GRIZZARD FINDS GLOBE’S ‘ANTIGONE’ FITS LIKE A GLOVE

George Grizzard has played Hamlet, Henry V and President John Adams. He’s worked alongside Jason Robards, Paul Newman and Sophia Loren. He’s been described as an “actor’s actor,” with more than three decades’ experience.

He’s worked with such playwrights as Edward Albee, Arthur Miller and now A.R. (Pete) Gurney Jr.

“I’m grateful to God for introducing me to Pete Gurney,” Grizzard said on a recent afternoon, “because Pete writes plays for middle-aged WASPs. I’d gotten to the point where, well, there’s ‘Life with Father’ and ‘King Lear,’ what else can I do?”

And then he laughed. Grizzard turned 59 on April Fool’s Day and worried that “Entertainment Tonight,” the chatty talk show of Hollywood gossip, might mention it.

Not that it would hurt Grizzard, who seems very much at peace with himself. He’s currently playing in Gurney’s “Another Antigone,” making its world premiere at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage of the Old Globe Theatre.

It is Grizzard’s Old Globe debut, and his first time in San Diego.

“I love it,” he said. “I love the sunshine.”

A veteran of the New York stage who now lives on a farm in Connecticut, he enjoys the West Coast for another reason. It has one benefit missing in East Coast theater: parking.

Grizzard is a thin, wiry man--about 5-feet-8, 145 pounds--who smokes an occasional cigarette and loves a martini and steak at the end of a day. His humor and depth as an actor are much in evidence in “Another Antigone,” playing a gruff, irascible, unyielding professor who’s impossible not to like.

The professor is highly principled. A devotee of the Greek classics, he refuses to compromise with students titillated by trendy alternatives. He believes in training the mind, and the body, showing reverence when reverence is due.

“The play really excites me,” Grizzard said. “I’m very much in favor of education. That’s the way any group gets out--out of the barrio, the ghetto, the sharecropping farm. Education does it. I think our prejudices are based on a lack of education. Prejudice has nothing to do with race, color or creed but a lot to do with ignorance. Lack of education leaves us frightened of other people.

“There’s a lot about that professor I like. I like his courage--he takes responsibility for what he does. I believe in that, in not blaming somebody else for what goes wrong with your life.”

Grizzard and the character also share, he said, “rigidity. My parents used to complain I was too rigid. The older I get, I’m even more rigid.”

He’s rigid about exercise--he does it once a day, whether he needs it or not. He has occasionally turned down plays, because he didn’t agree with the playwright’s theme. He’s rigid about the need to read, believing the line in the play:

“We live in an age when a good book is as obsolete as an aeolian harp.”

Grizzard was born in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., but moved with his family to Washington at age seven. He was an only child. In the second grade, his accent was so thick his teacher sent him home with a note, saying he needed remedial speech.

He makes no secret of trying to shuck his Southern twang. From all outward indications, he’s succeeded beautifully. His voice is a clear, articulate tenor. He said he’s sometimes mistaken for being British, an accent he’s never tried to affect.

Grizzard has lost not only an accent but at times, critics say--in praise--his own identity in a myriad of roles. His friend, Paul Newman--like his friend, Robert Redford--has sometimes been criticized for playing himself. But Grizzard set out “not to be typecast,” and thus immerses himself in a part.

Among his most famous roles was that of John Adams, whom he portrayed for PBS’ “The Adams Chronicles,” which aired as a Bicentennial event in 1976.

The Times said of that performance:

“It becomes increasingly difficult to separate that character from the actor who plays him.”

Grizzard’s early teachers were strict, as were his parents. (His father was an accountant and later a government worker.) In looking back, he sees those influences--as well as the big names of drama he’s had the chance to work with--as offering the lasting moments of a nearly 40-year career.

He played Paul Newman’s little brother in “The Desperate Hours,” which marked Grizzard’s debut in 1955.

“I was so happy for him the other night when he won his Oscar,” Grizzard said. “He deserved it. He was wonderful in that movie (‘The Color of Money’). I was thrilled when Joanne (Woodward, Newman’s wife) won 25 years ago (actually, 30), for ‘The Three Faces of Eve.’ I remember letting out a yell in the theater in New Haven.”

Like Newman and Woodward, Grizzard has done TV and movies, as well as scores of plays. He likes the money that TV and film pay and the chance to unwind in the evening, which the theater never allows. It has, he said, a way of eliminating the martini and steak.

He’s done commercial voice-overs for Exxon, TWA and Prudential. He likes that money, too, saying he’d love to win the lottery and retire from acting forever. In the meantime, he has the satisfaction of knowing he’s taken risks--he’s come a long way from the countryside of North Carolina--and that most have worked.

“Once, Joanne and I were up in Williamstown, Mass.,” Grizzard said. “I was doing Noel Coward, and she was doing ‘The Glass Menagerie.’ I was singing, dancing. I was so glad I didn’t know Paul and Joanne were in the crowd.

“Later, Paul came backstage and said, ‘You’ve got the (courage) of a gorilla.’ I think maybe he’d like to do the kind of thing I was doing, am doing. But his idea of courage is different from mine.

“You would never catch me in a race car, driving 100 miles an hour.”