SUMMER STARS

It happens every year. Certain summer films give certain actors a chance to bloom. But what happens once the warm weather ends? We checked in on a decade’s worth of summer stars to see what’s happened since.

1980: BARRY CORBIN IN ‘URBAN COWBOY’

“I think you have to be typecast. A lot of actors are very versatile actors but there’s nothing to grab hold of,” said the man known for his countrified characters.

“When the casting people start thinking about actors, they don’t think about these particular people because they do such a wide diversity of things. I have a hook.”

Corbin--who recently shed 30 pounds (which he’d gained to play roles older than his 45 years)--stars as the hard-as-nails businessman in the current “Nothing in Common.” He also appears as a police captain in the just-wrapped feature, “Undercover,” and as Lyndon Johnson’s campaign manager in NBC’s fall mini-series, “L.B.J.”

He’s also in the low-budget late-summer entry, “Sweat,” and the upcoming TV movie, “Greater Alarm,” about the first woman firefighter in L.A.

“Since I started doing film I play a much narrower range than I played on stage,” said Corbin, who spent 12-years doing enough off-off-Broadway and Broadway to establish a repertoire of everything from “Shakespeare to (Irish playwright) Brian Friel.” Said Corbin:

“When I was based in New York I would take anything that anybody would offer me. I (even) played women on stage.”

He had TV in mind when he headed for Los Angeles. “My ambition really was to do six or eight guest shots in a series and maybe be a regular on a series. But it’s worked out better than that,” he said. Still, in the beginning it was radio--not TV--where he found work. He and actress-wife Susan Berger paid the rent by writing and performing one-act plays for Pacifica radio station KPFK.

And these days? “I am beginning to believe I have a career out here. You start believing that maybe you have a career and maybe somebody isn’t going to come along and take it all way from you after you have been working five or six years.”