Keith Carradine: Character of a Character Actor : Stage: The actor, who plays the title role in ‘Will Rogers Follies,’ has a Zen attitude toward his career.

Keith Carradine is as cool as his white suit. “Great” says the actor about his new Broadway show--playing garrulous Will Rogers in “The Will Rogers Follies.” “Great,” he says again with a cowboy-sized grin followed by a cowboy-sized awkward silence.

Great.

One of the film industry’s more perennial character actors who has specialized in playing inarticulate outsiders, Carradine opened last night as the leading man in this latest and most ambitious musical by Tommy Tune, Broadway’s lone reigning choreographer-director.

“The Will Rogers Follies” is Tune’s homage to Florence Ziegfeld--creator of the original Follies--and Rogers, Ziegfeld’s prized “Oklahoma Philosopher,” the Follies star attraction for nine years. At $6 million-plus, the show--which features lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Cy Coleman--is glossy, extravagant and replete with a rope-twirling Carradine and leggy chorus girls frequently dressed as cattle.

But the word on the street was that the show needed work before its opening. Trouble with the second act. Trouble with the book. Trouble with the divided attention span of Tune who is also in rehearsal for the upcoming national tour of “Bye-Bye Birdie” (opening May 11 in Long Beach).

Carradine, however, is cool. Never mind those tepid reviews for his last Broadway appearance nearly a decade ago--the guitar-strumming son of Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn in “Foxfire.” Never mind that he had to arm-twist an audition from Tune who had other leading men in mind to play Rogers. Carradine eventually won the part of the gum-chewing, lariat-twirling, wise-cracking American sage. Signed on for a year. Even doubled up on TV movies and feature films--including Merchant-Ivory’s latest “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe,” which opens next week--so he could afford to work on Broadway.

In a mid-town restaurant, over a turkey sandwich and a mineral water, Carradine is displaying a lot of that cool sang-froid, or what his friend, director Alan Rudolph calls “Keith’s Zen-like attitude to his career.” For instance, ask Carradine about the show and you get: Tune is “brilliant”; the audiences are “terrific”; the show is “great”; he is “having the time of my life.”

Indeed, interviewing the laconic film actor is like conversing with a fixed smile; a lot of surface amiability masking some equally palpable unease. It is a combination much like the characters, sensitive outsiders, that Carradine has specialized in portraying throughout his two decades-long film career.

Despite his 41 years, the actor retains a youthful gawkiness, what with his hair a limp spill of corn silk and his oversized suit that only emphasizes his ranginess. Rudolph, who has worked with Carradine on four films and insists that he is one of the industry’s great, if underrated character actors, suggests that “Keith is not interested in playing the game. He just thinks if he’s doing his best, then he won’t get hurt by anything. He’s very philosophical about his choices, which range from TV movies to European art films.”

As careers go, Carradine’s is as eclectic as they come, a purposefully scattershot approach to film roles that has resulted in an ill-defined public persona for this quiet, third son of the famed character actor John Carradine. (His other sons include actors David and Robert Carradine and Michael Bowen.)

Finding the part of himself that is akin to Will Rogers, the humorist who captivated the country in four mediums--newspapers, film, radio and the stage--before his death in an 1935 in a plane crash in Alaska, entailed a fair amount of research for the actor.

“I didn’t have a great deal of preconceived knowledge about him,” says Carradine. “He died 14 years before I was born and although his name is all over Southern California, I hadn’t really seen his movies. So I read a lot of books, watched a lot of the films, listened to the recordings of his broadcasts. But my job is not to do an imitation of Will Rogers but to evoke his essence.”

Finding that actor who could evoke the essence of Rogers, a genuine folk hero was the final piece of the puzzle that Tune and producer Pierre Cossette were assembling with “Follies.”

Although Tune was quick to bring on veteran lyricists Comden and Green as well as book-writer Peter Stone, finding the right actor proved to be more difficult. Through the project’s five year genesis, many actors, including singer John Denver, had been considered for the part. It was Cossette’s wife who first convinced the creative team to audition Carradine.

“Cy Coleman, Tommy, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, they all had serious doubts that I was the right one to play Rogers,” says Carradine.

“I didn’t have a real good idea what he could do until the audition,” says Tune, who was most impressed by Carradine’s “seamless” melding of acting, singing, guitar-playing and story-telling that were necessary to the role.

It is the kind of “He’s-better-than-we-expected” description of his talents that has long dogged Carradine, who has referred to himself as his family’s “white sheep” while living under the collective shadow cast by his famous father, John, and more famous brother, David. It was such a daunting pedigree that despite success in high school dramatics classes, Carradine went off to college in Colorado determined to be a forest ranger.

Carradine’s desire to live alone in the woods didn’t last long before he headed off to Hollywood in the early ‘60s. David Carradine helped launch his younger brother’s acting career when he took him to an audition for “Hair,” where Keith landed a lead role in a touring company.

“It’s impossible for me to answer any question about my family’s impact on my career choice,” says Carradine. “I remember my stepmother telling me that she really didn’t think that I should be an actor, that I wasn’t cut out for it, that I should stick to my music . . . All I know is what I am and what I came from, that I came from a performing family and it certainly had an influence on my life.”

Today, Carradine lives quietly with actress Sandra Will and their two young children in Topanga Canyon. (He also has a ranch in Telluride, Colo.) Friends and colleagues say that Carradine is as contented as he has ever been with his solid family life and a comfortable if unspectacular career.

“I certainly would like more power to create projects,” Carradine says sounding more resigned than wistful. “To just do the projects that I want to do. Maybe this show will help me get to that. Maybe again it won’t. What really matters is what you’re getting out of it,” he says with another one of those determined smiles. “And right now I’m having the time of my life.”