Who Says You Have to Be a Star?

The problem with being a great character actor is that nobody recognizes you from one performance to the next. It’s hard for an actor to build up much movie star momentum when he virtually evaporates into every character he plays--which brings us to Alan Arkin.

“Alan’s never had an identifiable screen personality because he just disappears into his characters,” says Norman Jewison, who directed Arkin in his 1966 film debut, “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” “His accents are impeccable, and he’s even able to change his look--but oddly enough, this gift has worked against him. He’s always been underestimated, partly because he’s never been in service of his own success, which is one of the things I love about him. Alan’s just so cool!”

Other directors must be realizing that, because Arkin’s turned up with increasing frequency of late. Featured in the Bruno Barreto film “Four Days in September,” which opens Friday, he recently completed work on “Jakob the Liar,” a comedy co-starring Robin Williams, and co-starred with Marisa Tomei in “The Slums of Beverly Hills.”

Arkin’s recent resume also includes performances in the 1990 films “Edward Scissorhands” and “Havana,” 1992’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “‘Mother Night” in 1996. Last year, he played a detective in the sci-fi thriller “Gattaca” and did a dazzling turn as a terrified psychoanalyst in “Grosse Point Blank.”

“Alan’s one of the great American actors and I’ve loved him forever, so having him in ‘Grosse Point Blank’ was a dream come true,” says John Cusack, who co-wrote, co-produced and starred in the film. “If an actor wants a modern tutorial on the art of listening, just watch Alan in ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’; he does more just listening than most actors can do with several pages of dialogue.

“He challenged our script for ‘Grosse Point Blank’ because he felt that it didn’t go far enough--and that thrilled me, of course, because it meant that we wound up with three new pages of dialogue co-written with Alan Arkin,” adds Cusack, who’s collaborating with Arkin on the development of “Arigo,” a film about a Brazilian peasant healer that Arkin’s been trying to get off the ground for 19 years. (At this point, “Arigo” will be produced by Cusack, who hopes that Arkin will both direct and star in it.)

In the meantime, “Four Days in September”--which is based on a true story--finds Arkin cast as Charles Elbrick, the American ambassador to Brazil who was kidnapped by a group of Brazilian radicals and held for four days in 1969.

“ ‘Four Days’ is an ensemble piece that doesn’t allow much time for setting up the characters in terms of back story, so I needed an actor who could introduce Elbrick as a fully fleshed person in the very first scene,” says Barreto of the casting of Arkin. “Alan can communicate volumes of information with the subtlest of gestures--and, of course, you tend to like him the minute he appears on screen.”

As to why he took the part, Arkin says, “I was struck by the fact that you end up caring about everybody in the film. You understand that, regardless of how misguided they might be, these people are doing the best they can.

“I had one of the most difficult days I’ve ever had as an actor on ‘Four Days,’ ” adds the 63-year-old actor during an interview at a Beverly Hills hotel. “The film was shot out of sequence, and on my first day we did a scene where I’m led to a bathroom after having soiled my pants, then I sit on the toilet and cry my eyes out. To jump into a character at such a pivotal moment felt strange, and I have no idea what the scene looks like.”

It happens, in fact, to be Barreto’s favorite moment in the film. “Alan brought me to tears when we shot that scene, and I’ve cried every time I’ve seen it since,” he confesses. “Alan’s extremely quiet and he kept to himself on the set, but he had a wonderful relationship with the Brazilian actors. They all knew and admired his work, and on days off they’d take Alan around and cook for him--it made me jealous because they never invited me!”

Arkin, born in New York City in 1934, recalls, “My father was a painter and a writer, but he couldn’t make a living doing those things, so he worked as a teacher, as did my mother.

“When I was 5, I confided in my father that I was going to be an actor when I grew up, and though he was sure I’d grow out of it, I didn’t. To decide on something at the age of 5 and stick to it comes from a very neurotic place; with me, that neurosis was rooted in the fact that the only time my parents paid attention to me was when I was performing.”

Thus is the life of a red diaper baby. “My parents were communists, and that had a big effect on my childhood because it isolated me from the outside world,” says the actor, who has two younger siblings. “I was a self-confident child until I was about 8, which is when they told me of their political beliefs. After that, I felt suspicious of the world and retreated into my imagination.”

The plot thickened for the Arkins in 1945, when they moved to L.A.

“I had an uncle who was a successful film composer, and he told my father he could get him a job in the studios as a set painter, so we moved to a house in Highland Park. Unfortunately, the minute we arrived, there was a studio strike that lasted a year and a half.”

In need of a job, Arkin’s father began teaching for the L.A. school system. He soon lost that job, however, as a result of the communist witch hunt of the ‘50s known as the Red Scare. “The bottom basically fell out for our family when we moved here,” Arkin recalls. “We were dirt poor so I couldn’t afford to go to the movies too often, but I went whenever I could and focused in on movies as if they were more important than anything in life.”

Graduating high school in 1951 with dreams of working as an actor, Arkin tried to break into movies, but says he “couldn’t get arrested.” So he studied theater instead, first at L.A. City College and L.A. State College, then on a scholarship to Bennington College in Vermont, where he was one of a handful of male students at what was then almost exclusively a girls school.

“I couldn’t get arrested on stage in New York either,” recalls Arkin, who married Bennington classmate Jeremy Yaffe in 1955 and shortly thereafter became the father of two sons; Adam Arkin, now 41 and a successful television actor, and Matthew Arkin, 37, who’s currently on Broadway in a production of “The Sunshine Boys.” “I was broke, so my marriage was falling apart, and at the age of 28 I was convinced nothing would ever happen to me. Then Paul Sills, who’d seen me in an improvisation group at the Crystal Palace in St. Louis, offered me a job in Chicago. Absolutely nothing else was going on for me, so I thought, what the hell--at least it will give me something to do. And that was Second City.

“Prior to Second City, I hadn’t thought of myself as a comedic actor and I was sure I was gonna get canned the first month because I wasn’t coming up with anything,” he says of his early days with the legendary comedy troupe. “Finally I stumbled onto a character that was funny, then I developed a library of characters the audience seemed to like.”

Times film critic Kenneth Turan recalls seeing Arkin on stage with Second City in New York in the early ‘60s as “one of the highlights of my youth. He was absolutely brilliant and came up with some of the most hilarious improvisation I’ve ever seen.”

“Second City was a major turning point in my life, and I stayed with them for two years,” continues the actor, who left the company in 1963 for a starring role on Broadway in “Enter Laughing,” which also featured Barbara Dana, whom he married in 1965. (Their 30-year-old son, Anthony Arkin, is also an actor.) Arkin earned glowing notices for his performance in “Enter Laughing,” and his work the following year in Murray Schisgal’s “Luv,” which was directed by Mike Nichols, caught the eye of Norman Jewison.

“I was stunned by how brilliant Alan was--he was so funny in a warm, human way, so I approached him about being in ‘The Russians Are Coming,’ ” Jewison says. “Nobody at United Artists had heard of him, and they insisted he do a screen test, so he came in and we did a filmed improvisation. I interviewed him as an officer accompanying a Russian theater group on tour in America, and he was so hysterical that everybody who saw it just fell off their chair.”

Arkin recalls the making of “The Russians Are Coming” as “a spectacular experience that ruined me for everything that’s happened since. Norman was a dream to work with, largely because of the inspiring vision he has of what filmmaking can be.”

Arkin gave some indication of his range the following year, when he starred as a psychopathic killer opposite Audrey Hepburn in “Wait Until Dark.” He recalls that three-month shoot, wherein he was required to torture Hepburn, as “just awful. She was an exquisite lady, so being mean to her was hard!” He reinvented himself again in 1968, playing a deaf mute in Robert Ellis Miller’s adaptation of Carson McCullers’ novel “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.”

“They don’t make films like that anymore,” says Arkin of “Heart.” “As a culture, we were children then and we still had our innocence, and it’s reflected in films like ‘The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.’ It has a totally open heart--aspects of it are almost embarrassing, they’re so open. All the betrayals of the ‘60s brought an end to that childhood, and the culture seems stuck in adolescence now.

“My favorite genre is realistic fantasy, because that’s where myth resides,” he adds. “The best films of Frank Capra are fantasies, but we don’t think of them that way because they’re done with a total belief in the emotional content of the material. When similar films are attempted today, they always seem to be done slightly tongue in cheek--although there are, of course, exceptions. I was absolutely devastated by ‘Shine.’ The first time I saw it, I was on an airplane, and I thought they were gonna have to land the plane.”

After “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Arkin turned in one of his best-known performances, as Yossarian, a pilot struggling to maintain a grip on his sanity amid the surreality of war, in Mike Nichols’ 1970 adaptation of the Joseph Heller novel “Catch-22.”

“ ‘Catch 22’ was a tough experience because Mike had a vision of it I had difficulty understanding,” Arkin recalls.

“Making films can be difficult for different reasons. “With ‘Big Trouble,’ for instance, Peter Falk and I were given one of the funniest scripts I’d ever read, but as we were shooting, [director] John Cassavetes rewrote it on a daily basis,” says Arkin of a 1985 film best described as “Double Indemnity” played as slapstick. “In 1967, I was in a film directed by Vittorio De Sica [“Woman Times Seven”], who gave actors no room to move. I grudgingly took it from him, but Peter Sellers, who was also in the film, told De Sica to screw himself.

“More often, though, working on films has been glorious,” adds Arkin, who’s delivered dozens of brilliant performances in such an, offhand manner that it’s easy to overlook them. Notable among them: his portrayal of an inept Mexican cop in the 1974 comedy “Freebie and the Bean”; his turn as Sigmund Freud in the 1976 film, “The Seven Percent Solution”; and his pairing in 1979 with Peter Falk in one of the great odd couple comedies, “The In-Laws.”

Acting is one of many activities in Arkin’s full life. An accomplished photographer and jazz guitarist, he was a member of the folk group the Tarriers from 1957 to ‘59, he’s written more than a hundred songs, and his recordings for children made with the group the Babysitters have sold steadily for three decades. Arkin’s also written six books, including a 1979 autobiography, “Halfway Through the Door,” and four books for children. His seventh book, “One Present From Fleckman’s,” written for his granddaughter Molly and illustrated by Richard Igielski, will be out this year from HarperCollins.

Amid all that, Arkin’s been preparing to appear on stage in New York for the first time in 30 years, when “Power Plays” premieres off-Broadway at the Promenade Theater in early April. An evening of one-act plays that includes “Virtual Reality”--which he wrote and will direct and perform in--”Power Plays” also includes two new plays by Elaine May that will feature her daughter, actress Jeanne Berlin, and Arkin’s son Anthony.

“I’m still terrified of acting on stage, but I love directing theater and I generally find a joy in my work now that didn’t used to be there,” says Arkin, who earned his stripes as a film director in 1971 when he brought Jules Feiffer’s black comedy “Little Murders” to the screen. “Acting used to be torture, and if I didn’t do a scene well I felt as if I’d died. I never considered quitting acting though--I couldn’t, because I was so shy that I needed it as a way of contacting people. I could be outgoing when I was acting, but when I wasn’t acting you could put me in a closet. Over the years, I’ve learned how to talk to people, so I no longer need acting in the way that I used to.

“My real vocation for several decades has been trying to find out who I am, and learn something about reality and consciousness. That’s been my main work, and one of the results of this very long, slow process, is that acting’s become fun for me.”