The ‘Mask’ Is Off for Private Person Stoltz

There are all the old jokes about the actor’s ego. Fred Allen said of one actor that he was last seen walking down Lover’s Lane holding hands with himself. Someone described another actor whose fondest wish was to die in his own arms.

Any interviewer meets actors, male and female, who find the contents of their mirrors obsessively fascinating and who must say why, at some length.

But at the other end of the spectrum there are actors--more now than ever it has seemed to me--who prize not only their privacy but a kind of anonymity. They are willing to talk about their films and their craft, but, for the rest of it, they would as soon be thought of as disembodied but functioning spirits.

Although it was not his first film, Eric Stoltz made a stunning impression as Cher’s tragically deformed son in the Peter Bogdanovich film “Mask,” a role in which Stoltz as Stoltz was for all practical purposes concealed and only the performance showed, like John Hurt’s in “The Elephant Man.”

Undisguised, Stoltz is a personable, red-haired and red-bearded young man who gets about on a motorbike (a fairly anonymous vehicle in Southern California), lives in a rear flat in a converted Victorian-style mansion on Hollywood Boulevard, works in Europe as frequently as he can and talks as little as possible about his private life.

He has lately co-starred with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Judith Ivey in a humid Louisiana thriller called “Sister Sister,” which moved in and out of Los Angeles fairly quickly. He spent last summer in Europe, where he made back-to-back pictures with Ivan Passer and Dusan Makavejev.

Born in American Samoa, Stoltz grew up in Santa Barbara and fell into acting early, doing juveniles in a local summer theater when he was 10. He spent two years studying theater arts at USC but dropped out, he says, “because it wasn’t the experience I needed. There was no interaction between film and theater, so you had actors who were afraid of the camera and directors who had no knowledge of acting and no idea of how to direct actors. I’ve worked with directors who are frightened of actors.”

He took off for Europe and appeared with an American repertory troupe at the Edinburgh Festival in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” and other plays before he came back to Hollywood to tackle television and the movies.

Stoltz studied privately in Los Angeles with the late Peggy Feury and says that the acting exercises and discipline changed his life.

He made his film debut in a small part as Sean Penn’s pal in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” “Mask” (1985) was the large break, and it was, Stoltz says, “like being caught between two hurricanes.” The differences between Cher and director Bogdanovich were well publicized, but Stoltz says, “I feel they drove each other upward to peak performances and it helped the picture.”

Back in Europe Stoltz has appeared in “Emerald,” a World War II thriller with Ed Harris, and in Franklin Schaffner’s story of the Crusades, “Lionheart,” which awaits release.

Earlier last year, he appeared in John Hughes’ “Some Kind of Wonderful.” Last summer Stoltz played the poet Shelley in Ivan Passer’s “Haunted Summer,” from a Lewis John Carlino script based on the Anne Edwards novel. Passer has been editing the film in Los Angeles and Stoltz sits in on the process, “watching them prune this wild rose bush into shape.”

Stoltz says: “The directors I like most to work with are the most experienced--so confident of their own ability that they’re open to suggestion. Ivan prefers little rehearsal. He lets it happen and likes to be surprised. He’s fascinated by imperfection, happy accidents. You never know what’ll happen.” Makavejev stopped by the shooting of the Passer film in Rome, and from the meeting came a small part for Stoltz as a lovesick postman in “For a Night of Love,” from an Emile Zola story, which Makavejev shot in Yugoslavia.

“Dusan gets flashes of genius,” Stoltz says. “He’ll say, ‘Be ecological! Be a cloud!’ ” Stoltz grins. “They never teach you how to work with European directors.”

He sips a milkshake at a funky restaurant on the Sunset Strip. “I love acting, I really do,” he says. “I’m amazed I get paid to do it. I’m not even that much interested in the final product. It’s the process that matters. We had a good, hard time on ‘Sister Sister,’ but it’s history. It’s the next one that matters.” He will be working Off-Broadway in a Horton Foote play shortly.

He and Passer would like to do Turgenev’s “Spring Torrents” one of these times. “I don’t have to work now,” Stoltz says. “Choice is the greatest luxury of all.”

He grabs his protective and concealing helmet, fires up the bike and slips anonymously into the darkness and the westbound Sunset traffic.