The ‘Burden’ Is on Elizondo : ABC Miniseries Gives Actor the Biggest Role of His Varied Career

“I am now at the right time for me,” Hector Elizondo was saying, scratching his salt-and-pepper goatee. “I have got the right wrinkles. I have aged very well. I am not pickled. I have stayed in shape and I still play basketball with the younger guys. I am a very satisfied guy now at this point in my life.”

After spending years “making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” with his film and TV roles, the 55-year-old veteran of such films as “American Gigolo,” “The Flamingo Kid” and “Pretty Woman,” is finally getting parts he can sink his teeth into. “Ever since ‘Pretty Woman’ I am getting more options,” he said. “It’s exciting to know while I still have the energy for it, I still may get some pitches I can really hit.”

Elizondo is up to bat Sunday as the star of ABC’s four-hour miniseries “The Burden of Proof,” based on the 1990 best-seller by Scott Turow (“Presumed Innocent”). Elizondo plays Sandy Stern (Raul Julia portrayed Stern in the 1990 film of “Presumed”), a middle-aged Jewish criminal attorney of Argentine-German descent who finds his ordered world turned upside down after his wife commits suicide.

“It is not the most important role I have had,” Elizondo said. “But it’s certainly the longest. It’s a character lead. It is like what Bobby Duvall does. It is not young, thin and pretty. Thank God!”

Elizondo described making the miniseries as murder. “Man, I was in every single scene,” he said. Even more difficult was capturing Stern’s accent. Though Elizondo has a knack for accents (“I was blessed with a good ear”), the actor had a hard time accepting the fact Stern would even have one.

“The man has been (in America) since age 13 and is a very verbal guy and a criminal lawyer,” he said. “His focus is on his work. A guy like that wouldn’t have an accent any more. I know people who have been here since 18 and they have no accent.”

But Turow envisioned Stern with one. “I went along with it. It is more a sound than accent. I didn’t want it to get in the way of the character.”

Some people, he said, have compared Stern to his character in “Pretty Woman,” the sophisticated hotel manager who befriends Julia Roberts. Elizondo said the two are nothing alike.

“(Stern) is not worldly and you get a sense that the ‘Pretty Woman’ character was a worldly guy,” Elizondo said. “The guy in ‘Pretty Woman’ likes the ladies and is good with the ladies. Sandy Stern is not good with the ladies. He is not too aware of what’s around him.”

The New York-born Elizondo, who is of Puerto Rican and Basque ancestry, began his career at 10, appearing on radio’s “The Okey-Dokey Ranch House,” a precursor to TV’s “The Howdy Doody Show.” “I sung and I danced,” he said. He was featured on TV during its infancy in 1947 on “The Wendy Barrie Show.”

“Then I did radio as part of the Frank Murray’s Boys Choir. I did that for a year and then I finally decided after school I didn’t want to go to rehearsals any more. I wanted to play ball.”

When he decided to return to performing a decade later, his father suggested Elizondo change his name for show business. “My father was a proud man and one who identified strongly with his culture. When he finally accepted the idea I was going into this profession, he said, ‘Change your name.’ I said, ‘Dad, it’s a lovely name. You cannot mispronounce Elizondo.’ ”

Of course, Elizondo quickly learned that not only did people mispronounce his name, having a name “with a vowel ending” can hold an actor back from certain roles.

The New York theater, though, cast him in various roles ranging from an unemployed New York executive in Neil Simon’s “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” to George C. Scott’s wily servant in the French farce “Sly Fox” to God in “Steam Bath,” for which he won an Obie.

Says Elizondo: “I have also been stubborn in refusing to do certain types of roles that feed into that distortion, that feed into that horrible misrepresentation (of Latinos) --the drug dealer of the month. That kind of garbage. I don’t know if I wouldn’t have done those (roles), if I had been starving, but it never quite came to it.”

Besides, Elizondo is a man of a thousand faces and nationalities. “I look like a Russian border guard or something,” Elizondo said, laughing. “‘I look like Lenin. I went to a poetry reading with four Russian poets and these old Russian ladies were looking at me. They thought I was Russian. In Hungry, when I did ‘Amnesty Files’ (for TNT), they thought I was Russian. That is how I am fortunate.”

“The Burden of Proof” airs Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m. on ABC.