Actor Continues a Family Tradition of Having Fun

It’s been just over a decade since Greg Mullavey put away his baseball cap as Tom, the perennially boyish husband who did Mary Hartman wrong in more than 300 episodes of “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” from 1975 to 1978.

His hair may be graying now that he’s in his mid-40s, but Mullavey still looks boyish as he sits outside the Old Globe Theatre, awaiting the rehearsal call for “Breaking Legs.”

“Legs” is a new play by Tom Dulack, which, under the direction of Old Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien, will unfurl at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage from Wednesday through Oct. 22.

Mullavey claims to be driven to succeed, like the playwright he portrays--a college professor who writes about murder, only to learn more than he bargained for when he asks a coterie of restaurant owners to back his new play. They turn out to be members of the Mafia.

Mullavey’s relaxed, “gee-whiz-how-did-I-get-here?” smile belies his “driven” nature, as does his answer as to why he chose acting as a career.

“It’s fun and they pay you to do it--sometimes.”

Working at something because it is fun is a family tradition, Mullavey said.

His father, Greg Mullavey Sr., was a coach with the Brooklyn Dodgers and followed them out west when they became the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“My father played a kid’s game all his life,” he mused. The message Mullavey got from his father--since deceased--was that “if it’s not play, it’s not fun and I don’t want to do it.”

Before he got that message, Mullavey Jr. was 21 years old, working in an ad agency in New York when a girlfriend of his, an actress, told him she was going to an audition. He told her he could act--although he never had. When they got to the open audition, he read and walked away with the lead in “Ah! Wilderness” Off Broadway. His girlfriend didn’t get anything. A romance ended and a career was launched.

He did the usual waiting on tables between jobs and, as he began to realize that acting was more than learning lines, he invested years of study under Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisler and others. He moved to Los Angeles to join his parents--he still lives in Venice--and his television credits began to roll with an episode of “Bonanza,” co-starring Kate Jackson in her first TV role.

More than 200 guest appearances on various shows followed in addition to “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” the late-night soap opera satire that had much of America watching the Hartmans struggle with impotence, rape, sexual surrogates and a friend who drowns at the kitchen table in a bowl of chicken soup.

The emotions he best relates to in “Breaking Legs” are the fear the playwright feels and the curiosity.

“In my own life, I tend to be very curious, so I tend to get myself in trouble. I watched a gunfight in Hollywood once after someone just robbed someone. It took me a while before I realized that these were real bullets flying past me.”

Similarly, the playwright, in the course of “Breaking Legs,” makes the journey--however comically--from writing about fear of death to experiencing terror firsthand.

“One of the things this character in the play does is write about a corpse, even though he’s never seen a real corpse,” Mullavey said. “There’s always a threat. The tension is between that threat and laughter.”

Speaking of tension, Mullavey’s recent career, or lack thereof, has been the cause of some. He hopes “Breaking Legs” will propel a comeback, since interest in his work underwent a “rapid cooling process” in the three to five years after the end of “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” he said.

His confidence wasn’t helped by the breakup of his 18-year marriage to actress Meredith MacRae two years ago, or by losing out on a role in the national touring company of “Rumors” to former Hollywood Squares star Peter Marshall because his own name “wasn’t big enough.”

He dealt with the fallow years on film by turning to the stage where he has a Broadway credit (“Romantic Comedy”) and several Off-Broadway as well as regional theater roles. Three years ago he became co-artistic director of the Burbank Theatre Guild, where he performs regularly. He thinks he may have a good shot at replacing Rob Leibman in the Broadway production of “Rumors” this fall.

Has he learned anything from the full and lean seasons?

“Sure. I ask myself, ‘What am I doing?’ I should have been a plumber,” he said with a laugh.

“I may know a little more, I may not. The more I do, the more I realize I have to learn. The danger is to be smug about the work.

“I did a picture with Richard Burton once--’Raid on Rommel.’ He had become a huge star and he walked through it because it was a three-week Universal (Studios) quickie. I adored his work before and then I realized he had feet of clay. I have a great need to be successful, but I hope I never do that.”