It’s All About Quality Control : Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh won’t make a movie these days without Peter Gallagher, but that wasn’t always the case for this actor

It’s probably Mozart, some acoustical footnote to the name--Cafe Mozart--but just the overture for Peter Gallagher. He’s run in, a little breathless, to grab a sandwich at this neighborhood cafe on the Upper West Side, but the canned piano stops him dead. Even before he reaches his favorite corner table, he turns, cocks his head and segues into unprompted melodrama.

“Soon the talking stopped and we listened. And wept. And realized what was the point of going on with the interview because we’d be dead anyway, in the next 30 or 40 years.”

Gallagher drops his backpack to the table with a thud and sinks into a chair, smiling rather blissfully for an actor who up until recently had a hard time getting anyone to take him seriously, musical accompaniments notwithstanding.

He was a stage-trained performer, an accomplished song-and-dance man, who had done all those Broadway shows, big musicals like “Hair” and “Grease,” even plays with major-league directors--”A Doll’s Life,” with Hal Prince; “The Real Thing,” for Mike Nichols and “Long’s Day Journey Into Night,” directed by Britain’s Jonathan Miller. He had earned good notices, a few awards, even a Tony nomination, but none of it seemed to matter in Hollywood, where Gallagher’s name was tainted by his far less impressive foray into film more than a decade earlier.

In Taylor Hackford’s 1980 drama “The Idolmaker,” Gallagher played a Fabian-like rock star, replete with chest-hair waxings and an overdose of publicity for the then-25-year-old newcomer with the Elvis Presley pout. “Caesare is coming” screamed the posters plastered with Gallagher’s smoldering, dark-browed features. Coming and going was more like it; the film disappeared with embarrassing speed, nearly capsizing the actor’s fledgling film career. Two years later, when he played an equally depilated member of a menage-a-trois in Randal Kleiser’s short-lived “Summer Lovers,” Gallagher thought he would never work again.

It was “that classic pretty boy thing,” as director Robert Altman recalls, that can kill a serious actor’s career. “I’d get amazing reviews in Broadway shows and then I wouldn’t have an audition for a year,” says Gallagher. “So you’d start to think, ‘Yeah, I guess there is no market for people with big lips and fat eyebrows.’ ”

That the 38-year-old actor with the strikingly Byronic features has struggled back from that inauspicious beginning to remain one of Broadway’s more viable members while landing some of Hollywood’s plummiest character roles says as much about the peculiar nature of success as it does about Gallagher’s own talents and persistence.

Although he still does not head many producers’ A-lists, Gallagher has shed that earlier stigma to become one of the more respected and busier characters working, in demand for a variety of film, television and theater projects. Recent high-profile appearances include “Mother’s Boys,” an erotic thriller co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and Joel and Ethan Coen’s “The Hudsucker Proxy,” as well as an HBO movie, “White Mile,” which airs later this month.

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He also remains the actor of choice for a handful of acclaimed auteurs , most notably Altman, who has worked with the actor on “The Player” and “Short Cuts,” and Steven Soderbergh, whose 1989 drama, “sex, lies, and videotape,” marked Gallagher’s first unqualified hit and whose next film, “The Underneath,” was written for the actor.

“After ‘sex, lies, and videotape,’ I certainly saw more (scripts),” says Gallagher. But it’s all about the long haul, when I started out, John Travolta was big and I got work because I had vaguely Italianate looks. Then that changed. I fully expect to have several careers, or chapters of careers.”

“We all end up in categories,” adds Altman, who has said that he looks for a role for Gallagher in each of his films. “But Peter is a terrific actor, and very courageous because he plays a character regardless of their weakness or badness. He doesn’t posture himself as a hero.”

Although he is perhaps still best known to audiences for playing those protagonists whom Altman describes as “handsome, vain and sleazy”--John Milaney, the cheating husband in “sex, lies, and videotape,” Larry Levy, the back-stabbing studio executive in “The Player” and Stormy Weathers, the volatile helicopter pilot in “Short Cuts”--Gallagher has amassed a fairly catholic range of roles on his resume. In addition to those earlier theater productions, Gallagher originated the role of Sky Masterson in the recent Broadway revival of “Guys and Dolls”--and turned down starring roles in the Los Angeles production of “Sunset Boulevard” and the Stephen Sondheim musical “Passione.”

In “Mother’s Boys,” he plays the devoted father of three young sons, his first sympathetic leading man role to date. In Alan Rudolph’s “Mrs. Parker,” which is being shown at Cannes this month, he portrays Alan Campbell, the beleaguered alcoholic husband of writer Dorothy Parker, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. In “White Mile,” he plays a naive advertising executive under the spell of a Machiavellian boss played by Alan Alda. And in “The Underneath,” which will be released early next year, he portrays an older version of his “sex, lies, and videotape” persona, “a guy who’s always gotten by on his looks and charm,” as Soderbergh says, “but who now has to come to terms with that.”

“Yes, I’m in every movie that’s coming next year,” Gallagher deadpans. “If you look carefully in crowd scenes, I’m there. It’s like, ‘Where’s Waldo? Where’s Gallagher?’ ”

And in “White Mile,” Gallagher can be spotted clinging to a rubber raft careening down some of New Zealand’s most challenging white-water rapids in a film, directed by Robert Butler from a script by Michael Butler, that Gallagher calls, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “an allegory for the ‘80s.” He plays a young advertising executive, the protege of particularly competitive CEO (Alda) who, in a story line strikingly similar to the annual raft trip hosted by Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg, invites colleagues along on a treacherous white-water outing.

“It becomes this whole (expletive) contest that’s all about ruthless ambition and the lack of responsibility,” says Gallagher, adding wryly, “Of course my character is in conflict about his boss’ motives.”

Currently, Gallagher is weighing offers from several producers to star in a variety of comedies, which only recently he has begun to explore. “Peter is one of the smartest and funniest actors,” says Soderbergh. “He’s not a jokester, but makes characters funny in a dark way and by his (intended) lack of irony.”

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And sitting in this cafe just around the corner from the co-op he shares with his wife, Paula Harwood, an independent producer, and their two young children, Gallagher seems far more engaging and ingenuous--not to mention being a devoted family man--than his film roles might suggest. His darkly handsome looks, while striking testimony to his Irish-Catholic background, seem also to be mellowing, “deepening” as Soderbergh says. Mostly, his appearance serves as an ironic counterpoint to his unassuming breezy affability, a sanguinity born out of his experiences on Broadway and in Hollywood.

In fact, Gallagher can be scathing about certain events. He doesn’t hesitate to disparage several Broadway producers, including those of “Sunset Boulevard,” who wanted him to star with Glenn Close during the production’s Los Angeles run: “I couldn’t afford to do it because they were offering $1,000 a month living expenses, and to hear Andrew Lloyd Webber cry poverty. . . .”

He is also startlingly candid about the film industry, the paucity of well-written character parts, agents who make actors “feel like it’s your fault that you haven’t an audition for a year,” and what he sees as the industry’s prejudice against actors who, as he quips, “don’t operate under the burden of wanting to be liked.” Hollywood, he says simply, “rewards people who have the savvy or good fortune to have significant roles in successful movies.”

Even “Mother’s Boys,” a film he concedes offered him the opportunity to play a more realistic role than most thrillers, was not his first choice when Harvey Weinstein, president of Miramax Films, the producers of “sex, lies, and videotape,” first approached him about the work.

“I had a lot of problems with the script,” Gallagher says, “but they made some changes and because they’d gotten into a little bit of a scheduling jam, I did it.”

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Yet he also shows a touching lack of ego. Despite his impressive Broadway credits, he insists he doesn’t have “the musical chops” some actors do, and he jokes about being replaced in the workshop version of Sondheim’s new musical, “Hey, lets get Mandy (Patinkin) because he sings higher.” He refers to himself as “a late bloomer” and characterizes his career with a blithe “I don’t think anything is going to help at this point.”

And no amount of success, he adds, snapping open his wallet with its requisite photograph of his two children, a 3-year-old son and an infant daughter, “would make it worth (compromising) the life we’re trying to build with our family. Yeah, I’d love to have bigger parts that give you more room to express yourself, but I really believe there is no formula and the truth is, I’m happiest when I’m just working well.”

If anything characterizes Gallagher’s approach to his craft it is his love of collaboration, fostered by his years in theater but less called upon in his film experiences. “Film can’t really be successful unless it is the product of a single vision,” he says, “but that vision can be expansive enough to include others at their fullest.”

Soderbergh and Altman clearly agree. “I cast Peter in ‘sex, lies, and videotape’ because I needed an actor who was smart enough to flesh out the least well-written of the four characters,” says Soderbergh. “I needed him to come up with good stuff and Peter had great ideas about how to make the husband more real, funnier and also darker.”

As for Altman, with whom he first worked with on the 1988 TV movie “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” Gallagher describes the director “as almost painterly in his approach. He creates the environment where something might occur and gives you the freedom to go with it. It’s why we all sing Bob’s praises, because he loves actors--his taste isn’t market-based, it’s very personal--and he allows us to do our work.”

As Soderbergh puts it, “Like most good actors, Peter is not afraid that the character reflects on him. He’s not afraid to make them real jerks.”

Indeed, after Gallagher resuscitated his career from the pretty-boy label, he found himself pigeonholed again after “sex, lies, and videotape” was the surprise winner at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival--a prejudice not helped by the producer’s use of promotional material that included admiring quotes from reviewers for every performance but his. “Because I played the least sympathetic characters, I knew that people who weren’t familiar with my work would say, ‘Boy, he’s an (expletive)! Next!’ ”

But as Gallagher is quick to point out, there are bad guys and there are bad guys. “In most movies if you’re not playing the lead, you’re supposed to make sure audiences know who you are with just a few moments of screen time, and if you’re the bad guy, you’re supposed to spell it out in real obvious ways. But people aren’t like that in real life. The most interesting bad guys are the ones you’d least expect.”

The youngest son of an outdoor advertising businessman--”you know, billboards!” he laughs--and a bacteriologist, Gallagher was raised in Armonk, N.Y., in a conservative Irish American family beset by many of the insecurities common to second-generation Americans. “We knew nothing of the world of show business,” he recalls. “We didn’t go to many movies and I think I was actually in a play before I saw one. I never really considered a career in show business.”

Despite an interest in musical theater developed in high school and a summer studying voice at the New England Conservatory, Gallagher attended Tufts University in Boston where, at his father’s urging, he obtained a degree in economics. He even spent a semester studying Marxist theory at UC-Berkeley. But theater eventually wooed him back. After spending three seasons working with the Boston Shakespeare Company, Gallagher moved back to New York and immediately began to work on Broadway, playing the starring role of Danny Zuko in “Grease” in 1972.

Almost two decades later, Gallagher still finds that link to New York’s theater community remains pivotal. It’s the main reason why he refuses to settle in Los Angeles, where he sees actors “treated like poker chips,” of differing value, and “where the only thing you can count on is that your value won’t stay the same from week to week.”

“New York is where I’m from and it helps remind me who I am when I’m here,” he adds, looking around the cafe as if he were about to burst into song. “I just believe there is no way to anticipate the success of something. You only have control over what you do and choosing people to work with that have sympathetic points of view. If you do that, you can be enriched by the experience.”*