For Seniors : At 91, a ‘Player’ Sparkles Upon the Stage
Green eyes sparkle and his ruddy face glows. Maybe it’s the pink shirt and maroon bow tie he’s wearing that brings out his best features. But all you have to do is spend a few minutes with Jack Daniels and you begin to imagine pixie dust falling around him.
The calendar says he’s 91 but his spirit says indomitable. How else can you explain restarting an acting career begun in the ‘20s? He never gave up his Screen Actors Guild card No. 231.
Daniels never had star fever. He just wanted to make a living in a craft that gave him joy. “My father was a frustrated actor but he worked at a job he hated and I just never wanted to do that,” Daniels said. “I did work as a soda jerk, bartender, sweat shop presser and waiter so that I could act in the New York theater at night.”
He debuted on the Broadway stage in “The Backslapper” in 1924 and spent many years on the road playing everything from Demetrius in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to Captain Absolute in “The Rivals,” an obscure play staged in St. Louis’ Garden Theatre.
There’s a table in Daniels’ Beverly Hills apartment stacked with the yellowed clips of an actor proud to have just worked. Here’s what one reviewer said about his performance as Tranio in Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew”: “The work of Jack Daniels, as Tranio, scored for him a triumph from a secondary role. General admiration was inspired for the capable and masterly manner in which he depicted the part of a devoted servant.”
And this in the New York Post about a 1926 play titled “Fashion”: “One little bit of acting stood out brilliantly where everything else was amateurish and uncertain. Mr. Daniels, in the comparatively unimportant role of Snobson, a blackmailing clerk, did a vivid portrait that was rewarded with the only genuine spontaneous burst of enthusiasm of the evening.”
Beside every struggling actor, though, is someone who shares a part of the fantasy. And, in Daniels’ case, it was Isabelle Daniels, his wife of 62 years.
During the struggling years, Isabel managed a restaurant so at least the meals came regularly. Daniels, a native Angeleno, met his wife at Lincoln High School. When his first New York stint ended, he hitchhiked to San Diego and got a role in a local theater. He called Isabelle.
“I told her why don’t we get married between the matinee and the evening performance,” he recalled. The couple did and they were married for 11 years before Isabelle decided that he worked regularly enough to support a family. Their two sons are trial lawyers. “Now, a courtroom, that’s bad theater,” Daniels says with a laugh.
As Daniels got older, even the small parts became scarcer. So, unwilling to stray too far from the smell of greasepaint, he became a stage manager. “I made $40 a week and there were plenty of flops, but Isabelle made it possible” for him to work in a field he loved, Daniels said.
He was stage managing one of those flops in 1945 when a Hollywood friend called and told him about a dialogue director’s job at Warner Bros. Studio. “I rehearsed the actors . . . before they went before the director,” he said.
After that, he spent the next 18 years directing industrial films and TV commercials. “I was known as the fastest director in town. What took others two days took me 3 hours,” he said.
As to his longevity, he credits his Welsh genes and doesn’t pay attention to cholesterol. He drinks eight glasses of water a day, ends his daily shower by turning off the hot water and “taking it as cold as it comes.” He studies art and has won awards. A painting of Isabelle hangs over the sofa.
When Isabelle died in 1987, Daniels had already been retired for several years. “When I turned 90, I decided to act again,” he said.
He joined the Beverly Hills Senior Players. “I can still learn lines and I get the same feeling--panic--right before I go on,” he said. Seven decades after “The Backslapper,” Daniels gets to perform again.
Ever the actor, he offers a sample from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It:”
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely the players.”
Daniels stops, smiles and adds his own thoughts: “Be sure you know what you want because you’re going to get it.”
