and produced a half-hour CBC Radio series, “A Touch of Greasepaint,” which ran for 14 years.

He appeared in so many Canadian television productions, Mr. Wood said, that “a critic back in the ’50s called him the test pattern for the CBC.”

My thoughts and prayers go to Morse's friends and family.

*Not me. Not that old. Seriously. Stop with the jokes.

**aka "House of Crazies". Because a non-melodramatic title is never enough in Seventies British Horror Anthologies- aka Groovy Evil Vibes of Celluloid Mania, Man.

And The Name Is Hal Holbrook!

2008-01-29T16:10:00.000-08:00

You don't know this guy? Seriously? You might have seen him as Dirty Harry Callahan's boss in "Magnum Force"...
...Or howsabout being everyone's idea of a perfect Deep Throat (until the real guy clued us in a couple of years ago) in "All the President's Men" ...
...I know my parents* would remember him as Mark Twain in his one-man show "Mark Twain Tonight"...
... but since Hal Holbrook just got an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor work in "Into The Wild", I find it hard to believe you don't know who he is.

Well, just in case you don't, here's a little bio from the good people at Hollywood.com, who I'm sure would never make anything up.

A versatile leading man and supporting player whose folksy, avuncular nature often disguised his true acting firepower, Hal Holbrook was best known to audiences for his portrayal of American humorist Mark Twain in his Tony Award-winning one man show “Mark Twain Tonight!” which he performed some 2,000 times between 1959 and 2005. Stage gave him his best showcases, but he was frequently praised for his television work, most notably in “Pueblo” (1973), “That Certain Summer” (1973), and the title role in “Lincoln” (1976). Film success was sporadic, though he was well cast in “All The President’s Men” (1976) and “The Firm” (1993), and he received an Oscar nomination in 2008 for his moving performance in Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild” (2008).

Though adept at gentlemanly Southern roles, Holbrook was born Harold Rowe Holbrook, Jr. in Cleveland, OH on Feb. 17, 1925, and raised mostly in South Weymouth, MA. The son of a vaudeville dancer, he was educated at the Culver Military Academy before moving on to Denison University to study theater. He left the school during World War II to serve for three years as an Army engineer; after the war, he returned to Denison, where an honors project on Mark Twain helped to foster an interest in the famed author’s life and works. In 1945, he married actress Ruby Holbrook (with whom he had two children, including actor David Holbrook), and the couple developed a two-person stage show that revolved around interviews with famous figures from history, including Twain. They presented the show during a punishing tour that saw them traveling 30,000 miles to perform 307 shows in 30 weeks.

Holbrook revised the show into a one-man production that focused solely on Twain, and appeared (under considerable makeup) in “Mark Twain Tonight!” for the first time at a school in Pennsylvania in 1954. A job on the daytime soap opera “The Brighter Day” (CBS, 1954-1962) kept him and his new family fed while he performed in and developed the Twain show in clubs and theaters across the country. One of the most notable aspects of “Twain” was that Holbrook had done such extensive research into the author that he never set his program for any given night, and chose what material he would address in each respective show as he performed it.

The hard work paid off when Ed Sullivan caught a performance and invited him to present his Twain on “Toast of the Town” (CBS, 1948-1971) in 1956. The exposure gave Holbrook the boost he needed, and he mounted an Off-Broadway production in 1959. The show ran for 22 weeks, which was followed by another national tour – including a performance for then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower – and a jaunt through Europe which made him the first American actor to go behind the Iron Curtain since World War II. He would pen a book about the show in 1959 – Mark Twain Tonight! An Actor’s Portrait – and go on to perform it for audiences great and small for the next 50 years.

Holbrook made his Broadway debut in “Do You Know the Milky Way?” in 1961, and soon added more stage credits to his c.v., including a 1965 stint as The Gentlemen Caller in “The Glass Menagerie” with Maureen Stapleton and Piper Laurie. The following year proved to be a watershed for the actor; not only did he make his film debut in Sidney Lumet’s “The Group” (1966), but he brought “Mark Twain Tonight!” to Broadway. The production earned him a Tony and a Drama Desk Award, and was later preserved in a 1967 TV presentation which netted him huge ratings and an Emmy nomination. Holbrook had also divorced wife Ruth the previous year, and married actress Carol Eve Rossen, with whom he had his third child, a daughter named Eve. The couple would later split in 1979.

Holbrook’s blend of gravity and compassion made him a natural for film roles requiring some degree of flexible authority, and he found himself cast as understanding fathers, as well as politicians, legal types, military men and law enforcement officials. He could be corrupted, like in his turn as a soft-hearted senator who allows a megalomaniacal rocker to take over the U.S. government in the counterculture nightmare “Wild in the Streets” (1968) or a high school principal with a libidinous secret in the TV-movie “The People Next Door” (1968). And he could be cold, as shown by his straight-arrow police lieutenant who secretly fronts a death squad in “Magnum Force” (1973), the first sequel to “Dirty Harry” (1971). Mostly, he was dependably honest and real – he was a senator pursuing clean air regulation in the Emmy-nominated “A Clear and Present Danger” (1970), which served as the pilot for his short-lived series titled “The Senator” (NBC, 1970-1971); a father revealing his homosexuality to his son in “That Certain Summer” (1972); the captain of a U.S. spy ship captured by the North Koreans in “Pueblo” (1973); Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln” in a series of 1976 TV specials; and one of the most ideal stage managers to date in a 1977 television version of “Our Town.” For this body of work alone, Holbrook won three Emmys – for “The Senator,” “Pueblo,” and “Lincoln” – and received countless nominations. During this time, Holbrook mounted a return to the New York stage with “Mark Twain Tonight!” in 1977.

Holbrook’s film career remained largely an afterthought for most the 1970s and 1980s, though he was widely praised for his largely unseen turn as Deep Throat, the Washington insider who revealed the truth behind the Watergate scandal in “All The President’s Men” (1976). His screen output slowly shifted from big-budget features, including “Julia” (1977) and “Capricorn One” (1978), to smaller dramas and thrillers – in 1983’s “The Star Chamber,” he played a judge who handed down death sentences to criminals who evaded the law – and horror movies, including John Carpenter’s “The Fog” (1980) and the George Romero-Stephen King collaboration, “Creepshow” (1982).

Television remained a source for quality material – he was a mentalist targeted for murder by his wife (Katharine Ross) in the acclaimed “Murder By Natural Causes” (1979); the father of a teenage runaway in “Off the Minnesota Strip” (1980), with a script by David Chase; and a father searching for answers in a police cover-up surrounding his son’s murder in “The Killing of Randy Webster” (1981). He made a terrific screen president on several occasions, from the low-budget feature “The Kidnapping of the President” (1980) to John Adams in the miniseries “George Washington” (1984) and Abraham Lincoln (again) in “North and South” and “North and South Book II” (1985 and 1986). Holbrook’s co-star in “Randy Webster,” the ebullient Southern actress Dixie Carter of “Designing Women” (CBS, 1986-1993), became his third wife in 1984, and he had a recurring role on the series as her boyfriend from 1986 to 1989.

In 1985, Holbrook toured the world with “Mark Twain Tonight!” in honor of the author’s 150th birthday. The jaunt took him from London to New Delhi and points everywhere in between. Meanwhile, the movies gradually began to rediscover Holbrook, beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with substantive roles in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” (1987) and “The Firm” (1993), and later in the acclaimed “Eye of God” (1997), “The Bachelor” (1999), “Men of Honor” (2000) and “The Majestic” (2001). Television also continued to yield regular work, most notably as a series regular on “Evening Shade” (CBS, 1990-1994) as Burt Reynolds’ irascible father-in-law. There were also notable guest turns on “The West Wing” (NBC, 1999-2006) as the Assistant Secretary of State and “The Sopranos” (2006), as a terminal patient who shares a hospital wing and wisdom with a recently injured Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini).

In 2004, Holbrook marked his 2,000th performance in and 50th year of consecutive performances of “Mark Twain Tonight!”, and in 2007, his contributions to American theater and the preservation of Twain’s legacy received a special commendation from the State of Mississippi’s legislature. That same year, he was cast as Ron Franz, a lonely elderly man who develops a deep emotional connection with a wayward young man (Emile Hirsch) in Sean Penn’s film version of “Into the Wild.” Critics singled out Holbrook’s affecting turn in a top-notch cast that included William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Vince Vaughn, and Catherine Keener, and he was showered with award nominations, most notably an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor in 2008. The 82-year-old Holbrook was the oldest performer to ever receive such recognition.

The thing I love about Holbrook, and they mention this above, is his absolute sincerity when he acts. Make no mistake, besides the portrayal of Twain (and having a dependable, generic Southern accent in his characters every once and awhile), he is not a chameleon disappearing into each part. He is almost always recognizable.

But I can think of no other actor who can successfully embody both a completely good character or a completely evil one. Holbrook is truth personified in every part he plays.

If there is any justice, he will win an Oscar for that alone.

*That's right smarty, my parents... because I'm not that old, okay??

And The Name Is Suzanne Pleshette!

2008-01-21T18:29:00.000-08:00

Fake TV Husband #1.

Real Husband #3.

I wrote previously, when Tom Poston passed away about meeting them (Suzztom? Tomzanne?) at a fiend's wedding and let me just reiterate here, they were very, very nice. I was (and am) a huge fan of both Suzanne Pleshette and Tom Poston and the fact that they were decent enough to listen to me prattle on about my little comedy short I was trying to finish... well, they were at a wedding and didn't have to listen to me at all.

Class.

To lose, in the space of 9 months, one of Steve Allen's original men on the street and Bob Newhart's husky-voiced wife, two people who, in real life, had just found each other again after years of being married to others... well, it's just sad.

And, not to toot my own horn, but it's one of the reasons I blog about character actors so much. These people are part of the foundation of the great stories we remember in film, theatre and television.

To paraphrase Arthur Miller poorly, "attention should be paid".

Here's the New York Times' nice obit of a nice lady.

Suzanne Pleshette, Actress, Dies at 70

By ANITA GATES

Published: January 21, 2008

Suzanne Pleshette, the husky-voiced actress who redefined the television sitcom wife in the 1970s by playing the smart, sardonic Emily Hartley on “The Bob Newhart Show,” died on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 70.

Ms. Pleshette died of respiratory failure, her lawyer, Robert Finkelstein, told The Associated Press. Ms. Pleshette had undergone chemotherapy in 2006 for lung cancer.

A native New Yorker, Ms. Pleshette already had a full career on stage and screen in 1971 when producers saw her on the “Tonight” show with Johnny Carson and noticed a chemistry between her and another guest, Bob Newhart. She was soon cast as the wife of Mr. Newhart’s character, a mild-mannered Chicago psychologist, and the series ran for six seasons, from 1972 to 1978, as part of CBS’s ratings-winning Saturday-night lineup.

Emily Hartley’s teaching job did not receive much attention, but the character was confident, sexy and anything but submissive. Mr. Newhart has said that one of his favorite episodes is the one in which his character learns that Ms. Pleshette’s has a considerably higher I.Q. than his.

Moviegoers knew Ms. Pleshette from a string of Hollywood features, and her low-key performances often transcended thankless roles in bad movies. She made her film debut in a 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy, “The Geisha Boy,” and came to the attention of teenage audiences in her second movie, “Rome Adventure” (1962), a good-girl, bad-girl romance opposite Troy Donahue, the beautiful blond heartthrob of the moment. (Ms. Pleshette played the virgin.) After making another film together in 1964, she and Mr. Donahue married, but lasted only eight months.

Alfred Hitchcock fans knew Ms. Pleshette best as the pretty small-town teacher who not only loses the guy (Rod Taylor) to the blonde (Tippi Hedren), but is also pecked to death by an angry flock in “The Birds” (1963). Because she was a Method actress, “Hitch didn’t know what to do with me,” Ms. Pleshette said in a 1999 Film Quarterly interview with other Hitchcock heroines. “He regretted the day that he hired me.” Many disagreed with that conclusion.

Suzanne Pleshette was born Jan. 31, 1937, in Brooklyn Heights, to Eugene Pleshette, who managed the Paramount and Brooklyn Paramount theaters, and Gloria Kaplan Pleshette, a former dancer.

An only child, Ms. Pleshette attended the New York High School of Performing Arts, then Syracuse University and transferred to Finch College, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Her professional career began in 1957 with her television debut, a single episode in a short-lived adventure series, “Harbourmaster,” and her Broadway debut in “Compulsion,” a drama about the Leopold and Loeb murder case. In 1959 she appeared in “Golden Fleecing,” a comedy set in Venice, opposite Tom Poston, whom she would marry more than four decades later.

Her real Broadway triumph came in February 1961 when she replaced Anne Bancroft (who had just won a Tony Award) as Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker,” opposite 14-year-old Patty Duke. Her reviews were admiring.

Ms. Pleshette returned to Broadway once more, some two decades later. “Special Occasions” (1982), a play about a divorced couple, was so ravaged by theater critics that it closed after a series of previews and one regular performance. Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times, excoriated the play, but praised Ms. Pleshette’s performance: “The throaty voice, wide-open smiles and quick intelligence are as alluring as ever,” he wrote.

Ms. Pleshette had an active film career in the 1960s and the first half of the ’70s. She starred in several Disney movies, including “The Shaggy D.A.” (1976). Early on she dealt with heavier subjects, playing a flight attendant who survives an airline crash in “Fate Is the Hunter” (1964), a sexually compulsive heiress in “A Rage to Live” (1965) and a book editor trying to save a successful young author from himself in “Youngblood Hawke” (1964). Eventually, though, she seemed to settle into comedies, like “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969), about a busload of unhappy American tourists.

But it was in television that she received the greatest recognition. She was nominated for an Emmy Award four times, first in 1962 for a guest performance in “Dr. Kildare,” twice for “The Bob Newhart Show” (1977 and 1978) and in 1991 for playing the title role in the television movie “Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean.”

She was never in a hit series like “The Bob Newhart Show” again (although there were efforts), but she continued to appear in television movies and as a guest in popular series into the 21st century. Her last role was the estranged mother of Megan Mullally’s character in several episodes of NBC’s “Will & Grace” between 2002 and 2004.

After her divorce from Mr. Donahue, Ms. Pleshette married twice. In 1968 she wed Tom Gallagher, a businessman, a marriage that lasted until his death in 2000. In 2001 she wed Mr. Poston, her long-ago Broadway co-star, who had also been a guest star on “The Bob Newhart Show” and a regular in Mr. Newhart’s second sitcom, “Newhart,” in the 1980s. He died last year.

Arguably Ms. Pleshette’s most memorable television moment was not in “The Bob Newhart Show,” but in the final episode of “Newhart” in 1990. Mr. Newhart’s character, Dick Loudon, was hit in the head by a golf ball and woke up to find himself in Dr. Robert Hartley’s bed, with his beautiful wife, Emily, at his side. The whole second sitcom had been a nightmare.
The episode was considered one of the most successful series finales ever, partly because it managed to remain a secret until it was broadcast. As time passed, some found the scene a useful metaphor for hopes that a difficult situation might turn out to be just a bad dream. In 1999 a headline in the humor publication The Onion read, “Universe Ends as God Wakes Up Next to Suzanne Pleshette.”

And The Name Is Mariette Hartley!

2008-01-17T19:25:00.000-08:00

Mariette Hartley is not just someone who has worked a lot (although she has), she is someone who has gone through a lot of real life drama as well...
...and I'm not even talking about working with Sam "Bloody Sam" Peckinpah in "Ride The High Country"...
...and I doubt working with the mighty James Garner in both Polaroid commercials and "The Rockford Files" would've been too stressful...
...or working with the great Bill Bixby in "The Incredible Hulk"(an Emmy award-winning performance) or the short lived sitcom "Goodnight Beantown". Although this still makes it look like Bixby's about to push her off a cliff.

But I digress.

I can remember the first time I saw her in a TV movie made for "The Wonderful World Of Disney" entitled "The Mystery in Dracula's Castle", but she had been working way before then.

And don't take my word for it. Her website's bio will corroborate (yay, I said "corroborate")...

Mariette Hartley is an Emmy Award-winning (and six times nominated) Best Actress. She has established herself as an enduring star on stage, in five television series, countless television movies, and more than a dozen feature films. Her adventurous stage career has embodied the works of Chekhov and Shakespeare as well as musicals, and she has shared the stage with such notables as Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy and Charlton Heston. Her tireless efforts in helping humanity through myriad charitable involvements has not only distinguished her career from its early beginnings, but has made her one of the top motivational speakers in the country.

One of the last young performers chosen by MGM Studios to be groomed for motion picture stardom, Hartley conquered Hollywood in Sam Peckinpah's classic Ride the High Country. Her subsequent starring roles included Alfred Hitchcock's psychological thriller Marnie, with Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren; Skyjacked, with Charlton Heston; and Improper Channels, opposite Alan Arkin, for which she was nominated for a Genie Award (Canada's equivalent of the Oscar) for Best Performance by a Foreign Actress.

Hartley has also appeared in dozens of television projects. She was a regular cast member on the series Peyton Place and Goodnight, Beantown, and guest-starred on episodes of Gunsmoke, The Bob Newhart Show, The Streets of San Francisco, McCloud, M*A*SH, Nash Bridges, and many more. She also starred in such acclaimed TV movies as M.A.D.D.: Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and Silence of the Heart. Hartley may be best known for those great Polaroid commercials she did for six years with James Garner, and for which she won three Clio awards, advertising's highest honor. In 1980, she substituted for Jane Pauley on NBC's Today Show, and in 1987 was co-host of CBS's The Morning Program.

More recently, Mariette starred in Hallmark Channel's Meet the Santas, and she currently has a recurring role on Law & Order: SVU.

Hartley studied with Eva Le Gallienne and John Houseman, touring with Houseman's Stratford, CT Shakespeare Festival in A Midsummer Night's Dream and in The Winter's Tale with Bert Lahr. In the early 60s, after moving to Los Angeles, she was a member of the UCLA Theatre Group, starring in To Clothe the Naked, Measure for Measure, and Antigone. She reprised her role as Isabella in Measure for the famed Joe Papp at the Delacorte, who brought her back to play Constance in King John. Regionally, she appeared in The Merchant of Venice (Goodman), Mrs. Warren's Profession (Huntington Theatre); A.R. Gurney's Buffalo Gals (Williamstown); and The Seagull, directed by Jack O'Brien (Old Globe). Locally, she appeared in The Miser with Hume Cronym and Jessica Tandy (Mark Taper) and Chemin de Fer. She received a Drama-Logue Award for Trojan Women and an Ovation nomination for Enchanted April, and toured in The Sisters Rosensweig (Drama-Logue Award), Death Trap, and Copenhagen (for which she received the Broadway Ovation Award). Most recently, her Broadway credits include A.R. Gurney's Ancestral Voices at Lincoln Center, Sylvia at MTC, and Cabaret at Studio 54.

Born in Weston, Connecticut, she is the granddaughter of John B. Watson, the internationally renowned psychologist who founded the school of behaviorism and who taught that children were to be trained, not touched or nurtured. Her warm and affectionate personality is a stunning contrast to her upbringing. In 1990 her autobiography "Breaking the Silence" was a bestseller in hard cover and paperback; it publicly chronicled her personal memories as a child in a home torn apart by alcoholism and depression.

Hartley feels privileged that her celebrity has allowed her to make contributions to society. She is the national spokesperson for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which honored her with an Humanitarian Award for her outstanding work in the field of suicide prevention and research. For her involvement with organizations combating mental illness, Hartley was honored by the Southern California Counseling Center, and received the PSYCHE Award from the L.A. County Psychological Association. She was the first recipient of the California Family Studies Center's "Life Achievement Award" for her strength and ability to overcome family difficulties, and she was honored with the Larry Stewart Leadership and Inspiration Award from the Entertainment Industries Council.

Hartley is also involved with the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, SOJOURN, and M.A.D.D. She hosted an educational video entitled How to Stop the One You Love From Drinking and Using Drugs, which is part of the Paramount Home Video's "Strong Families, Safe Families" series. She was also named Outstanding Mother of the Year by the National Mother's Day Committee in Washington, D.C.

I love watching her in anything, to the point of I will probably try to catch her on Courtney Cox's "Dirt" as she plays Cox's mother on the show.

One of the things I love about her is that she can imbue any character she plays with a real sincerity, even when she plays morally suspect characters.

In the Columbo episode "Try and Catch Me", she plays the murderer's (Ruth Gordon) assistant. For most of the story, until about 3/4 in, you're not quite sure if Hartley is aware of what Gordon did. Finally, they have a scene where they lay the cards on the table and Hartley not only holds her on with Ruth "the only thing you remember about 'Rosemary's Baby'" Gordon, she plays completely against being the blackmailer that her character is.

Hartley just smiles very sweetly and tells her employer that she might like to join her on her upcoming cruise, and that she might also want to talk about her future as Gordon's assistant. And while she gets even more explicit about what she knows, she never loses the smile on her face or the warmth in her eyes. It is amazing watching her in this.

Mariette Hartley is someone that David E. Kelly should call immediately for "Boston Legal" as she is one of these stage trained actors that can frickin' deliver.

...And The Name Is John Slattery!

2008-01-11T18:29:00.000-08:00

This guy has been around since the late eighties, but right now you can see him in "Charlie Wilson's War"...
... and he blew me away with his performance in AMC's new show "Mad Men"...
...but did anybody see him in his television debut on "The Dirty Dozen- The Series"? Beuller? Anybody?

Well, it only lasted six episodes, but from what I remember, it felt like rip off of a rip off of a rip off of the original. And counting the two "sequel" tv movies that were made before it, I'm only one "rip- off" off.

But what about Slattery? Good question. Let's see what AMC has to say...

A veteran actor on TV, film and stage, John Slattery made his theater debut in the 1989 play, Lisbon Traviata, which also starred Nathan Lane. Since then, he has appeared on Broadway in Betrayal, Laughter on the 23rd Floor and Rabbit Hole, for which the Drama League nominated him. Off-Broadway, he graced the stage of the Manhattan Theatre Club with performances in Night and Her Stars, Mi Vida Loca and The Extra Man. He also received an LA Drama Critics Award for his role in Three Days of Rain.

Most recently, Slattery’s had a recurring role as a new love interest of Gabrielle on the hit series "Desperate Housewives" and appeared in Clint Eastwood’s critically acclaimed World War II film Flags of Our Fathers.

Slattery has also starred in Mona Lisa Smile, Bad Company, Eraser, Sleepers, City Hall and HBO’s groundbreaking series K Street, which was produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh. He has performed memorable guest appearances on such hit shows as Sex and the City, Will & Grace, Law & Order and Party of Five and was a series regular on Jack and Bobby.

He soon can be seen in several upcoming features including Charlie Wilson’s War, which was directed by Mike Nichols, Reservation Road and Underdog.

Well, I know we all loved "Reservation Road" and "Underdog". But check him out in "Charlie Wilson's War" and watch his first scene with the mighty Phillip Seymour Hoffman. You'll see two pros raising each other's game, line-by-line in a textbook scene of how to listen. Which is what great ensemble acting is all about.

My wife would like to remind us that he's also in a few of the "Sex & The City" episodes from season 3, playing the politician who's into water sports.

Thanks honey.

Slattery has a great way about his acting, a street quality that give even his more waspy characters an edge.

Like his portrayal of the mayor who marries Gabrielle on "Desperate Housewives" this year and last. During the past few months, as his character has become more of a threat to Carlos and Gabrielle, Slattery has added more layers of a swaggering, subtle menace becoming a much-needed balance.

Which you need to when sharing a scene with Ricardo Chavira, who looks like he can snap a guy in two.

John Slattery is one those actors who enters a scene and you can't help but watch everything he does, because the choices he makes are so interesting.

And The Name Is Barbara Harris!

2008-01-06T19:15:00.000-08:00

She first came on the scene as one of the "normal" people in the film (here with 2 former SAG presidents William Daniels and Barry Gordon... perhaps she should add "kingmaker" to the special skills section of her resume?)"A Thousand Clowns"...
...but I think her real forte is kookiness herself, as in her strange performance in one of my favorite Altman films "Nashville"...
...however most people my age (again, stop with the jokes, you) will probably remember her as the mother in the original "Freaky Friday".

Like I said, she is mostly known for playing "kooks". But what about the incredibly kooky, redoubtable Wikipedia? Well, here's what some guy who may be lying, has to say about Harris...

Early life
Barbara Harris was born(July 25, 1935) in Evanston, Illinois, the daughter of Oscar Harris, an arborist who later became a businessman, and Natalie Densmoor, an accomplished pianist. She began her stage career as a teenager at the Playwrights Theatre in Chicago. Her fellow players included Edward Asner, Elaine May and Mike Nichols.

She was also a member of the Compass Players, the first ongoing improvisational theatre troupe in the United States, directed by Paul Sills, to whom she married at the time. Though the Compass Players closed in disarray, a second theatre opened by Paul Sills called The Second City opened in Chicago in 1959 and attracted national attention. Despite the fact that Sills and Harris had divorced by this time, Sills cast her in this company and brought her to New York to play in a Broadway edition at the Royale Theater, opening on September 26, 1961. For her performance in this, she received her first Tony Award nomination.

Broadway career
Harris received a nomination for the 1962 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her Broadway debut in the original musical revue production From the Second City (1961), which ran at the Royale Theater from September 26 to December 9, 1961. The revue also featured the young Alan Arkin and Paul Sand. Produced by the legendary Max Liebman (among others) and directed by Paul Sills, the production presented Harris in such sketches as Caesar's Wife, First Affair, Museum Piece, and The Bergman Film winning critical and audience acclaim.

In a rare 2002 interview in a Phoenix, Arizona newspaper, she recalled her ambivalence about even bringing the troupe to New York from Chicago. She said, "When I was at Second City, there was a vote about whether we should take our show to Broadway or not. Andrew Duncan and I voted no. I stayed in New York, but only because Richard Rodgers and Alan Jay Lerner came and said, "We want to write a musical for you!" Well, I wasn't big on musical theater. I had seen part of South Pacific in Chicago and I walked out. But it was Richard Rodgers calling!"

While Rodgers and Lerner were busy working on their original musical for her, she won the Theatre World Award for her role in playwright Arthur Kopit's dark comedic farce, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad. Next, she received a nomination for the 1966 Tony for Best Actress in a Musical for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965), a Broadway musical created for her in the end by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane, but not by Richard Rodgers, who left the project. She starred as "Daisy Gamble", a New Yorker who seeks out the help of a psychiatrist to stop smoking. Under hypnosis, the apparently kooky, brash, and quirky character reveals unexpected hidden depths. During her hypnotic trances, she becomes fascinating to the psychiatrist as she reveals herself as a woman who has lived many past lives, one of them ending tragically. While critics were divided over the merits of the show, they praised Harris' performance. The show opened on October 14, 1965 at the Mark Hellinger Theater and ran for 280 performances, earning a total of three Tony nominations. Harris performed numbers from the show with John Cullum on The Bell Telephone Hour - The Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner, broadcast on February 27, 1966.

She had previously appeared on Broadway with Anne Bancroft in a 1963 production of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, staged by Jerome Robbins, at the Martin Beck Theater; the production received five Tony Award nominations.

Harris gave another memorable performance in The Apple Tree, another Broadway musical created for her, this time by the team of composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick, known best for Fiddler On the Roof. The show, in which Harris co-starred with Alan Alda and Larry Blyden was directed by Mike Nichols, opened at the Shubert Theater on October 5, 1966 and closed on November 25, 1967. The show was based on three tales by Mark Twain, Frank R. Stockton, and Jules Feiffer and Harris starred in all three, again receiving exceptional reviews, even if the show did not. Richard Watts Jr. of the New York Post wrote "[t]here are many high triumphs of the imagination in the vastly original musical comedy", he added "but it is Miss Harris who provides it with the extra touch of magic." Walter Kerr famously called her "the square root of noisy sex" and "sweetness carried well into infinity". Harris captured the 1967 Tony for Best Actress in a Musical. Of her friend and colleague Mike Nichols, she said in 2002, "Mike Nichols was a toughie. He could be very kind, but if you weren't first-rate, watch out. He'd let you know."

Just as Harris appeared poised to join the first ranks of Broadway stars, she stopped appearing on stage after The Apple Tree, except for the off-Broadway first American production of Brecht and Weill's Mahagonny in 1970, in which she played the role of Jenny, originally created by Lotte Lenya. That her Broadway career was so legendary but so brief has long been considered by theater fans to be a major and baffling loss. Always a mercurial, private person, in a 2002 interview, Harris shed some light on why she stopped performing regularly on stage despite all the acclaim. She said, "Who wants to be up on the stage all the time? It isn't easy. You have to be awfully invested in the fame aspect, and I really never was. What I cared about was the discipline of acting, whether I did well or not."

Hollywood career
From 1962 through 1964, she appeared as a guest star on such popular television series as Naked City, Channing, The Defenders and The Nurses. In 1965, she made an auspicious feature film debut as social worker Sandra Markowitz in the screen version of A Thousand Clowns. She co-starred opposite Jason Robards, who played the freewheeling, eternally optimistic guardian of his teenage nephew, the custody of whom is threatened by authorities' dim view of his bohemian lifestyle. The New York Times critic wrote on December 9, 1965 that the movie "has the new and sensational Barbara Harris playing the appropriately light-headed girl". Harris and Robards won Golden Globe nominations and the film won four Oscar nominations, with Martin Balsam winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Robards' brother.

In Neil Simon's Plaza Suite with Walter Matthau, the British entertainment magazine Time Out called the "delightful" Harris' gifts "wasted". She had only slightly better opportunities in The War Between Men and Women with Jack Lemmon, and the screen version of Arthur Kopit's darkly comic Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad with Rosalind Russell as the monstrous mother of Robert Morse who takes the stuffed corpse of her dead husband along on trips. Reviewing the latter film for the New York Times on February 16, 1967, critic Bosley Crowther wrote, "Barbara Harris from the original play cast is as wacky as she was on the stage -- casual and direct and totally blase about the boisterous business of sex. Her tussle to accomplish her purpose, with the corpse falling out into the roam every time she is about to score a field goal, is still the funniest scene."

She earned an Oscar nomination for the 1971 film (which co-starred Dustin Hoffman) Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, about a rich, successful, womanizing pop song writer suffering a debilitating but oddly liberating mental crisis. The script was by Herb Gardner, who also wrote A Thousand Clowns.

Harris Vs. Two Master Directors
In 1975, Harris appeared in one of her signature film roles in Robert Altman's masterpiece Nashville, playing "Albuquerque", a ditzy, scantily clad country singing hopeful who may be far more opportunistic and calculating than she would first appear. Accounts of the film's chaotic and inspired production, particularly in Jan Stuart's book The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece, indicate a clash between actress and director. Still, even among rich and inventive performances by Lily Tomlin, Karen Black, Henry Gibson, Ned Beatty, Ronee Blakely, Shelley Duvall, Keenan Wynn, Keith Carradine, Barbara Baxley, Geraldine Chaplin and others, Harris' wildly eccentric performance and her impassioned singing of "It Don't Worry Me" in the devastating finale stands out. Harris earned a Golden Globe nomination (one of 11 for the film); as Oscar-nominated co-star Lily Tomlin put it, "I was the hugest of Barbara Harris fans; I thought she was so stunning and original." Although the two were set to reunite with Altman in a sequel, that film was never made.

The following year, Alfred Hitchcock cast her in Family Plot as a bogus spiritualist hunting with her cab driver boyfriend for a missing heir and a family fortune. Among a cast that included Bruce Dern, Karen Black and William Devane, Hitchcock was particularly delighted by Harris' quirkiness, skill and intelligence. She received critical kudos for the film, which was based upon the novel The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning and which marked a reunion of Hitchcock with Ernest Lehman, who created the original screenplay for North by Northwest. In a rare interview published in a 2002 edition of the New Times of Scottsdale, Arizona, she admitted, "I turned down Alfred Hitchcock when he first asked me to be in one of his movies." But, finally agreeing to star in Family Plot, she recalled, "Mr. Hitchcock was a wonderful man."

Later Career and Vanishing Act
Harris continued to appear in films of the '70s and '80s including Freaky Friday with a young Jodie Foster, Movie Movie for director Stanley Donen, and The North Avenue Irregulars with Cloris Leachman. She co-starred in The Seduction of Joe Tynan with one of her former Broadway leading men, Alan Alda (who also wrote the screenplay), a tale of a liberal Washington Senator caught in an affair with a younger woman, played by Meryl Streep. In 1981, she starred in Second-Hand Hearts for esteemed director Hal Ashby as "Dinette Dusty", a recently widowed waitress and would-be singer who marries a boozy carwash worker named "Loyal", played by Robert Blake to get back her children from their paternal grandparents. The film, based on a highly sought-after "road movie" screenplay by Charles Eastman, was a disaster that tarnished the careers of all concerned. Critic Vincent Canby in his negative New York Times review on May 8, 1981 opined, "[t]he film's one bright spot is Barbara Harris, who plays Dinette as sincerely as possible under awful conditions. She looks great even when she's supposed to be tacky, and is genuinely funny as she tries to make sense out of Loyal's muddled philosophizing, which, of course, the screenplay requires her to match."

A combination of career frustrations, personal challenges and other issues kept Harris off the movie screen until 1986 when she played a supporting role as the mother of Kathleen Turner in Peggy Sue Got Married for Francis Ford Coppola. Her last films to date were the 1988 black comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin and Grosse Pointe Blank, in which she played John Cusack's mother.

Many have tried to lure back Harris with other film, stage, and television projects, including Bette Midler who called her "the greatest thing I've ever seen on stage", and tried unsuccessfully to cast her as one of the star strippers in the show-stopping You Gotta Have a Gimmick number in the 1993 TV version of the Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne musical Gypsy.

Harris currently teaches and directs. Asked if she might one day be lured back to mainstream stage, film or television, Harris said in 2002, "Well, if someone handed me something fantastic for 10 million dollars, I'd work again. But I haven't worked in a long time as an actor. I don't miss it. I think the only thing that drew me to acting in the first place was the group of people I was working with: Ed Asner, Paul Sills, Mike Nichols, Elaine May. And all I really wanted to do back then was rehearsal. I was in it for the process, and I really resented having to go out and do a performance for an audience, because the process stopped; it had to freeze and be the same every night. It wasn't as interesting."

In 2005, she briefly resurfaced, guest starring as "The Queen" and "Spunky Brandburn" on the Radio Repertory Company of America audio drama, Anne Manx on Amazonia, which aired on XM Satellite Radio.

Unlike fellow "kook" Goldie Hawn, Harris never gives one the sense of going for the cutes in her performances. She is always coming from a place of reality. Maybe not mine or yours (well maybe mine), but a recognizably real place.

Her performance as John Cusack's senile mother in "Grosse Pointe Blank" is so unexpectedly moving, and I think what I tend to love most about her acting. Barbara Harris is the master of the unexpected choice.

And The Name Is Bill Cobbs!

2007-12-29T11:31:00.000-08:00

His first film appearance was in "The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three"...
...but you may remember him as the narrator "Mose" in one of my favorite Coen Brother films "The Hudsucker Proxy"...
... and certainly the young people will remember him as one of the old, sinister janitors in "Night At The Museum". Here, he and Dick Van Dyke contemplate leaving as Mickey Rooney launches into another one of his stories(rants) about the way things used to be...

Bill Cobbs is one of those guys who's been around for-frickin'-ever and his resume shows it. And yet his first credits happened when he was almost forty! Just goes to show what a little hard work can do.

Here's what those falsehood purveyors at Wikipedia say...

William Francisco "Bill" Cobbs (born June 16, 1935) is an American film actor. He has starred in over 120 television programs and movies.

Cobbs was born in Cleveland, Ohio to a domestic worker mother and a father who worked in construction.[1] He was a part of the Negro Ensemble Company. Cobbs has appeared and been a regular on many television programs including: The Michael Richards Show, The Outer Limits, I'll Fly Away, Yes, Dear, The Sopranos, The Others, JAG, The Drew Carey Show, Lost, October Road, and many more.

In 2006, Cobbs played a supporting role in Night at the Museum as Reginald, a security guard on the verge of retirement. He also played basketball coach and retired basketball player Arthur Chaney in Disney's Air Bud. He had a pivotal role in the Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy and played a jazz pianist in Tom Hanks' That Thing You Do.

He recorded a public service announcement for Deejay Ra's 'Hip-Hop Literacy' campaign, encouraging reading of Ice-T's autobiography.

Like a lot of character actors I like, it's hard to find a lot about them on the intertubes. So, I'll go with what I know...

I always enjoy seeing Cobbs in a film. His warm, gravely voice makes for perfect narrator in The Coens' "The Hudsucker Proxy" and he is just the guy to bring home the moral of Tom Hanks' "That Thing You Do", when he appears late in the film. I read some wag on IMDB's comment section remark that Cobbs is "the poor man's Morgan Freeman".

And by "wag", I mean "jackass".

Cobbs is one of those guys who provides a certain dramatic stability in whatever they appear in. You know you're in good hands when Cobbs arrives in a scene.

And The Name Is G.W. Bailey!

2007-12-20T18:04:00.000-08:00

You probably know him from TNT's "The Closer"...
...And those of us who lived through bad 80's cinema will recall his desperately trying to save the "Police Academy" films...
...I know I first noticed him as "Rizzo" in the television version of "M.A.S.H."- as did people in... Denmark? Is that what ".de" stands for?

But my favorite character was his psychiatrist "Dr. Hugh Beale" in "St. Elsewhere". I don't know why they cut him loose, or maybe he found a bigger, better gig, but he was perfect as a guy who might be a little crazy himself. Or as one exchange went...

Patient: You're crazy-
Beale: -As a loon!

Bailey knocked that line out of the park. The thing I love about him is, once again, he is obviously someone who is theatre-trained and uses it to great effect in film by doing a lot with his eyes, even when he doesn't have lines. But when he has lines, he's got this great Texas gravelly, gargled with barbed wire, kind of voice that growls out the lines, like the above exchange.

Besides acting, Bailey has gone from working with the "Sunshine Kids" charity to becoming executive director of it's foundation.

Here's more about Bailey from their website...

G.W. Bailey
Executive Director, The Sunshine Kids Foundation

After serving as a SSK volunteer for 15 years, G.W. became the Executive Director in Jan. 2001. Since creating the California Fun-Time Fantasy in 1988, he has overseen the expansion of National Events that now include ten destinations and involve volunteers nation wide working with the Foundation to provide trips and activities for hundreds of young cancer patients annually.

A long time student of Texas Tech University and a graduate of Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos , Texas , G.W. became internationally known as a professional actor for his portrayal as Capt. Harris in the POLICE ACADEMY film series. He is also widely recognized as Sgt. Rizzo from the MASH television series and for his other feature and TV movies. He is currently a regular on the TNT television hit series, THE CLOSER.

G.W. was introduced to the Sunshine Kids by his goddaughter Brandy Aldridge who had been diagnosed with leukemia. Her experiences with other Kids who were also fighting cancer had a profound effect on Brandy, her family and friends. She inspired G.W. to begin working with the Foundation and with Rhoda in an effort to create more activities that would reach as many Kids as possible. His work with the Sunshine Kids has always been dedicated to the memory of this remarkable young woman.

Please check out both his ongoing career and this worthy charity that he is a part of.

And The Name Is Lupe Ontiveros!

2007-12-14T09:13:00.000-08:00

You probably remember her as the duplicitous murderer of J-Lo in "Selena"...
...or as America Ferrera's controlling mother in "Real Women Have Curves"...
...or even Carlos' suspicious mother in "Desperate Housewives".

But probably my favorite performance of hers is Beverly Franco, the theatre manager in "Chuck and Buck" who is talked into directing the bizarre play written by Buck (Mike White). The way Ontiveros underplays her scenes with White is a great choice, given how strange and infantile Buck is. And yet you get the idea that Beverly has been waiting for a chance to direct and is ready to go when Buck comes along. It is a character and performance that make an almost unwatchable movie, watchable.

And yet, as interesting as this is, what do the mega-liars at Wikipedia have to say?

Early life
Ontiveros was born Guadalupe Moreno in El Paso, Texas, the daughter of Luz "Lucita" Castanon and Juan Moreno, middle-class Mexican immigrants who overcame a lack of formal education to become owners of a tortilla factory and two restaurants in Ontiveros' native El Paso.[2][3] She graduated from El Paso High School and went on to study at Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas, where she received a bachelor's degree in social work. After her marriage, she and her husband moved to California to realize his dream of starting an automotive business. During a period of professional dissatisfaction with her social service career, Ontiveros was trying to decide whether to go back to school for a nursing degree when she saw an article about a need for local film "extras." With her husband's encouragement, she began with that simple job and parlayed it into a long stage and screen career.

Prior to acting, Ontiveros worked for 18 years as a social worker, and she continues as an activist with many of the same causes with which she worked in that profession, such as domestic violence prevention and AIDS awareness and prevention, among other health issues.

Film career
Ontiveros has said that although she wants to see a more diverse set of roles made available to Latina actors, she is proud of the work she has done each time she has played a maid or other working-class character: "I'm proud to represent those hands that labor in this country. I've given every maid I've ever portrayed soul and heart."[4]In part because of her history in this role, she was chosen as the narrator for the documentary Maid in America. [5]

One of Ontiveros' most prominent early movie roles was in the 1983 Gregory Nava film El Norte, in which she played a seamstress and maid who acts as mentor to a newly arrived immigrant girl from Guatemala. In a 2004 interview with the Dominican newspaper Listín, she called El Norte "the film that always will remain in me... [it] tells the immigrants' story" when asked as to her favorite film from her long career.[6] She played the housekeeper Rosalita, a Hispanic maid hired to assist in the packing and moving of the Walsh family in the hit adventure film The Goonies (1985).

The actress worked with Nava in subsequent films, including My Family/Mi Familia (1995) and Selena (1997). In the latter film, she portrayed the murderer of Tejano singer Selena, Yolanda Saldívar, the singer's fan-club president. Her performance was so believable and memorable that years later, the actress sometimes is mistaken for Saldívar and verbally accosted.[7]

In 2000, she was featured in the film Chuck & Buck, in which she played Beverly, a tough theater director who puts on a play written by one of the main characters. She has said in multiple interviews that she accepted the role even before seeing the script, solely on the basis of being approached to play a character who was not defined by Hispanic ethnicity. For that role, she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture in the 2000 Independent Spirit Awards.

She co-starred with America Ferrera in the 2002 film Real Women Have Curves as the overbearing and hypercritical mother of Ferrera's character. Her performance received excellent reviews and earned her and her co-star a Special Jury Prize at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.

Television
Ontiveros had a recurring role in the 2004-05 season of American prime time soap opera series Desperate Housewives as Juanita Solis, Gabrielle's suspicious mother-in-law. She received an Emmy nomination as Best Supporting Actress for this role. In 2004 she also began a role as Abuela Elena, the grandmother of the title characters in the animated PBS children's series Maya and Miguel. The multicultural and bilingual series later introduced a deaf character, Marco, after a sign language-themed episode was suggested by the actress, who has two hearing impaired adult sons.[8]

The actress was one of the stars of the WB's Greetings from Tucson, playing the grandmother in an upwardly mobile family of mixed Irish and Mexican heritage. She previously had recurring guest roles on the series Veronica's Closet, for which she won an ALMA Award in 1998, and on the short-lived soap opera Pasadena. She also has been a guest star on Hill Street Blues, Red Shoe Diaries, Resurrection Blvd., Cory in the House, and King of the Hill, among many other series.

Theater
After deciding she wanted an acting career, Ontiveros began in earnest, following up full-day sessions at her first career with evening work at Nosotros, a community theater in Los Angeles.

In 1978, she was cast as Dolores in Luis Valdez’s historic play Ban Louis Jagger in her first major theatrical role. She went on to reprise the role on Broadway — the first Mexican American theatrical production ever to play there — and in the 1982 film version. She was a founding member of the Latino Theater Company[10]

Personal life
In August, 2006, the Kaiser Permanente insurance company announced that Ontiveros would be the featured presenter in a new health-education DVD to be available in English and Spanish.[11] She also has promoted higher education for Latinos through advertisements for the Hispanic Scholarship Fund in 2002 and participation in a 2003 campaign to increase access to the 2004 Hispanic Scholarships Directory across southern California.

She and her husband are the parents of three grown sons and reside in Pico Rivera, California.

Hey, thanks fibbers!

One of the things I like about Ontiveros is that she has great eyes that bring truth to the cliche that eyes are the "window to the soul". One always has a hard time not focusing on anything in scenes she's in but her eyes and what she's thinking. Just watch her in "Selena" as she talks to, well, Selena oddly enough, about how the business of her fan club is going. Ontiveros is very prim and matter-of-fact as she goes into the mundane details. But watch her eyes and you can tell she is a very calculating person.

Ontiveros would do well in silent film.

And The Name Is Cherry Jones (no relation)!

2007-12-08T16:41:00.000-08:00

You probably remember her from Steven Soderbergh films like "Erin Brockovich", "Ocean's 12" or Tim Robbins' "Cradle Will Rock"...
...but did you know she's one of the great American stage actresses...
... appearing in the lead roles of a revival of "The Heiress", "Faith Healer", and John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt"?

Well, she is. And she has.

But enough of my yakkin'. Howsabout we hear what those big-time pathological liars at Wikipedia have to say...

Career
Jones is known primarily for her stage work, including her Tony-winning lead performances in Lincoln Center's 1995 production of The Heiress and John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt, which opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre in March 2005. Other Broadway credits include Nora Ephron's play Imaginary Friends (with Swoosie Kurtz); Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, the 2000 revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten, and Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, for which she earned her first Tony nomination.[1] She is considered to be one of the foremost theater actresses in the United States.

In recent years, Jones has ventured into the film industry, in which she has played mostly supporting roles. Her screen credits include Cradle Will Rock, The Perfect Storm, Ocean's Twelve, Signs, The Village.[2]

Jones will play President Allison Taylor on the seventh season of the Fox series 24.[3]

Personal life
Jones was born in Paris, Tennessee, to a high school teacher mother and a flower shop owner father.[4] Jones, who is a lesbian, has long been frank about her sexuality and romantic engagements.[citation needed] In 1995, when Jones accepted her first Tony Award, she thanked her then partner, architect Mary O'Connor. When she accepted her Best Actress Tony in 2005 for her work in Doubt, she thanked "Laura Wingfield", a character in the then-current Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie, played by actress Sarah Paulson, Jones' current partner.[5]

The thing about Jones is, one gets this sense of... substance for lack of a better word. And yes, usually I am more about the flash of the rolled "r" and the maniacal spark in an actor who loves acting's eye.* But being theatrically trained doesn't just mean being able to declaim to the back row of another theater (in another town), as much as that is fun. It is being able to communicate silently to the back row of another theatre (in another town).

Cherry Jones could emote the phone book.

Which is not to say she's not fun... she is very much part of the crime caper template in "Ocean's 12" and you're just going to have watch the film to know what I'm talking about.

But my favorite performance of hers is in "Cradle Will Rock". She plays Hallie Flanagan, the real life national director of the Federal Theatre Project. The beatific charm she brings to the part is something that the whole "history as Preston Sturges' screwball comedy" needs to balance the hellzapoppin atmosphere.

The Cherry Jones touch is one that helps ground and balance some of the best theater and film we have. Remember her face and name.

*Yeah, I know there's probably a better way of saying this. I really shouldn't blog after the 5th scotch.

And The Name Is J.K. Simmons!

2007-12-04T07:33:00.001-08:00

How could you not remember his "I'm really doing a screwball comedy, not a superhero movie" performance as J. Jonah Jameson-newspaper editor/publisher of The Daily Bugle in the "Spiderman" movies...
... and here's what he looks like without the wig and 'stache...
...but this year critics are lovin' his performance in the new indie comedy "Juno", which they are also lovin'.*

Like a lot of the character actors I love, there's not a lot on the intranets about Simmons. So let's see what the world's favorite fabricator Wikipedia has to say...

Biography

Early life
Simmons was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Patricia (née Kimble), an administrator, and Donald William Simmons, a college professor.[1][2] He has a brother, David (a singer and songwriter), and a sister, Elizabeth. He attended the University of Montana[3] and was a member of the Seattle Repertory Theatre.[3]

Career
Prior to his film & television career, Simmons was a Broadway actor and singer. He was in the revival of Guys and Dolls as Benny Southstreet. He also played the role of Jigger in a revival of Carousel at the Houston Grand Opera.

Simmons is known for his TV roles as Dr. Emil Skoda, a police psychiatrist who has appeared on three of the four incarnations of Law & Order, and as the sadistic Vernon Schillinger on the prison drama Oz. He also played the obsessively egotistical newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson in all three Spider-Man movies. Simmons provided his voice for two newspaper editors in two episodes of the eighteenth season of The Simpsons. The characters are never named, but are obviously meant to emulate the character of Jameson (one even demands "pictures of Spider-Man.") He also stars as Ralph Earnhardt, the father of famous race-car driver Dale Earnhardt, in 3: The Dale Earnhardt Story. Currently he plays as the Assistant Chief of the LAPD, Will Pope in The Closer.

Less well known is that Simmons provided the voice of the yellow M&M in the product's commercials as well as voiceover work for Norelco razors. He also provided the voice of General Wade Eiling in Justice League Unlimited. He also did an audio book for Tom Clancy's Net Force Point of Impact. Like many of his Law & Order co-stars, he also appeared in an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, though he portrayed a criminal suspect rather than his Dr. Skoda character.

The thing I've enjoyed about this guy is that he has obviously come from the theater. You don't see a lot of actors who are not theater-trained using their voices so well in film and TV. Simmons really knows how to put over a line in comedy, as seen in the "Spiderman" trilogy and the much-maligned Coen Bros. remake of "The Ladykillers". But then he softens his rich baritone for his appearances on Law & Order and becomes the nicest psychiatric expert for the prosecution you'd ever want to meet.

And the guy is lovin'** his work. You can tell by how he attacks his lines in, yes, the "Spiderman" trilogy. He is on another playing level with his take on this exchange stole- I mean borrowed from IMDB...

Miss Brant: Sir, your wife's on the line, she said she lost her checkbook.
J. Jonah Jameson: Thanks for the good news!

And, of course, you can see him on TNT's "The Closer", where he plays Kyra Sedgewick's former lover.

Because bald guys in their fifties have lives, too, man. Don't judge.

*that will be the last time you see the word "lovin' "in this piece. Except right there. Now... I finally got it out of my system. Phew, I'm glad that's over with.
**I lied. Okay? Back off.

And The Name Is Still Charles Nelson Reilly!

2007-11-28T08:42:00.000-08:00

He went from being a major Broadway musical character actor to television's "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" (this being one of the shows that rode on the coattails of the success of "Bewitched" and "My Favorite Martian")...
...and from there to being the quintessential seventies game show celebrity and talk show guest...
... to becoming an in-demand theatre and television director, acting teacher and guest star of one of my favorite episodes of both "The X-Files" and "Millennium".

I cannot say enough great things about this actor. A great comedy technician and show biz personality, he left the world wa-a-a-a-y too soon (just as the filmed version of his stage show is being released to rave reviews). Here's what the truthful users-unfriendlytm Wikipedia says about his life and career...

Biography

Reilly was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of Charles Joseph Reilly, an Irish Catholic commercial artist, and Signe Elvera Nelson, a Swedish Lutheran.[1][2] When young he would often make his own puppet theater to amuse himself. His mother, foreshadowing his future as an entertainer, often would tell him to "save it for the stage". At age 13, he escaped the Hartford Circus Fire[3] where over a hundred people died, and as a result he never sat in an audience again through the remainder of his life.[4]

Career

Reilly made his first movie appearance in 1957, playing an uncredited role in the Elia Kazan film A Face in the Crowd. However, most of his work during this period was on the stage, as he appeared in many off-Broadway shows. His big Broadway break came in 1960 with a minor part in the hit Bye Bye Birdie. Reilly would go on to win a Tony Award for his performance in 1962's How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,[5] and he was nominated for another Tony two years later, for his work as Cornelius Hackl in the Broadway production of Hello, Dolly![6] Reilly appeared regularly on television in the 1960s. For example, he did stints both as one of the What's My Line? Mystery Guests and as a panelist on the popular Sunday Night CBS-TV program.

While he kept active in Broadway shows, Reilly would soon become better known for his TV work. In 1965, he made regular appearances on The Steve Lawrence Show, which aired for a single season. From 1968 to 1970, he appeared as uptight "Claymore Gregg" on the television series The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, which also starred Hope Lange and Edward Mulhare, in which he was reunited with Hello, Dolly! Broadway co-star Eileen Brennan on one episode.

In 1971, he appeared as the evil magician "Hoodoo" in Lidsville, a psychedelically flavored live-action children's program produced by Sid and Marty Krofft that aired on Saturday mornings on ABC. The show was about a boy who falls into a magician's hat and enters a magical world of hat-humans. It is through these roles, as well as his playing the titular role in Uncle Croc's Block, that Reilly's voice and mannerisms were embedded in a generation of young fanatics.

During the 1970s, Reilly also appeared as a regular on The Dean Martin Show, and had multiple guest appearances on television series including McMillan and Wife; Here's Lucy; Laugh In; The Love Boat; and Love, American Style. He was also a frequent guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, appearing over 100 times, as he lived within blocks of the studio and would fill in for other guests who were unable to make it to the studio in time.

During this time, Reilly was perhaps best known as a fixture of game shows, primarily due to his appearances as a regular panelist on the television game show Match Game. Reilly was the longest-running guest, and often engaged in petty, hilarious arguments with fellow regular Brett Somers. Reilly typically offered sardonic commentary and peppered his answers with homosexually themed double entendres that pushed the boundaries of 1970s television standards.

From 1975 to 1976, Reilly starred in another live-action children's program called Uncle Croc's Block with Jonathan Harris. Reilly was often a guest celebrity in the 1984 game show Body Language, including one week with Lucille Ball and another week with Audrey Landers.

From 1980, Reilly was primarily active teaching acting and directing for television and theater. He directed episodes of Evening Shade in 1990 and earned a 1997 Tony Award nomination as Best Director of a Play for working with longtime pal Julie Harris, opposite whom he had acted in Skyscraper, and whom he had directed in The Belle of Amherst and a revival of The Gin Game.

Reilly was a longtime teacher of acting at HB Studio, the acting studio made by Herbert Berghof and his wife, Uta Hagen. His acting students included Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler.

In the 1990s, Reilly made guest appearances on The Drew Carey Show, The Larry Sanders
Show, Family Matters, Second Noah, and as eccentric writer Jose Chung in the television series The X-Files ("Jose Chung's From Outer Space") and Millennium ("Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense"). Reilly was nominated for Emmy Awards in 1998 and 1999 for his performances in The Drew Carey Show and Millennium, respectively. From the late 1990s,
Reilly directed theater and opera, touring the country performing a critically acclaimed one-man stage show chronicling his life called Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly and occasionally performing as the voice of "The Dirty Bubble" on the animated series SpongeBob SquarePants. In 2006, his stage show was made into a feature film called The Life of Reilly.[7]

Personal life
Reilly did not publicly proclaim his homosexuality until his one man show Save It for the Stage. However, much like fellow game-show regular Paul Lynde, Reilly played up a campy on-screen persona. In many episodes of Match Game, he would lampoon himself by briefly affecting a deep voice and self-consciously describing how "butch" he was. He mentioned in a 2002 interview with Entertainment Tonight that he felt no need to note this and that he never purposefully hid his homosexuality from anyone.

Patrick Hughes III, a set decorator and dresser, was Reilly's partner; the two met backstage while Reilly was appearing on the game show Battlestars. They lived in Beverly Hills.[8]

On May 25, 2007, Reilly died at his home from complications from pneumonia after a year-long illness.[9]

When I was growing up in the seventies in a little town in Mississippi, the only ideas I had about show business came from game shows and afternoon talk shows like "Dinah" or "The Mike Douglas Show". Sad, possibly. Pathetic, sure. Tragic? Well, let's not get too drama-ytm.

The truth is people like Reilly made Hollywood, performing and being a celebrity seem like the best fun you could have. Living there quickly made me realize otherwise, but I think my love of the great faces and voices of character actors came from my love of game show and talk show celebrities. And no, I'm not going to use irony quotations around celebrities.

For the pure entertainment they give when they appear on TV or in the movies, I celebrate them every time I see them. No irony there.

...And The Name Is Charles Nelson Reilly! And Here Is The Trailer For The Film Of His One Man Show!

2007-11-19T03:25:00.001-08:00

The actual "You Know The Face..." write-up will have to wait until I see the movie (it better come to DC!). But until then, please enjoy this smidgen of all good things that are CNR...

And The Name Is Beverly Garland!

2007-11-14T07:27:00.001-08:00

You might know her now from her appearances on "7th Heaven" or "Port Charles" or maybe you've stayed at her hotel in North Hollywood...

.... or maybe you remember her from countless mother parts including Laura Holt's on "Remington Steele", Lois Lane's on "Lois And Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman", and, of course, Mrs. King's on "Scarecrow and Mrs. King"...
... but I'm not sure if you remember that she was also known as the best screamer in Hollywood for her horror film appearances in the fifties, like "Not Of This Earth".

One thing you can say about Garland- she's a survivor. Like a lot of the actors on this site, there has never been a time in her career when she has not worked. Unless it was to run her hotel, which I had the pleasure of going to while researching my character actor project. Which you can read about here, here, here, and here. The Beverly Garland Holiday Inn is where the "Stars Of The Twilight Zone" convention was held in 2002 and Garland was one of the stars we met the day we went.

And despite turning down my wife's perfectly reasonable sales pitch to carry "Seattle's Best Coffee" or "Starbucks" in her hotel*, she was still very nice and was slightly (politely is a better word) interested in our little documentary idea. Truth to tell, in approaching the actors with what little we had prepared, I'm still a little stunned that we weren't shot down more often.

Here's what Garland's website says about her amazing career...

Beverly Garland has combined the raising of four children with starring in 41 feature films and nearly 700 television programs to establish a list of entertainment industry credits perhaps unmatched for its combination of diversity and volume.

She has played opposite many of Hollywood’s most popular leading men-from Charles Boyer and David Niven to Clint Eastwood and Frank Sinatra.

Ms. Garland’s film debut was in a supporting role in the 1950 classic film noir, “D.O.A,” starring Edmond O’Brien. Her television career began in the same year with appearances in a variety of dramas which led to starring roles in the most celebrated live dramas of fifties, “Playhouse 90” and “Lux Video Theater.”

She was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1954 for her role, co-starring with Lee Marvin, as a leukemia-stricken mother in “Medic.”

In 1957, she made television history, becoming both the first actress to star in the title role of a dramatic series and becoming television’s first policewoman when she played NYPD officer Casey Jones in “Decoy.”

She has been a regular in eight TV series, including co-starring as Bing Crosby’s wife in his series, Fred MacMurray’s wife in the long-running “My Three Sons,” and Kate Jackson’s Mother in “Scarecrow and Mrs. King.”

Her feature films range from dramatic hits such as “The Joker is Wild,” with Frank Sinatra and “Desperate Hours,: with Humphrey Bogart, to sci-fi favorites “It Conquered the World,” with Peter Graves, and “The Alligator People” with Lon Chaney Jr. to classic westerns “Gunslinger” with John Ireland and “Where the Red Fern Grow,” with James Witmore.

In 1983, Beverly was awarded her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2001 she was inducted into the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters Hall of Fame. To mark her 50 years in show business, the City of Los Angeles proclaimed January 19, 2001 “Beverly Garland Day in Los Angeles.”

In 1999 her husband of 39 years died, and since then she has combined her acting career with an increased devotion to the hotel he built and named after her, the 255-room resort style Beverly Garland Holiday Inn and Conference Center in North Hollywood, California.

One of the things I love about her mother roles is how much bite she puts into them. There's always a little edge to her visits with Laura Holt, Lois Lane or Mrs. King, usually along the lines of "get married/settle down" variety. Which (not to get too doctoral-thesis-y here, but what the heck) is ironic given how much of a survivor in Hollywood she herself was. And maybe that's what the edge is these particular parts.

One of her best parts was as Tuesday Weld's mom in the amazing "Pretty Poison". Garland brings so much to the part that...

spoiler alert

...you hate to see her go.

end spoiler alert

Beverly Garland is one of the great ladies of character acting, if only for bringing some much-needed attitude to the typical wife/mother parts.

But she should've changed her hotel's coffee.

*referred to in our family as "The Incident".

And The Name Is L.Q. Jones!

2007-11-13T07:19:00.001-08:00

You saw Jones recently in "A Prairie Home Companion", "The Mask Of Zorro", and "Casino"...
... but didja know he was part of Sam Peckinpah's film rep company, appearing in "The Wild Bunch"...
... and "Ride The High Country", among others?

Let's see what factually-suspect Wikipedia has to say...

L.Q. Jones (born August 19, 1927 in Beaumont, Texas) is an American character actor and film director, best-known for his work in the films of Sam Peckinpah.

Born Justus Ellis McQueen Jr., he made his film debut in 1955's Battle Cry, with Van Heflin, under his birth name. His character was named L.Q. Jones, and when it was suggested to him by film producers that he change his screen name for future pictures, he decided that the name of his debut character would be a memorable one.

Jones appeared in numerous memorable films in the 1960s and 1970s. He became a member of Sam Peckinpah's stock company of actors, appearing in his Ride the High Country (1962), Major Dundee (1965), The Wild Bunch (1969), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), and Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid (1973). Frequently cast alongside Strother Martin, most memorably in The Wild Bunch. Jones also appeared in television, as recurring characters on such shows as Cheyenne (1955), Gunsmoke (1955), and The Virginian (1962). Also directed, executive produced and adapted the screenplay for A Boy and His Dog (1975), with Don Johnson, Jason Robards, and the voice of Tim McIntire. Other films include Flaming Star (1960), Hell is for Heroes (1962), Hang 'Em High (1968), Stay Away, Joe (1968), The Brotherhood of Satan (1971) (which he co-produced and wrote, and cast Strother Martin again in the lead role), Lone Wolf McQuade (1983), Casino (1995), The Edge (1997), The Mask of Zorro (1998), and A Prairie Home Companion (2006).

L.Q. Jones (besides having an awesomely fictitious last name), is one my favorite actors to see in any program or film. He has a great cruel glint in his eye (rivaling the mighty Vincent Price!) that makes his scene in Casino with DeNiro (the one where he's trying to talk DeNiro into re-hiring Joe Bob Briggs) really crackle. You know that he is more than a match for the mobbed-up Casino manager, just from the way Jones smiles at him.

But he can be touching too, as seen in "A Prairie Home Companion" when he sings "You've Been A Friend To Me". This Carter Family classic is sung simply by Jones as the performance of a venerated old star from the Porter Wagner-era of Grand Ole Opry-dom. But when he gets to the last line "...If ever I have had a friend, you've been that friend to me", his voice cracks, he bows his head humbly to acknowledge the applause, and walks off the stage.

To see his range, please pick up one of the Peckinpah's and then "Prairie Home...". You'll be glad y'did pardner.

And The Name Is William Schallert!

2007-11-08T07:39:00.001-08:00

Schallert is definitely one of those actors that people recognize by both face and voice ...
... older television viewers may remember him as Patty Duke's father on "The Patty Duke Show"...
... but Trekkies ("Like yourself?" you ask. "Hey, I'm not the only one!" I respond defensively) will remember him as "Nilz Baris" in the "...Trouble With Tribbles" episode of Star Trek (The Classic Series- natch) .

By now you're probably saying, "Oh yeah, that guy." And it's Schallert that was one of the main inspirations for this blog. An actor of decency and intelligence this is one of those guys who frickin' works, man, and you can see that by looking at the bazillion* entries in his IMDB listing here.

Let see what those storytellers at Wikipedia have to say...

William Schallert (born July 6, 1922 in Los Angeles, California), is an actor who has appeared in many movies and television series such as The Smurfs, The Rat Patrol, Gunsmoke, and Get Smart.

He is best known as patriarch Martin Lane on The Patty Duke Show and as teacher Leander Pomfritt on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Coincidentally, on both shows, he worked opposite the late actress Jean Byron.

He is also very well known for playing the role of Nilz Baris on the Star Trek episode entitled "The Trouble with Tribbles". He also appeared in the archive footage of that episode which was used in the popular Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations". Schallert appeared in DS9 himself, in the second season episode "Sanctuary", in which he played Varani, a Bajoran musician.

Schallert starred in an innovative 1964 TV pilot for ABC called Philbert, which combined live action camera work and animation. Created by Friz Freleng and directed by Richard Donner, ABC backed out of the series shortly before full production was to begin, though the completed pilot was released in theatres as a short subject.

He was president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1979 to 1981 (his former co-star and TV daughter, Patty Duke would succeed him between from 1985 to 1988).

He continues to work steadily, appearing most recently in a 2007 episode of How I Met Your Mother, and his distinctive voice continues to bring him work for commercial and animation voiceovers.

Speaking of voiceovers, Schallert was also the voice of "Milton The Toaster" the cartoon spokes-appliance for Poptarts.

I met him at the Stars Of The Twilight Zone convention in 2002 in Los Angeles. You can see pictures of that event here, and maybe see me and the missus in one of the photos. Probably not, but I can dream, can't I?

We were there to drum up support for and shoot some footage for a documentary pilot idea I had with the same name as this blog. While there, I talked to quite a number of my character actor heroes, and one of them was Schallert. As you will find in reading through some of the links I have provided, he is one of the nicest guys you will ever meet and we talked a for a long, long time.

At his autograph-signing table. While others were waiting. To get his autograph. And finally, after about twenty minutes, he very politely said "Would you mind? I don't want these other folks to go away empty handed."

I'm a big jerk. And Mr. Schallert, if you're reading this, (as I said at the time) I'm very sorry.

William Schallert. Actor. Former SAG president. Genuinely nice guy.

*"Bazillion", yet another Stephen Hawkins numerical designation. Or an order of ordained priests who follow in the footsteps of St. Basil.

And The Name Is Patricia Neal!

2007-10-31T08:07:00.000-07:00

She has been in films, television and stage for more than sixty years...
...and even in smaller, character parts (like"Breakfast At Tiffany's") she steals every scene she's in...
...which is why it's great to see how other actors raise their game when she's in a scene with her, like Andy Griffith, giving the great dramatic performance of his career in "A Face In The Crowd" (Nov. 1st @ 2:30am et on TCM, with an interview to follow).

The thing I love about Neal is her incredible voice and the way that, no matter what character she plays, one gets the idea the character has some baggage. And has lived. And probably has a passing acquaintance with the ways of the world. And alcohol. And cigarettes. And guys.

I don't know if she could ever pull off a spinster aunt or nun. Unless they had come to their positions late in life. After a lot of, let us say, adventures.

Not only an incredible actress, Patricia Neal miraculously survived both death and several massive strokes in the mid-sixties. She came back three years later in "The Subject Was Roses" and went on to have as successful career as she did before. Her survival also resulted in the creation of "The Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center" which helps patients come back from stroke, spinal cord and brain injuries.

Here's their bio of Neal...

Patricia Neal: A Biography

"Patricia Neal, 39, last year's Oscar-winning best actress who copped five prizes for her first Broadway performance in 1947, died at midnight last night at UCLA Medical Center." This was the front-page banner headline in the February 22, 1965 issue of Variety. Although the newspaper editors, and many others, were convinced Patricia Neal had died, she refused to let that be her fate. She remained in a coma for 21 days following three massive strokes, refusing to give up.

"I think I was born stubborn, that's all," she says. "I almost died many times from broken hearts…when my daughter Olivia died, when my baby son Theo was hit by a car, and when I had my strokes. There were many who didn't think I would pull through. I had to have an operation that lasted seven hours, and I know very well my doctor thought I would conk out in the middle of it; but as I told him later, we Tennessee hillbillies don't conk that easy, so I stayed alive."

Patsy Louise Neal was born January 20, 1926. Even in her youth, growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee, she recognized her interest in acting and frequently recited monologues at church and other gatherings. As a Christmas present from her parents, she was given acting lessons when she was 12. Her teacher was Emily Mahan Faust of Knoxville.

Following graduation from high school, she enrolled in speech and drama at Northwestern University. After two years, she joined her drama coach, Alvina Krause, for summer theatre in Eaglesmere, Pennsylvania. At the summer's end, she packed a suitcase, caught a train, and headed for New York.

After only two-and-a-half months of knocking on doors and working odd jobs, she got her first job as understudy for the two main female parts of Voice of the Turtle. Now calling herself Patricia instead of Patsy Louise, she was cast by the Theatre Guild in the summer theatre production of Devil Take the Whistler, where she was seen by Lillian Hellman, Richard Rodgers, and Eugene O'Neill. Shortly thereafter, she accepted an offer from Miss Hellman to play in Another Part of the Forest, for which she received several awards; among them the Tony (Antoinette Perry) and the Drama Critics Award for Best New Actress. She had become a star, and she was not yet 20.

Her triumphant stage success in 1946 led to many offers from Hollywood where Miss Neal signed with Warner Brothers and proceeded to make 13 movies in the next four years, including John Loves Mary and The Hasty Heart with Ronald Reagan, The Fountainhead and Bright Leaf with Gary Cooper, Diplomatic Courier with Tyrone Powers, and Operation Pacific with John Wayne. While continuing to appear in films, both in Hollywood and England, she returned intermittently to the stage, where she did The Children's Hour, A Room Full of Roses, Suddenly Last Summer, and The Miracle Worker. She met author Roald Dahl during this time, and they were married on July 2, 1953.

But tragedy was to strike three times. A taxi struck their infant son, Theo, while in his carriage and caused severe injuries, requiring him to undergo extensive rehabilitation. The eldest of five children, Olivia, contracted measles encephalitis and died at the age of seven. Resolving to go on with life, Miss Neal continued her acting career and won an Oscar as Best Actress in 1964 for her performance with Paul Newman in Hud, and made In Harm's Way with John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda, and Larry Hagman. At the peak of her success, when she had started work with director John Ford, Anne Bancroft, and Eddie Albert on MGM's Seven Women, tragedy struck again. On February 17, 1965, when she was three months pregnant, she suffered a series of strokes which left her partially paralyzed. Undaunted, Miss Neal began a successful struggle through years of rehabilitation. Her fifth child, Lucy was born healthy. Her two other daughters, Tessa and Ophelia, along with Theo and Lucy are grown now and living in the U.S. and England.

Miss Neal returned to her career and received an Academy Award nomination for The Subject Was Roses with Martin Sheen. Distinguished television roles including The Homecoming, The Lou Gehrig Story, and All's Quiet on the Western Front garnered three Emmy nominations.

In 1978, Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center dedicated the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. Since then the center has served almost 20,000 inpatients and more than 30,000 outpatients, as they re-learn to walk, talk, eat and live independently following stroke, traumatic injury and disease. Miss Neal has been tireless in her commitment to developing the center into the finest rehabilitation facility in the Southern Appalachian region. She has become a champion in the rehabilitation field and a worldwide symbol of hope and victory to stroke victims and others with disabilities.

Miss Neal continues her acting career in addition to traveling and lecturing extensively. She is a regular participant in the Theatre Guild's Theatre-At-Sea programs, which have taken her to many exotic ports-of-call. Her autobiography, As I Am, was published in 1988 by Simon & Schuster and has been reprinted all over the world. Her recent work, major motion picture Cookie's Fortune with Glenn Close, was released to rave reviews in April of 1999.
Miss Neal resides in New York and spends the summer season at her home in Martha's Vineyard. She visits Knoxville and the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center several times each year.

And The Name Is Luis Guzman!

2007-10-27T20:36:00.001-07:00

He usually does either comedies like "Punch Drunk Love"...
or crime dramas like Soderbergh's high falutin message movie "Traffic"...
... but seldom do you see him in costume pictures like "The Count Of Monte Cristo".

Let's see what the big falsehood purveyors at Wikipedia have to say...

Luis Guzmán (born August 28, 1956 or 1957[1]) is a Puerto Rican actor. He is known for his character work. For much of his career, his squat build, wolfish features, and brooding countenance have garnered him roles largely as sidekicks, thugs, or policemen, but his later career has seen him move into more mainstream roles. He is a favorite of directors Steven Soderbergh, who cast him in Out of Sight, The Limey, and Traffic, and Paul Thomas Anderson, who cast him in Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love.

Personal life
Guzmán was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico and was raised in New York City's Greenwich Village and the surrounding Lower East Side neighborhood. His mother, Rosa, was a hospital worker, and his stepfather, Benjamin Cardona, was a TV repairman.[1] A graduate of City College of New York, he began his career not as an actor but as a social worker; however, he moonlighted as an actor and became heavily involved in street theater and independent films. He currently lives with his wife Angelita Galarza-Guzmán and their five children in Sutton, Vermont, where he owns a ranch called Wild Orchid Stables.

Career
Guzman's numerous movie credits include Carlito's Way, Carlito's Way: Rise to Power, Welcome to Collinwood, Stonewall, Waiting..., The Salton Sea, and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. He has also appeared on the TV shows Homicide: Life on the Street, Frasier and Oz and had a role in the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and its prequel Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. Guzmán starred in the short-lived 2003 television comedy Luis, and is a commentator on VH1's I Love the '80s and its sequels, including I Love the '70s and I Love the '90s. He co-starred on the canceled 2007 HBO series John from Cincinnati.

For me, I love Guzman in everything I've seen him in. His way with a line is like a less grandiose Peter Falk and he can always exude menace when he is the bad guy. Mostly he plays comic relief to the hero.

But one of his roles gave him the rare (for him) opportunity to be in a costume drama*, playing "Jacopo" in "The Count of Monte Cristo". I know people who have had a problem with Guzman, who is a very modern actor, being in a period piece, where everyone else has the King's English accents. But, like Harvey Keitel as a Brooklynite** Judas Iscariot in "The Last Temptation Of Christ ", Guzman is a such a good actor, it's not really a problem.

And you can tell he's loved by the fanboys, because the geeksites only refer to him as "Gooooooozzzzzzmannnnnn!".

The bottom line is, like many of the actors I admire, he is both talented and nice enough to work with, that he is asked back repeatedly by some of the great filmmakers of our day, including Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Soderbergh.

Gooooooozzzzzzmannnnnn!

*unless you count the "Carlito's Way" films. And no one does.
**A form of Kryptonite that turns Superman into a formerly lower class borough of New York that has recently gone through a major urban renaissance. Lex Luthor found it effective when he wanted to both defeat Superman and create real estate for urban hipsters who have just started to raise children at the same time.

And The Name Is James Hong!

2007-10-24T19:23:00.000-07:00

Not only has he been in a billion zillion* films and television shows, he also helped found the premier Asian American repertory theater in the country...
... but if you're my age (shut up) you would remember him as the eye specialist in "Blade Runner" ...
...or if you're a little younger (seriously, stop it) you might remember him in "Big Trouble In Little China. "

But I tend to think of him as Faye Dunaway's butler in "Chinatown". You can find more about Hong on his website , including how he helped to found EastWest Players, his acting classes, etc. The guy has a lot irons in the fire, not to mention a documentary about him making the rounds called "Man Of A Thousand Faces" and it shows in the over 300 listings for him on IMDB in the actor section alone.

What tends to make James Hong stick out for me as an actor is his humor. He has a crack in his voice and a glint in his eye that lets you know he enjoys his work. Just watch him in anything he does including the episode of "Chuck" he was on the other night. Playing a Triad boss named "Ben", Hong (even though his character is stuck in a wheelchair) is on fire with every appearance he makes in the episode.

The joy of acting is evident in whatever this guy does. Just like my other heroes Vincent Price, William Shatner, Orson Welles, and, of course, Adam West.

I am completely serious about this. You may not like some of the actors I mention, but you have to admit, each one of these talents love what they do.

Which is a rare and wonderful thing, in this cockeyed, carnival ride, to completely screw up Preston Sturges' great line from "Sullivan's Travels".

*A real number, created by Stephen Hawkins in his spare time. Look it up.

And The Name Is Anthony Zerbe!

2007-10-23T22:37:00.000-07:00

Although he has had a wonderfully varied stage career, throughout his film/television career, Anthony Zerbe has played mostly villains...
...trying to get the drop on Timothy Dalton's Bond, James Bond in "License To Kill"...
...freaking out a young Mr. Jones (and Charlton Heston) in "The Omega Man"...
...but interestingly enough, the role he might be best remembered for is the old, grizzled boss of ABC-TV's "The Young Riders"*!

Here's what the fibbers at Wikipedia have to say about Zerbe...

Anthony Jared Zerbe (born May 20, 1936 in Long Beach, California) is an American stage, film and television actor.
Zerbe studied at the Stella Adler Theater Studio in New York. He is the former artistic director of Reflections, A New Plays Festival at the GeVa Theatre in Rochester, New York, which is currently touring the United States in Behind The Broken Words, a performance of contemporary poetry, comedy and dramatic works with fellow actor Roscoe Lee Browne. Zerbe also continues to perform in a project, Prelude to Lime Creek, with poet and lyricist Joe Henry.
From 1959 to 1961, Anthony Zerbe served in the United States Air Force. In 1976, Zerbe won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Continuing Performance By a Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Harry O).
He married Arnette Jens on October 7, 1962.

In my much-lamented former life as a stand-up comic**, I used to have a bit in my act where I did, what I'm sure, is the only impression of Zerbe ever. The idea came from my memories of seeing this guy play the bad guy in almost every other episodic crime show on TV in the early to mid-seventies.

Especially shows like "Cannon", "Ironside", "Hawaii Five-O", and, of course, "KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park". Zerbe would give these shows his all, which meant using some very theatrical enunciation (putting him squarely in Vincent Price territory- not a slam, I assure you) while playing, in some cases drug pushers "from the streets", or other non-stage trained characters. The bit always went something like this...

It's an episode of "Cannon" , where the detective has tracked down a "Mr. Jericho", a down and dirty pusher who has gotten Cannon's pal's daughter hooked on "the stuff". Jericho is the kind of character who wears paisley, collar-less shirts, John Lennon-ish sunglasses and Zerbe's trademarked, early-seventies slicked-back longish (but short enough that he could slick it back for his rare forays into respectability, playing cop foils on other crime shows) hair.

Zerbe, in his clench-jawed theatrical enunciation and wolf-ish smile, says, "Cannon what're you hassling me for? I'm just a simple businessman."

Cannon, in his booming Cannon-voice says, "Business? What business? Selling junk to kids?"

To which Zerbe, chuckling, replies "Wait a second, first I'm a drug pusher, then a junk man- get your story straight Cannon!"

Audiences everywhere adored me.

Because comedy club patrons love a good Zerbe.

*Not to be confused with FOX-TV's experimental pilot for "The Jung Riders" about a squad of psychiatric crime fighters in Europe at the turn of the century solving mysteries using dream therapy and gestalt theories. Zerbe was to have played their comic foil Sigmund Freud. It was passed over for "The New Adventures Of Beans Baxter" instead.
**See Variety's June 17th, 2007 front page headline "Whither Jones?" in which the world of comedy is quoted as "shedding a bitter tear that Jones walked away".