O.C. THEATER / JAN HERMAN : A Caretaker of His Craft : Robert Cornthwaite Shows His Mettle in the Pinter Classic at SCR

In a career spanning more than five decades, Robert Cornthwaite has played roles as different as the mad scientist in the 1951 horror movie “The Thing” and the eccentric grandfather in the 1991 revival of Moss Hart’s and George Kaufman’s “You Can’t Take It With You” at South Coast Repertory.

But few roles have presented the actor with as much a challenge--psychologically or intellectually--as the title character of Harold Pinter’s blackly ironic modern classic, “The Caretaker,” which is being revived on the SCR Second Stage.

Cornthwaite, now 74, portrays Davies, a shabby old vagrant unwittingly trapped between a pair of weird brothers who offer him a job as caretaker of the derelict house they’re in the process of renovating. For three physically demanding acts, Cornthwaite embodies the heart and soul of a play filled with nearly as many idiosyncrasies as the character.

“What I find both disturbing and fascinating about him is how little he knows about himself,” Cornthwaite said in a recent interview at the theater. “The man doesn’t know where he came from. He claims Davies is his real name, but he calls himself Jenkins. I wonder if he has forgotten other names.

“He’s also as paranoid as can be about everything. The whole world is his enemy. For that very reason, I think, he will never be able to clear himself of his vagrancy. He’s a man in flight. He’s a cornered rat.”

Cornthwaite, who lives in the Mojave Desert and translates plays from the French and Italian when he’s not performing, says he read George Orwell’s 1933 memoir, “Down and Out in Paris and London,” to get a feel for Davies’ British milieu and for his obsessions with shoes and identification papers.

Although “Down and Out” deals with an earlier period than that of “The Caretaker” (which premiered in London in 1960), Pinter’s character might have stepped out of one of Orwell’s chapters describing how tens of thousands of transient beggars were kept on the move in England during the Depression.

“Local municipalities would grudgingly allow these people to stay one night a month in their facilities,” Cornthwaite explains. “This meant they had to walk 12 or 15 miles to the next town that would take them in and allow them a night’s lodging. They walked everywhere. If they had money, it wouldn’t occur to them to take a bus or a subway--therefore, the obsession with shoes and the condition of their feet.

“Also, having your papers was the absolute basis for existence. Without them you had no rights. You didn’t exist. Davies’ obsession with papers, which Pinter makes so much of, fits right in. So does the paranoia. In their hovel jungles--spikes, as they called them--there was so much petty theft that one was constantly on the qui vive (lookout) for attack or for being ripped off for what little you might have.”

The Orwellian parallels notwithstanding, “The Caretaker” has a highly personal orchestration of its own, replete with deep, even perverse, silences known as “Pinter pauses.” Set against a cascade of words, those pauses virtually tick with meaning. As for the words themselves, they are full of repetitions not unlike musical figures. The effect can be simultaneously mysterious and comic.

“I’ve only done one other Pinter--’The Birthday Party’--and that was more than 20 years ago,” Cornthwaite said. “Not having done any in the interval, I thought the pauses might be difficult. So I underscored every one--my script has a line at each of them--and I learned the pauses just as I learned the dialogue.

“If you played the play without the pauses, it would be slick--it’s beautifully crafted and written, but it would be impenetrable. It’s through those pauses that the audience gets in. “

Cornthwaite says he remembers Donald Pleasence playing Davies in the original production “as if it were yesterday.” But although he admires that portrayal immensely, it has had no influence on his interpretation.

“I suppose what it amounts to is that I dig a performance out of the script,” he said. “I’m not much influenced by external things. For that reason I don’t cotton much to directors who come in with ‘a concept.’ You know, ‘We’re going to do ‘Hamlet’ on skates.’ That kind of thing. I get my nose into the script, and I never get it out.”

Yet nothing about Cornthwaite’s performance is bookish or literary. It is so vigorous, in fact, that it seems much the opposite. Because of his intensity and the freshness of his voice, moreover, he also gives the appearance of being younger than his years.

Indeed, his voice has always been an asset. Cornthwaite, who was born in St. Helens, Ore., got his professional start as a radio announcer while working his way through USC and moonlighting as a Hollywood actor. Early on, Paramount had “a lukewarm interest in putting me under contract,” he recalled of his career before World War II, “but when they found out I was up for the draft, they quickly lost interest.”

He recounts that one of his first “big” moments came in a minor scene with William Holden and Barry Fitzgerald in the 1950 Paramount remake of “Union Station.” Two days later he had “a very good scene” with Victor Mature in “Gambling House,” another 1950 release.

“I had an agent who was able to say ‘no’ in a very loud voice,” Cornthwaite recalled. “The strategy worked. He managed to get quite a lot of money for me, far more than the scenes were worth. He knew that if they pay you enough money, they think you must be important.”

Billy Wilder and Henry Koster were among the legendary Hollywood directors for whom he worked. But it was Howard Hawks who gave him his biggest role, as Dr. Carrington in “The Thing,” the 1951 horror movie Hawks produced about a group of arctic scientists confronting an alien thawed from the ice. “I suppose I’m proudest of that film because Hawks chose me,” he said.

Cornthwaite was working at Universal as a Mexican character in “Mark of the Renegade” when Hawks asked if he could come over to the RKO lot so that Hawks’ longtime assistant Christian Nyby (who is credited with directing “The Thing”) could shoot some silent footage just to see if Cornthwaite looked right.

“The producer at Universal let me off grudgingly for three hours in the afternoon,” Cornthwaite said. “Hawks and Nyby had brought in some actors from New York and were shooting them in rotation. Just before they were going to shoot me, Hawks said: ‘I want Mr. Hughes’--meaning (RKO Pictures owner) Howard Hughes--’to hear your voice. Is there anything you can do?’

“Now the only thing I could think of was a Moss Hart play I’d been in a couple of months before at the Pasadena Playhouse called ‘Light Up the Sky.’ I had this great, long, hilarious monologue. And here I was testing for a melodrama. I did the speech in one take and rushed back to Universal. It must have worked. I got the part.”

SCR playgoers first saw him on the Mainstage as Nat Miller, the newspaper editor, in a 1981 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” They saw him again in 1988 as Giles Corey in a revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” the role he did several years earlier to critical acclaim in Los Angeles in an Ahmanson Theatre production with Charlton Heston.

“I once made a vow to myself that I will not be ‘an old actor,’ ” Cornthwaite said. He recalled how, as a young man, he would sometimes watch aging former stars grateful for a day’s pay at work in the same B-pictures he was in go unrecognized and unappreciated by assistant directors who didn’t have a clue.

“Your mind changes--or mine did. Here I am an old actor, enjoying what I do. I decided I will do the thing I want as long as I can deliver the goods. My life is my work. The energy will run out inevitably. But right now I have it. It feels good.”

* “The Caretaker” continues through Dec. 8 on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Information: (714) 957-4033.