He’s No Frank Sinatra : And that’s Fine with Philip Casnoff, Who Plays--But Doesn’t Imitate--the Legend in CBS Bio

At first glance, stage-trained actor Philip Casnoff appears to have few things in common with Frank Sinatra, whom Casnoff portrays in CBS’ movie bio of the singer.

Casnoff loves the theater and is also an aspiring writer (with an unpublished 400-page novel and a screenplay). He is married to actress Roxanne Hart; they live a quiet life with their 4 1/2 year-old son. He doesn’t much care for Los Angeles, preferring the crowded and anonymous streets of New York.

Casnoff doesn’t even have blue eyes. (Blue contact lenses shaded his brown eyes for the movie.)

The real Blue Eyes was as famous for his numerous romantic liaisons and his hard-partying image almost as much as he was for his outstanding pipes and easy way before the camera. He never led anything remotely resembling a quiet life.

Despite--or perhaps because of--the lack of evident similarities between the two men, Casnoff relished the chance to take on the larger-than-life role. And, at 37, to play a character who ages from 19 to 60 presented one of his greatest professional challenges. The five-hour movie, which also stars Rod Steiger and Gina Gershon, airs Sunday and Tuesday.

“What attracted me to the script is that the writer seemed to capture a lot of the chiaroscuro , the light and dark of the character,” Casnoff said. “I think it’s fascinating to portray a live figure, somebody who’s been so public. People have such preconceived notions of who he is ... (But) I never attempted an imitation. No one’s going to literally be Frank Sinatra.”

Surprisingly, with Sinatra’s youngest daughter Tina the executive producer of the film, it is an unstinting look at Sinatra--warts and all. The movie had a long history, undergoing several script changes and taking eight years to finally get produced.

“It’s a very emotional piece,” Casnoff said. “Both in terms of the excitement and the elation of his successes and the intensity of parts of his life when he wasn’t so successful. It put all the facets of his life together--performance and personal facets. Even personal facets that were not so wonderful.”

Casnoff has starred in the miniseries “North and South” and “Hands of a Stranger” as well as in the Broadway musical “Chess,” for which he won the Theater World Award. He has also taken roles in several Shakespearean plays and has a prominent role in the soon-to-be released film “Jersey Girl,” a romantic comedy that also stars Jamie Gertz.

Casnoff has sung in previous stage roles, but wasn’t required to for the TV movie. The film uses original Sinatra recordings with Casnoff assuming lip-syncing duties.

He is modest about having landed the role that attracted dozens of hopefuls.

“They were having such a hard time finding Sinatra that they finally found even me,” said the Philadelphia-born actor with a boyish smile.

Though he tried to avoid direct imitation, Casnoff explained, he did adopt some of Sinatra’s gestures--”the ones that fit on me. I absorbed them and I tried not to think about them.”

Tina Sinatra found the gestures eeringly convincing, according to Casnoff.

“Occasionally Tina would say, ‘Oh my God, you’re sitting just like Dad,’ ” Casnoff said. “Her feeling that I was coming across like her father buoyed me up.”

Now that he is getting more film offers and gaining visibility with the starring role in a much talked-about television movie, Casnoff is reluctancly planning a move to Los Angeles.

On an oppressively hot Southern California summer day, Casnoff had just been on a house-hunting foray in the Hollywood Hills. He was not crazy about what he saw.

“I have very mixed feelings about L.A.,” Casnoff said. “I don’t like driving in a car all the time. I like walking the streets ... I just feel like New York is home. I like the density of it. I like the weather. But, both my wife and I get calls to do film work and our agents want us here. A lot of my New York friends have moved out here and there are more opportunities out here.

“Sometimes I think I should have come out to California earlier. But then I think these stage plays formed me into whatever kind of actor I am now.”

So, not wanting to give up the New York stage, Casnoff has landed on a solution: He and his wife and child will move to Los Angeles for a year as a kind of trial run.

While he is here he may try to shop around a screenplay he wrote which “seemed like a logical thing to tackle as a way to pass the time creatively instead of worrying about each audition.”

The storyline, Casnoff said, focuses on three 13-year-old kids in an integrated urban neighborhood in the early ‘60s. “It was the setting I grew up in,” he said.

But the Sinatra role may rev up his acting career so that he’ll find little quiet time for writing.

What does Casnoff hope “Sinatra” audiences will come away with, after watching the movie?

“I’d like them to be moved by the film,” Casnoff said. “I want people to say, ‘I don’t know what it was, but he had something that made me think he was Frank Sinatra.’ ”

“The Frank Sinatra Story” airs Sunday at 8 p.m. and Tuesday at 9 p.m. on CBS.