At 60, He’s Still Burning Bright

Frank Langella is a man of many personas. To the legions of fans who swooned over his 1970s turns in “Diary of a Mad Housewife” and “Dracula,” he is sexual charisma incarnate. To those who know him chiefly from the theater, he’s one of the few American actors in the classical thespian tradition--a master of towering and demanding roles. Then too, there is the droll Langella of comedy, both onstage and onscreen.

The man who greets a reporter on a recent morning, however, is at once all and none of these. Imperial yet approachable, he’s also pointedly unimpressed by his own track record.

“My body of work means nothing to me,” says the actor, seated in an office at the Geffen Playhouse, where he will open in the title role of Strindberg’s “The Father” on Wednesday. “I don’t care, and I don’t think anybody else should care.

“What means anything to me is ‘Will I be able to get it up two weeks from now and play this part richer and deeper?’ ” he continues. “Will I be able to deliver unto you some communication? And I’ll drive home, if I did it that night, feeling good about myself. If not, I’ll drive home miserable and mad at myself and the next time I’ll try and do it better.”

Clearly this is not the portrait of the artist as a young brat that he once was. As he puts it, he was “outrageous, obstreperous, difficult and willful.” Nor should one confuse Langella with the volatile Brobdingnagian he can become in character, and for which he is justly famous.

Rather, this is a more tender and circumspect being--not to mention one with an affinity for Eastern philosophy. “I know now that where I am is where it’s at, and I didn’t know that as a young actor,” says Langella. “I always thought it was somewhere else. It’s only what I’m doing that minute that matters. Experience does that for you.”

Langella has the graceful masculinity of a man at ease with himself. His eyes are mahogany reservoirs--their gaze direct, yet gently good humored--in a rosy-cheeked face that radiates vigor. He looks to be in his late 40s, though he is actually 60.

He’s been busy since he last appeared on a Los Angeles stage, in 1993 in “Scenes From an Execution” at the Mark Taper Forum. In addition to 1996 Broadway triumphs in both “The Father” and Noel Coward’s “Present Laughter,” his recent film projects have included “Lolita” and Cirque du Soleil’s as-yet-unreleased “Alegria.” He was in the process of shooting yet another movie (“I’m Losing You”) while in rehearsal at the Geffen.

“The last few years have been pretty hectic,” concedes the actor, who divides his time between New York and Los Angeles with his companion Whoopi Goldberg.

Langella is not only an actor; he has also produced such works as Charles Marowitz’s “Sherlock’s Last Case” on Broadway and Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall” off-Broadway, and directed Albert Innaurato’s “Passione” on Broadway.

“It really is cyclical,” he says. “You’d like to think that there’s a grand scheme, but there isn’t.”

Langella’s full dance card is notable, particularly given his professional longevity. “Frank is a real working actor,” says Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson, who first cast the actor in the Taper’s inaugural production, “The Devils,” in 1967. “He takes it all very seriously, and he’s grown and matured in really wonderful ways.”

Moreover, Langella has stayed with the theater despite having worked in film and television since the early 1970s. “It seems to be something that comes naturally to me,” says the New Jersey native, who made his Broadway debut in Edward Albee’s “Seascape” in 1975. “There seems to be some life energy or force that happens to me when I’m on a stage.”

Those who’ve seen him in “The Father,” which was first staged at the Roundabout Theatre in Manhattan in 1996, agree. Writing in the New York Times, Vincent Canby noted the actor’s “complete command over one of the most difficult and complex assignments in the modern theater” and called it “a career triumph.”

Geffen Playhouse producing director Gil Cates, who also gave Langella his first screen test in 1969, says “I went to see ‘The Father’ because I’d heard his performance was so splendid, not because I had the intention of bringing it to the Geffen.”

“What impressed me about the show was that I rarely have seen a classic made so accessible to a contemporary audience. I’ve seen ‘The Father’ six or seven times, and I always felt it was rather remote. But [here] I understood the Captain’s pain. [Langella’s] performance is truly monumental.”

Strindberg’s dark saga of the volatile cavalry captain and his wife waging primal psychosexual warfare against one another--played here in an adaptation by playwright Richard Nelson--had what Langella looks for in a play. “I’m kind of past the point now where the only thing I want to do is act a good part,” he explains. “I’ve done 70 or more plays, so now something has to just lay me low for me to want to do it. It has to feel insurmountable--so frightening and so challenging--and this play does that.”

Part of the appeal was that the conflict between the antagonists is both visceral and unusual. “What struck me immediately was it was one of the rare plays in which the man is the victim and the woman is the aggressor, a play in which the woman destroys the man,” says Langella. “You don’t get that often: a protagonist who’s the weaker, more fragile male.

“Of course, there’s the brilliant construction, the language, the interrelations and the road the man travels,” he continues. “He starts a very starched soldier and ends up a blithering idiot in a straitjacket. What actor wouldn’t want to have a shot at that?”

Langella was also attracted to the way the drama addresses emotional and social truths. “I thought the play spoke profoundly--for a 100-year-old play--to the heart of men’s fear of women,” he says. “I don’t think that it’s politically correct these days to say that women can be aggressive and manipulative and can misuse power--as a number of women are currently doing to the president.”

Such issues are at the heart not only of current headlines, but also of the ongoing hysteria over sexual harassment. “Something rankles in me when I watch a woman sitting on television quietly expressing her outrage at a simple act of sexual interest,” says Langella.

“If a woman sat there and said ‘and then he tore my dress apart, ripped it off, forced me to have sex with him, slapped me across the face, called me dozens of names,’ I’m on her side, and I want the guy hung. But if the man walked up and said ‘I think you’re attractive’ and began to fondle her, she could push him away and say, ‘I’m not interested, but thanks for the compliment.’ Once in a while, why don’t women consider that a compliment and not an offensive thing?”

The problem, as Langella sees it, is that the discourse has been too one-sided. “There are lots of women who walk up to a man and say, ‘I’d love to sleep with you’ and some who do it relentlessly, but it’s very hard to characterize those women publicly as somehow hurting or offending a man, or being overly aggressive,” he says. “There’s a picture painted of men as never being victims of this.

“Mind you, I take neither side,” he continues. “There are lots of men who are aggressive and cruel, and who harass. But there are also lots of women who are this way.”

Forthright as he tends to be in conversation, there’s also a striking immediacy to Langella’s acting. It’s a result, say those who know, of the actor’s technique and commitment.

“He can’t rehearse with half voice, as it were,” says veteran British director Clifford Williams, who staged “The Father” both here and in New York and has guided countless notables, from the late Eva Le Gallienne to Rex Harrison and Judi Dench. “Emotionally, he’s working at full tilt. He’s very intensive in rehearsal, very demanding on himself. His passion is to learn the part and he’s always in a very exploratory mode.”

Langella also has fans in experimental theater--including L.A.-based director David Schweizer, who first met the actor in the late 1970s and directed him in Austin Pendleton’s “Booth” in New York in 1994.

“Even though he is known as a larger-than-life, extremely theatrical and rather showy actor, his talent and his mechanism are really very raw and very instinctive,” says Schweizer, who’s hoping to direct a film written by L.A. playwright Michael Sargeant developed as a vehicle for Langella, which, if it gets made, Langella plans to star in. “What makes him unique is that you wonder ‘Why is this man so alive onstage?’ when the shape of the performance resembles those very technically crafted, precisely shaped British classical performances.

“Frank is a classical actor to the nth degree,” Schweizer continues. “And yet he’s a very particular kind of American classical actor, maybe even in a class by himself. His work is not coming from some academic idea. He really works in this utterly live, dangerous and sensual way onstage.”

These observations ring particularly true when held up to Langella’s own explanation of the opportunity that he finds in the theater.

“To be an actor in the theater is to teach yourself and keep yourself disciplined and honorable,” Langella says. “And if you do that, you get a chance to fly in this kind of emotional paradise that acting can be when it’s a part that’s really great. Acting is just as much hard work as digging a ditch. And if you do all the yeoman work, inspiration will come.”

It is a place where self-knowledge can be found. “Revelations come when you’re in the thick of it, pitting yourself up against something larger than yourself. I happen to be an actor. So I’m going to choose roles where every night I go out there thinking I have to go up against something that the man in the audience, as Camus says, takes a lifetime to face. And I have to do it eight times a week.”

After more than three decades of roles, Langella has also learned a few things about what it takes, and means, to be an actor. “The biggest lesson I’ve learned really is that there’s no room for the neuroses, for the childlike qualities that you think you need to be an actor,” he says.

“You have to maintain a certain attitude of childlikeness--because it requires it to be grown-up and go into a theater and put on a costume and walk out on a stage and say other people’s words. But with each decade, I come to value and respect decent, honorable, disciplined behavior more.”

Time has also given him a philosophical perspective on the long haul. Consequently, he has a trouper’s sang-froid.

Career highs and lows may come and go, but the point is not to let them matter too much. “I just feel that no matter what comes in a career--and mine has been all over the map--you must stay at the table, pick up the cards you’re dealt and play them,” says Langella. “There are long periods where it’s just terrible. And the test for any actor is whether you stay at the table or go away.”

Part of the the actor’s lot, after all, is to be subject to creative decisions that are largely beyond control. “Very often an interviewer will say to you, ‘Why did you choose to do that part at that point in your career?’ ” says Langella. “But most of the time for an actor it’s not really a choice. Even for the top top actors in the country--the five or six biggest box-office draws--if you got them to tell you the truth, there’s no choice for them either.”

Asked for one lesson he would impart to his younger colleagues, Langella offers an anecdote that is, characteristically, as much practical as existential.

“When I was a very young actor, I remember being given a piece of advice by a director who said, ‘An actor is in two positions in his career: You want them or they want you.’ If you want them, you could be sitting on their desk, lighting their cigar and kissing their ass and not get the part. But if they want you, you could be in the Sahara in a tent . . . and a note will slip under the tent saying ‘please report to work.’

“He told me that when I was 23 and I couldn’t fathom it,” Langella continues. “But I now know how absolutely right he was. This moment is what matters. That takes almost your lifetime to figure out. I don’t know why it takes so long, but it does. That’s probably the single most important thing I could leave with any actor.”

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“The Father,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Tuesdays to Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. $27.50-$37.50. Ends May 3. (310) 208-5454.