A Cowboy Rides High on ‘Exposure’ : But Barry Corbin Believes TV Should Learn to Respect Its Elders

Maybe it’s the Stetson parked on a table lamp, or the definite western cut of the business suit, or the red-and-black, handmade boots--exclusively from the hands of Oklahoma’s Cricket Garcia--or the warm, rolling West Texas voice.

You expect Spam in the can . . . ‘60s astronaut riding atop a rocket. You get lean ‘90s beef . . . right there on the hoof.

Clearly, actor Barry Corbin knows how to separate the cowboys from the spacemen.

He may be the grounded astronaut Maurice Minnifield, grand pooh-bah of Cecily, Alaska, on CBS’ “Northern Exposure,” but off-screen he’s very much the Texas native, an authentic horseman whose grandfather was a cowboy.

Corbin makes it clear that it was a stand-in who dove from a 40-foot cliff into 11 feet of 45-degree water in a recent episode of “Northern Exposure,” to demonstrate that Maurice was still vital and healthy despite a smattering of contrary medical signs.

“But that was me in the last scene, in that freezing water, acting exultant over the dive,” he says. “I’ll ride anything with hair on it, but I won’t take a dive.”

The episode meant a lot to him. “Aging and mortality are not subjects that are often handled in television,” he says. “The challenges of aging. We need to look at them more.

“Here we have Maurice who, despite his age, considers himself in the prime of his life and suddenly he is faced with the possibility that he may be declining a bit. What does he do? Cave in or do something? He tries different things and then decides the best treatment is to shock his body out of submission. Dive into cold water. Well, that’s an important issue--how do you age? How do you respond? Those are questions faced by a huge portion of our population and we can’t ignore them anymore.

“It’s something television needs to look at.”

His own experience of confronting the aging phenomenon was quite different from Maurice’s.

“I’m not old, but when you pass 50 (as he did a few years ago), other elements get involved,” he says. “I haven’t started to decline yet. I haven’t noticed any changes, except standing on my head. I tried it for my grandkids the other day. Couldn’t do it. And I’m in better shape than I was at 30. All of my destructive habits are gone. I’m healthier physically and mentally than I have been most of my career. But we all are getting older. I can still stay in the saddle for 14 hours, as I did a few weekends ago, but the headstand stopped me.

“It was sort of an awakening, not doing it. I hadn’t tried that in more than 20 years. I’m working on it now. Come back in about a month.”

Corbin was born in Lamesa, Tex., raised in Lubbock. He remembers seeing Western movies--Rocky Lane and “Wild Bill” Elliott--at age 8 and wanting “to be one of those guys. When I got older, I wanted to be Gabby Hayes.” He didn’t want to follow his grandfather. “Cowboys work too hard,” he says.

He went to New York after the Marine Corps and stayed there 13 years, “working every Equity contract there is from ‘Henry V’ to ‘Kiss Me Kate,’ ” including the Off-Broadway “Masquerade,” which, he says, “wasn’t the worst play to get to New York, but it’s in the running. It was an astonishingly bad play. It almost ruined my career.”

In 1977, Corbin went West, hoping for movie acting roles. Cowboy roles. “Immediately after I got here they quit doing Westerns, which probably, as far as my career, was the best thing. I would have been typed,” he says. “I did everything but play cowboys. One ex-cowboy actor said I was the only cowboy who was still working in Hollywood. But not as a cowboy.”

For a while in Los Angeles he wrote 15-minute radio plays for KPFK-FM’s “Popcorn Theater,” had two of his one-act plays performed at the old L.A. Actors Theatre, and his “Suckerrod Smith and the Cisco Kid” was staged at the Cast Theater. He got movie and television acting roles and appeared in five series, “none of which went past 13 episodes,” he says, plus plenty of commercials--voice-overs calling for that homey East Texas sound.

Playing the faded astronaut Maurice in “Northern Exposure” changed everything.

Hit TV show. Steady work. Long shooting hours in the chill of coastal Washington. And the kind of recognition that TV brings an actor, even after a long career.

“If I’m recognized for movie work (he’s appeared in 24 feature films), the reaction is this (he moves his head back, eyes popping). If I’m recognized for TV, they do this (he moves up close, eyes narrowing). It’s a matter of perspective--how big the screen is. People up in Washington treat us like old friends because we’re shooting in their homes. Lots of people when I’m on the road come up to me at restaurants and hotels, and you know what they say? Maurice reminds them a whole lot of their fathers or their uncles.

“That tells you something about the role, the image that comes across. Maurice is an aging tough guy, number one, an authentic American hero in his own mind. He’s the personification of the male in the ‘50s. Coming up into maturity during the Korean War, he had a certain image of what a man and particularly what an American man should be. He formed himself out of that mode. As a result, he is the embodiment of what is good and bad in the American male. Arrogant, chauvinistic, he’s also very open-hearted and very generous, if the generosity is earned.”

A self-description?

“Maurice and I look alike. We talk alike. We walk alike. And that’s about as far as it goes. I see things a lot more humorously than Maurice does. We’re politically in separate camps. I’m not as far to the left as he is to the right but I’m over there, somewhere, closer to the center.”

Corbin would like a future “Northern Exposure” to take Maurice out of his element, where people don’t know him or recognize him as the American hero he thinks he is. “If people don’t see us at our best, it kind of messes up what we think we are,” he says.

But he isn’t about to renew his writing skills on the television series. “I’m considered an actor,” he explains. “If the writers tried to act, I guess I’d consider them writers.”