They Act Like They Know Each Other

It begins with a kiss. Backstage before each performance of “Fighting Over Beverley,” Priscilla Pointer walks over to her husband, Robert Symonds, and pecks him on the cheek.

It’s the sort of affection that Symonds’ character in the play is fairly panting to receive. He comes on like a house afire, while Pointer--flattered but flustered--keeps backing away, trying to hide behind her teapot. She plays his long-lost sweetheart from back home in England, who ditched him in the thick of World War II to follow a wounded American flyboy to Gloucester, Mass. These many years later, Symonds materializes in her living room to declare that the flyboy has had her for 50 years, and now it’s his turn.

At home in Santa Monica, the couple’s ardor burns with a more sustained flame. They exchange affectionate glances and complete each other’s sentences as they talk about acting opposite each other in nearly 40 plays, television shows and films since 1954.

“We’ve known one another and worked with one another for so long, we understand one another’s rhythms,” Symonds says. “It’s like two dancers who know one another’s bodies and how they move.”

This quality is obvious to the audiences packing the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood to see Israel Horovitz’s play, and it is admired by those who know the couple well.

They are “unbelievably well-suited” to each other, says actress Amy Irving, Pointer’s daughter from her first marriage, to the late director Jules Irving. “I know my mom and dad were deeply in love with each other, but Mom and Bob have so much in common. There’s such harmony in their lives, a really nice balance. They spark each other.”

“They’ve got the relationship that all of us wish we had,” adds Hope Alexander-Willis, who directed “Fighting Over Beverley.” “You can see that they love each other. You can see that they still have a lot of passion and fire for each other. You can see that they’re best friends. And they bring all of that to the stage, and they share it.”

The couple’s joint projects include the 1984 Blake Edwards film “Micki & Maude,” in which they played Ann Reinking’s parents, and the 1993 South Coast Repertory production of “Morning’s at Seven,” in which they played brother- and sister-in-law.

Individually, Pointer is perhaps best known for CBS-TV’s “Dallas,” on which she played Pamela and Cliff’s mother, head of a rival oil family; Symonds wowed local theater audiences as the cranky cancer patient in the Fountain’s popular 1995 production of Horovitz’s “Park Your Car in Harvard Yard.”

Other credits include their six children--three each from their former marriages--and 12 grandchildren.

The playful squeals of one of those grandchildren ring through the house on an otherwise placid Saturday morning. Sun pours through the living room windows, bringing alive the colors in a painting of Symonds and Pointer walking hand in hand along a street in Paris, where they spend several months each year.

These are the sorts of things they must forget during each performance of “Fighting Over Beverley,” because their characters haven’t seen each other in 50 years. “That really requires acting,” Pointer says, “because instead of having known him for 43 years, I have to pretend--and so does he--that we haven’t seen each other since we were 18.”

Actually, there is one early memory that Symonds can allow himself: an image from his first day at the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco. “As I recall, I came into the office and you were sitting at a desk typing a letter,” he says, looking at her. Then, speaking to himself, he adds: “I remember she was very, very pretty.”

“Oh, thank you,” Pointer says softly.

Both “over 70,” they are a handsome pair. Symonds--white-haired and mustachioed--looks debonair, with a perpetual twinkle in his eyes that lends him a sense of mischief. And Pointer is a natural beauty. Whether hunkered on the floor petting a dog or sitting pertly on a couch, she is regal yet casual, arresting yet homespun.

They began working together at the Actor’s Workshop when they were in their late 20s. Co-founded by Jules Irving and Herbert Blau in 1952, the Actor’s Workshop was one of the country’s first regional theaters, helping to spread quality drama beyond New York and touring productions.

“It was an exciting period--not just because we were all struggling and young and raising kids but because of the kind of theater that suddenly was able to be done,” Pointer recalls. “There was a wave of Pinter and Beckett and things that nobody had ever seen the like of before.”

Symonds and Pointer’s early history together is chronicled in black-and-white production photos that Pointer spreads across the coffee table. There’s a shot of “Volpone” with Symonds, as the randy title character, crawling into a bed as Pointer, playing the lovely Celia, tries to scramble out the other side. There’s a shot of “Tiger at the Gates” with Pointer looking stunning as Helen of Troy and a bearded Symonds as the poet Demekos. And on and on.

While Symonds and Pointer acted, Jules Irving acted, directed and helped administrate, and Symonds’ then-wife, Jan Parr, worked as a costumer. The couples and their children virtually lived together. “All the kids grew up in the theater,” Symonds says, “backstage, sleeping in cribs in the dressing room, or whatever.”

Amy Irving remembers watching her mom and Symonds performing opposite each other. “It was pretty much Mom and Bob who defined Chekhov, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Durrenmatt and Strindberg for me. I learned by osmosis. They were my role models as actors.”

Years later, after Symonds and his wife had separated and Jules Irving had died, the union of Symonds and Pointer “just seemed like the natural thing to do,” Symonds says. They have been married 16 years.

Nowadays, the couple doesn’t get many opportunities to perform opposite each other because so few plays contain roles for more than one seventysomething character. That’s one of the reasons “Fighting Over Beverley” is such a pleasure, they say.

They also like its message about life’s infinite possibility. “Searching for your identity doesn’t necessarily stop at a certain age,” Symonds says.

With Symonds’ Archie Bennett panting at her heels, Pointer’s Beverley Shimma finally allows herself to acknowledge the pain of her largely loveless marriage and her husband’s flagrant infidelity. In a blinding flash, she realizes she has other options.

On the way to that realization, the play deals with a topic not found much on the American stage--or anywhere else in America: the sexuality of those who have reached a certain age. “It becomes a kind of habit of our society to ignore that,” Symonds says. “I think younger people are kind of embarrassed by the sexuality of their parents and especially their grandparents. . . .Younger people have their own problems; they don’t really want to think that older people may still be going through the same thing.”

Pointer and Symonds enjoy all the side benefits of working together, such as being able to rehearse on their own at home and being able to carpool to the theater (no small consideration, since it’s a cross-town commute).

Any drawbacks? “I can’t think of anything,” Pointer says earnestly. Then, shooting a sly look at her mate, she adds, “unless I thought you weren’t very good. Then we’d be in real trouble.”

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“FIGHTING OVER BEVERLEY,” Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hollywood. Dates: Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends May 17. Prices: $18-$22. Phone: (213) 663-1525.