Television Actor Ray Sharkey’s Machine Is Back on Track

When they went looking for Ray Sharkey to offer him a part as the prime bad guy on a proposed TV series, they didn’t know where to find him.

Everybody in Hollywood knew about Sharkey. He was the fellow who had made such an impression in “The Idolmaker.” He was the actor film critic Pauline Kael had called the next James Cagney after seeing him in a movie called “Hot Tomorrow.” He was the guy who had been all over the tube as a series guest star in the mid-’70s.

Whatever happened to Ray Sharkey? They tried calling his agent. He no longer had an agent.

They phoned home, to his mother back in Brooklyn.

Through her, Stephen J. Cannell Productions got Sharkey’s address and sent him a script. The teleplay called for Sharkey to play Sonny Steelgrave in a show called “Wiseguy.”

It arrived just two weeks after Sharkey had checked out of a substance-abuse rehabilitation center.

“I had been in a hospital at one of the less-known rehab centers in Southern California,” Sharkey said. “I had already been to one of the more famous ones.”

So here was Sharkey, fresh out of treatment centers, both brand name and generic, with a script in his lap. He was on the road back.

“Wiseguy” is structured in such a way that bad guys on the show do a lot more than a one-night stand. The show is done in what its producers like to call arcs, series of about nine episodes featuring a central villain opposite the show’s hero, Vinnie Terranova, played by Ken Wahl.

In the first arc last season, Sharkey played Steelgrave, a mob kingpin whose organization is infiltrated by deep-undercover agent Terranova. The Steelgrave role drew critical praise.

And the series, while a bit marginal in the ratings, has been renewed for the fall. Meantime, “Wiseguy” fans have been watching Sharkey’s arc recycle over CBS this summer. (It concluded this week.)

His success in “Wiseguy” has put Sharkey back on the Hollywood map. Recently he’s been busy wrapping up a part in the upcoming film “Wired: The John Belushi Story,” based on Bob Woodward’s book on the comedian’s capitulation to drugs. And for Sharkey, there’s another feature in the works, “Scenes from the Working Class in Beverly Hills.”

It is an irony that two of Sharkey’s vehicles on the comeback road suggest his own origins and his recent problems.

Sharkey was raised on some of Brooklyn’s meaner streets and recalls a youth that included fighting in gangs.

“It was a natural transition,” Sharkey said. “When you’re on the street, you have to be an actor. I just did it for money.”

He left Brooklyn to attend school in Manhattan. And he embarked on a reading program. “I read the great authors,” he said. “By the time I was 21, I had broadened my horizons.”

His first break as an actor came in 1976, when he starred in Martin Breast’s American Film Institute graduate film, “Hot Tomorrow.” It was about this time that Kael took note of him, and Hollywood soon followed.

There were the guest appearances on “Barney Miller,” “The Jeffersons,” “All in the Family,” “Starsky and Hutch” and “The Rockford Files.” There was a spot on “Saturday Night Live,” and there were television movies--”Behind Enemy Lines” and “The Ordeal of Bill Carney,” which earned him a Golden Globe nomination.

There were feature credits along the way, including “Who’ll Stop the Rain?” “The Lords of Flatbush,” “Wise Guys” and “Some Kind of Hero.”

His breakthrough came in 1982, when he won the Golden Globe for his starring role in “The Idolmaker.”