The list of men I admire in the movies is quite long. It goes from Lon Chaney Sr. to Gable to Tracy to Fredric March. It includes Mitchum, Clift, Kirk Douglas, Lon Chaney Jr., Michael Douglas, Tyrone Power, James Garner, Burt Lancaster, Yves Montand, Colin Firth, Albert Finney, Robert De Niro, Robert Preston, Paul Newman, Peter O’Toole, Gregory Peck, Maximilian Schell, and Gary Oldman.
My favorite movie actor is William Holden. On-screen, Holden is handsome, graceful, charming, and funny. He is tough and resourceful enough to handle himself in any type of predicament. In a range of films from Golden Boy to The Bridge on the River Kwai and Sabrina, from Sunset Boulevard to Stalag 17 and The Wild Bunch, Holden could do it all. I knew that developing a style like his was not practical. He was an original and tough to imitate. Plus, the scripts in those days were tailored for him. Writers today, in most cases, don’t necessarily write for a particular actor. But what I wouldn’t give to have been born in 1925 or so, to have survived the war and gone on to a career in films in that Golden Age of the 1940s and ’50s.
In small and not so small ways, many young actors seek to latch on to the persona of a particular star and channel that star in their early work. Some newcomers try to bring their Brando, Dean, Mitchum, Pacino, De Niro, or Nicholson to the roles. Women may try, especially when they’re young, to pull in everything from Monroe to Katharine Hepburn. They may try to emulate, not only in terms of style but also career choices, someone who is a contemporary like Meryl Streep, Cherry Jones, or Cate Blanchett. Young actors have to come up with something and haven’t had much experience. So why not steal from the best?
I don’t remember stealing from anyone, at least not in any overt sense. (Maybe a bit from Joe Maher!) But an actor who says they don’t borrow from others in their early years is a liar. I’d see an actor like Edward G. Robinson snarl a line (“Yeah, see?”), and at some point, I’d think, “I’m gonna snarl like Edward G.” Cagney was so cocky—let’s sprinkle a little of that in there. Bogart was so subtle, so silky, yet so playful—let’s layer a little of Bogey into this line. Let your face relax while holding a faint smile, like you just woke up from a nap, like Mitchum. Make the zingers zing, like Nicholson. Say the line with a smoldering, quiet tone, then thunder on the last phrase, like Pacino.
I suppose the contemporary actor who I most wanted to emulate was Pacino. Al’s passion, intensity, and sexuality, all of his now legendary signatures, took my breath away. The scene in Serpico when John Randolph presents Serpico with his gold shield, a bullet hole bored into Al’s face, his indignity, disgust, and rage are barely containable. As Randolph presses the badge onto Al’s chest, Pacino collapses in tears that, to this day, go straight through me. I didn’t want to imitate Al. But I wanted to learn from him. The task was to maintain a reservoir of emotional truth, pain, and love.
Even though Marlon Brando’s film career seems far in the past now, for some he remains a sort of gold standard. No doubt, Brando is a monolithic talent. He reached an undiscovered place in terms of emotional truth and complexity in film acting. And he developed this gift at such a young age. But Brando’s difficult relationship with the business, and with himself, left me wondering when Brando was acting and when he was mocking. His contempt for what he viewed as false or pretentious in Hollywood resonated with me. When he gave his all, the results were incomparable. But it became clear later in his career that he had no intention of giving his all in many films. A battered, fatigued Brando thought that simply showing up was enough. Perhaps actors with Brando’s unmatched talent, and the attendant worship that comes with that, run the risk of such cynicism, even self-destruction.
Movie stardom amplified Brando’s family issues, industry battles, and neuroses, ultimately overwhelming him. Pacino always struck me as different. Pacino seemed focused on balancing his two roles as actor and star, not easy given that his own accomplishments in the movies are legendary. He returned to the theater with some regularity, certainly more than most at his level. Like Nicholson, when it was called for, he left his vanity at home and just played the role, and beautifully, as in Angels in America. In films like The Godfather and Scarface, he put the character’s ugly nature on display. However, in films like Dog Day Afternoon, Carlito’s Way, and Donnie Brasco, his ability to break your heart is like no other. I don’t know about you, but I go to the movies to have my heart broken every now and then, and I’ve always relied on Al to bring that emotional wallop to his films.
Although I studied their work, I could never have Holden’s career, or Brando’s, or Al’s. Those careers are of their time. What I did have was Gus Trikonis’s advice that I simply focus on trying to do my best in whatever film role I landed.
Once the Tom Clancy franchise was out of the equation, I didn’t have to worry about protecting some squeaky-clean image. I learned that if you are willing and have an aptitude for playing an intelligent villain, your options change. Many actors, to this day, shy away from playing the bad guy. Even though those roles can offer great acting opportunities, some stars won’t take the chance that such work might tarnish their image. In the case of stars like Cruise and Hanks, this is understandable. They have towering careers in the movies built upon a combination of integrity and heroics. When I watched Cruise in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, I thought he had won the Oscar. He was riveting. But perhaps someone told him to never do that again and, for Cruise, villainous roles disappeared.
In movies like Malice and The Juror, playing the “negative value” in the script (a phrase I borrowed from the great director Harold Becker) was both fun and not without a cost. Hollywood studio executives, so limited in their creativity, make things easy on themselves by ruling that you can’t be the hero of a film if, in your last one, you stepped onto a school bus with a flamethrower. (Especially in one of their own pictures!) In the ’90s, most of the films I had made after Hunt had underperformed, or were outright turkeys. The Shadow, The Getaway, Heaven’s Prisoners, and The Juror offered me some wonderful experiences, but little luck at the box office.
When Rob Reiner asked me to do Ghosts of Mississippi, I thought that it was a real chance to gain back some ground in terms of my film career. The picture had been developed for Tom Hanks, and when he was unavailable, I got the call. But from the moment Reiner said “Action!,” it was clear to me that he wished it were still Hanks in front of the camera. Back then, Reiner left little to chance and made films only with the biggest stars available. In spite of a very soft script (“Another civil rights story told through the eyes of a white protagonist,” Coretta King complained to Myrlie Evers at the premiere. “Where is Medgar?”), making the film was very gratifying, although it did not succeed. However, in the summer of 1996, a script arrived that I had a hunch was my last real chance to save my movie career.
The first play by David Mamet that I performed in was A Life in the Theatre in 1987 at the old Hartman Theatre in Stamford, Connecticut, directed by A. J. Antoon. In 1972, Antoon held the distinction of being nominated for two Tonys in the same season, winning best director for That Championship Season. Antoon, a remarkably agile director, emphasized the importance of lighting, sets, and how the actor must move on the stage within his design for maximum effect. Antoon died of an AIDS-related illness in 1992, just five years after we worked together.
The piece is a two-hander and one of my favorites by Mamet. The other actor was the great Mike Nussbaum, a veteran of numerous early Chicago productions of Mamet’s work, including this play. Every day I traveled from Grand Central to Stamford during a snowy winter. It was the theater, which means that along with compelling material, there were no frills. In late December, we began rehearsals using a banquet room on the second floor of a VFW hall near the theater as a rehearsal space.
Like nearly every actor trained in the past few decades, I am a great admirer of David’s writing. Whether by way of scenes from Sexual Perversity in Chicago attempted in acting classes, our production at the Hartman, or filming Glengarry Glen Ross, I respected his ear for great dialogue. His roles for contemporary men are like no other. The lines that close act one in Oleanna make up some of my favorite writing in the theater. Carol struggles to communicate with her professor, John, saying, “All my life . . .” and stops. John replies, “Go on.” Carol says, “I’ve never told anyone this . . .” And suddenly, John’s phone rings. His wife is calling, and John’s life punctures their halting foreplay. When John hangs up, a humiliated Carol snaps out of her unaccustomed vulnerability. The moment is priceless. Whenever I’ve seen it performed, I gasp slightly and I love teaching it in any class I’ve taught.
In July of 1996, a script arrived from my agent entitled Bookworm, written by Mamet. As was the case on maybe five occasions in my life, I sequestered myself from everyone around me and read the screenplay the moment I opened the envelope. When I was finished, I called my agent to say that I loved it, and in a couple of weeks I was in a conference room in a Beverly Hills hotel with the presumptive director, Lee Tamahori, the producers, and other actors reading the smaller roles. Playing the other lead role was Robert De Niro. I was, obviously, beside myself with the prospect of working with Bob. However, the character was named Charles Morse, and as tycoons go, De Niro is more Stavros Niarchos. De Niro did the reading and decided he didn’t want to play the part.
I was offered the other lead role and waited for them to tell me who they would cast in De Niro’s place. That month, I went with Kim, Ireland, and Kim’s siblings and father to Figure Eight Island, just off the coast of Wilmington, North Carolina. We’d vacationed there for several years as it was a reasonable drive from Athens, Georgia, where Kim grew up and her family lived. I remember sitting on a bed in our rented beach house when my agent called to tell me that Anthony Hopkins had just been cast in the role of Morse. I literally welled up with tears of joy.
Just two years prior, the producer of the Oscars, Gil Cates, asked me to present a clip from a nominated film. I told Gil I would if that film could be The Remains of the Day, which was one of my favorites that year. I worshipped Emma Thompson and admired the director, James Ivory. The movie I shot with Hopkins would be one of the few of my films that I can watch. Its mournful treatment of the main character’s struggle to connect with people in any meaningful way requires an actor of Tony’s ability. Who plays existential angst better than Hopkins?
We began shooting that August on location all over Alberta, Canada. The cast and crew were in hotels and rental houses in Canmore, thirty-odd minutes from the gates of Banff National Park. It was decided to jettison the title Bookworm, which I preferred. The new title, The Edge, should have provided a clue as to how Tamahori, the producer Art Linson, and the studio execs at Fox wanted to shape the film into more of a conventional action-adventure-drama than the baroque thriller I thought I had signed on for. The script told the story of Morse, an awkward, introverted billionaire, who accompanies his supermodel wife, Mickey (Elle Macpherson), on a photo shoot in the Alaskan semiwilderness. Unbeknownst to Morse (or maybe not), his wife has been having an on-again, off-again affair with the attending photographer, Bob Green, played by yours truly. I loved the script because it was simple and stark, throwing two men into desperate circumstances, simultaneously mistrusting and needing each other. In several scenes, such as when a third companion, played by Harold Perrineau, is killed, the film mimics The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its moments of unbridled humanity.
In one rehearsal, Tamahori said, “This scene on page fourteen. I think we should just cut the first four speeches. David does tend to go on a bit.” I felt that the way David tends to “go on” was the very reason I was there. At one point, I telephoned Mamet, who listened politely to my concerns about the changes in the tone of the film. Then he said, “Alec, these scripts are like orphan children to me. I write them, they pay me, and they belong to someone else.” In terms of Hollywood protocol, he was right. As he was not the director, he wouldn’t waste his time worrying about how the film was being made. During the actual shooting, Tamahori revealed that he had little, if any, affinity for dramatizing the tensions between Morse and Green. Instead, he relied on Bart the Bear, our Alaskan Kodiak castmate, to execute the kind of storytelling he could comprehend.
Ultimately, the stars of the film are two incomparable icons, the Canadian Rockies and Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins treated me to my favorite acting collaboration and the best view of a truly great actor I’d had since shooting Knots Landing with Julie Harris. With his classical training, subtly expressive face and limpid eyes, and an essential sturdiness and strength, he is my favorite living actor. No matter the role, there is always both the gentleman and the thug, the man and the beast present in so much of his work. I had studied Hopkins (and I do mean studied) going back to 1974, when he starred in the television adaptation of Leon Uris’s QB VII. I’d then watched him in films like Magic, The Elephant Man, The Remains of the Day, Nixon, and, of course, The Silence of the Lambs. After we worked together, Tony, ever the pugnacious iconoclast, still delighted me in The World’s Fastest Indian.
Hopkins has numerous gifts, and it is, of course, his voice that casts his spell. Like the French horn solo from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, he simply opens his mouth to speak and his work is halfway done. While many British actors imbue their work with something a bit more polished than Americans do, with Hopkins there is an added layer. Whether it’s something sensuous or dangerous, it’s palpable. While we were on location in Banff National Park, my sister Beth came to visit me. My sister Beth flew from Syracuse to Toronto to Calgary, then drove ninety minutes to the set, arriving rather tired. I found Hopkins lying on an air mattress, recommended for a neck and back injury that he joked he picked up while channeling Nixon. I approached him and said, “Tony, I’d like you to meet my sister Beth.” Hopkins put down the newspaper, stood, and slowly looked up at my sister, his blue eyes like sapphires that he had often utilized to similar effect, no doubt. “Elizabeth,” he purred, taking her hand, “what a pleasure to meet you.” When he kissed the back of it, I thought that Beth, a married mother of six, was about to faint.
Another career lesson occurred while shooting The Edge. A year earlier, in 1995, I had become quite committed to the work of one of the entertainment industry’s leading arts advocacy organizations, The Creative Coalition, founded in 1989 by actor Ron Silver in cooperation with then HBO CEO Michael Fuchs and a roster of actors including Susan Sarandon, Stephen Collins, Blair Brown, and Christopher Reeve. Silver had wanted to harness the energies of politically engaged members of the industry who were willing to work on behalf of specific causes. His basic idea was to invite his more activist show business friends to study the issues on a level they had not been exposed to before. Programs were produced wherein experts and scholars lectured the TCC members—including not only famous actors but also writers, producers, musicians, and agents—as well as the public. TCC raised awareness on a range of core issues that included arts advocacy and the responsibility of the federal government in arts funding, gun control, First Amendment rights and issues related to freedom of expression, the reproductive rights of women, federal and state enforcement of environmental regulation, and campaign finance reform.
At the 1995 retreat, which was held in New York, I vividly recall standing next to Chris Reeve and knowing that he would run for political office, probably the Senate, and soon. He had cultivated a more moderate and politically adroit stance while serving as TCC’s president. He spoke more carefully and was less confrontational with our “opponents,” and he admonished me to follow suit. The very premise of TCC, that movie stars could effectively draw the attention of legislators and impact public policy if they had been sufficiently briefed, was embodied by Chris. It was entertaining to walk the halls of Congress with Chris to lobby for the issues TCC had adopted. The congressional staffs and elected officials themselves reacted to Chris in a charged way. Members of Congress would beam when meeting Chris and shout, “Come on in here, Superman!” Two weeks later, he broke his neck and was paralyzed. Soon after that, I was elected TCC’s president.
While shooting The Edge in Canada the following year, I informed the producers of a TCC commitment I needed to keep in New York. I went so far as to have them book my plane ticket to avoid any confusion about my trip. However, the late-evening flight from New York was delayed, and the connection, an odd Las Vegas junket to Calgary, took off without me on it. I wrote down the names and contact info of the flight crew in charge and called the first assistant director, a guy named Phil Patterson. Phil, who played a role similar to a sergeant in the army, seemed worried by my news, but took a deep breath and said, “We’ll try to shoot around it. Get here as quick as you can.” The next morning, I flew from New York to Calgary, stopping in Toronto. The trip took up most of the day. I arrived at work that Monday, in the late afternoon. We did a couple of uncomplicated shots, and I went back to my rented house in Canmore. The next day, I walked into my trailer to find a FedEx envelope from a Fox attorney named Bill Petrasich waiting for me. Fox was suing me for the lost production time.
After some inquiries, I was told that the head of the studio at the time, Tom Rothman, had envisioned someone else in my role, an actor who was either unavailable, unaffordable, or unwilling. Therefore, when the time came to make my deal for the film, Fox negotiators were taciturn, as they were negotiating with someone who was certainly not their first choice. Perhaps I had them over a barrel, to some extent, because the movie was in the pipeline and they believed they had to move forward. But when you are unwanted, your demands are always viewed as excessive.
When shooting films on location, I brought seven men with me: Carl Fullerton, makeup; Rick Provenzano, hair; Myron Baker, personal wardrobe; Fred Liberman, driver; Ted Haggerty, stand-in; Gary Tacon, stunt double; and Greg Pace, personal assistant. These guys had shot several films with me. They were my movie family. They also cost the studio some money, which may have pissed them off. However, the idea that a major studio would threaten to sue a lead actor on one of their films for missing work as the result of someone else’s error or negligence, even though I had offered them all the proof they needed that it had been far beyond my control, was more than ridiculous. It was abusive. I went to Art Linson, the producer, and asked him to intervene.
A producer, I’ve been told, is a person who brings an “essential element” to the table to get a film made. That can be money, material, or movie stars. Linson, who had made films like Melvin and Howard, The Untouchables, and Casualties of War, was the type of producer who was “friends” with certain actors, which I assume gave him a leg up when submitting scripts for them to consider. Robert De Niro and Sean Penn fell into that category, and rather quickly, it became clear I did not. Linson did nothing to help me. I was now stuck in the middle of Alberta, my wife and young child at home in LA, with a director who had no business making the film and a producer who was content to watch the studio fuck with me as some kind of payback for my desire to bring the same crew I’d taken on the road with me for years. Years later, Linson, believing that his own career was the stuff of Hollywood legend, made his memoir What Just Happened into a 2008 film with De Niro playing him. De Niro called me and asked me to play a character based on myself in the film. It was a testament to the loyalty of Linson’s friends that De Niro would even ask me such a stupid question.
With little hope that a good film would emerge from this scenario, I was left with Tony, the breathtaking scenery, the wonderful music of Jerry Goldsmith, and the cinematography of Don McAlpine. We helicoptered to the top of Mount Assiniboine, which, at 11,850 feet, is the highest peak of the southern Canadian Rockies. When we alighted from a helicopter at the top of Assiniboine, I felt as if I had died and gone to heaven. Prior to that trip, I thought Big Sur was the most beautiful place I had ever been. I may even have voted for the beaches in East Hampton, right in my own backyard, or Kruger National Park in South Africa. But in Alberta, everywhere you look is unforgettable. The people are lovely, too. Away from the ceaseless noise, hucksterism, and smugness of America, Canada itself is a balm to the soul.
During the shoot, I learned more about Tony. He was raised in the same town in Wales as Richard Burton, who encouraged him at a young age to attend the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. As he spoke, I envisioned this shy boy who liked to paint going on to become an Oscar-winning film star and receiving a knighthood from the queen. Tony spoke casually about his training at RADA and his early stage career at the National Theatre under the direction of Laurence Olivier, and stunned me with his assertion that Hollywood had always been his goal. But if I pressed him further, eager to hear more and showing him my own apprentice’s heart, a smile would come across his face and wonderful stories about Olivier’s vanity, playfulness, and, above all, talent would spill out.
In The Edge, my character, Bob, is one of the more vacuous characters I’ve ever played, and it was interesting, sometimes fun, recalling people I had known, even worked with, who lent me some idea for the character. Bob is intimidated by Charles’s intellectual and psychological powers. It was not hard to play that while acting opposite Tony. At the end, Bob chooses to exonerate Charles’s wife, Mickey, out of respect for Charles. It was easy to love and respect Tony in the extreme as well.
Years later, when I performed in Peter Shaffer’s Equus on Long Island in 2010, I asked Shaffer if he thought it was worthwhile for me to see the original production, with Hopkins and Peter Firth, that is on tape at the Lincoln Center library. Shaffer said, “I don’t think so, only because the cast did not wish to be taped. So Roberta Maxwell did not perform that show. Firth put on a North Country accent, completely out of character. And Tony impersonated Larry Olivier the entire performance.” After a bit of a pause, he said, “Very naughty boys.” This actually came as no surprise to me. Hopkins is funny and a wonderful mimic. On the set of The Edge, Hopkins and I had played a game of dueling Richard Burtons. The goal was to not only impersonate Burton but to distill the self-destructive genius down to his essence. Eventually, Tony won the game for all time with his almost haiku-like incantation: “Elizabeth! Baubles and stones. White wine. Marbella.” Then he feigned passing out.
One of my favorite images from making films comes from shooting a scene with Tony, running through a glacier-fed stream, pursued by Bart the Bear. When we began the picture, the temperature was in the low seventies and we wore bug repellent. Weeks later, we wore thermal linings in our costumes as we spent the day in frigid water. Along the bank of the stream, the crew had situated a hot tub that we could jump into to stay warm between takes, as our costumes were already soaked through. I sat in that hot tub, smoking a great Cuban cigar and muttering, “Baubles and stones. White wine. Marbella.” Here I was that little boy again, repeating the famous actor’s lines. Only now, the famous actor was my costar and the lines were spoken to me over lunch. I’ll never have it that good again. Not ever.
The final ten minutes of The Edge are the only piece of my own film work that I can ever watch and enjoy. The movie got decent reviews and made a nickel or two at the box office. I returned to Alberta for many years after the film wrapped to ski at Lake Louise, Kicking Horse, and Banff. I loved it so much, I thought I’d move there.
There was a period during the ’90s when, if I asked a question, made a request, or sought a piece of information, before my sentence was even finished, the response would be, “Of course, Mr. Baldwin, of course.” After The Edge, things would change, irrevocably, in my film career. In some ways that was a good thing, insofar as the less power you believe you have, the simpler life can get. And simple is good in acting. It just took me a bit more time to learn that.