An Actor’s Life Is Recalled, With All the Twists and Turns

In the prologue of his engrossing and candid memoir, “Angels & Demons: One Actor’s Hollywood Journey,” Ray Stricklyn writes that he “might qualify as one who has had his 15 minutes in the limelight; perhaps even 20.” It’s typical of Stricklyn, a veteran screen and stage actor, to have such an accurate and witty perspective on his career.

When Stricklyn fell ill in 1997 and learned he was suffering from emphysema, he felt the urge to write his autobiography.

“I really did it as therapy,” he said, sitting in the spacious living room of the vintage Spanish bungalow he shares with his companion of 33 years, esteemed theater director David Galligan. “I thought, ‘God knows whether I’ll be here tomorrow.’ ” As it turns out, he was able to stabilize his condition sufficiently to be able to return to acting, most recently with a recurring role on “Days of Our Lives.”

A Brilliant Beginning Then Sudden Decline

Born in Houston in 1928, Stricklyn tried his luck at acting fresh out of high school. After some local success he headed for New York, and got his foothold in theater and television before arriving in Hollywood, where he quickly became recognized as a promising young actor, scoring triumphs playing Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine’s son in “The Catered Affair” and as Gary Cooper and Geraldine Fitzgerald’s son in “Ten North Frederick.”

For a time Stricklyn was riding high, spotlighted in movie magazines and going from one role to another. Then his glamorous existence crashed. The swift decline of the old studio system hit contract players such as Stricklyn hard, plus his enduring boyish looks typecast him as a juvenile for many years.

“Angels & Demons” works on several levels, recommending it as a rich read even to those to whom his name is not familiar but who are likely to recognize him from his countless roles on stage, screen and TV. It’s a classic show-biz saga of burgeoning success followed by long years of alcoholic despair that culminates in sobriety and a dramatic comeback in middle age. It is also the story of a man coming to terms with his homosexuality back in the repressive ‘50s.

Turned From Acting to Publicist

Chock-full of anecdotes, it is above all a celebration of the love of acting in all its artistic challenges and creativity, the sustaining force in Stricklyn’s life.

Tennessee Williams looms large in Stricklyn’s career, although he says he knew him only slightly. On his first trip to New York as a teenager, the first play he saw was “The Glass Menagerie.” Transfixed by the play and by Laurette Taylor as the faded Southern belle Amanda Wingfield, he wrote, “I’d seen theatrical magic. Whatever it was, I wanted more. And I wanted some more for me, too.”

Not long after, Stricklyn won a New York drama school scholarship playing a scene from Williams’ one-act “Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry.” And it would be as Tennessee Williams in a one-man play, “Confessions of a Nightingale,” that Stricklyn would score a resounding comeback in January 1985, winning prizes and plaudits around the country.

By 1973 Stricklyn would begin a new career as a publicist, running, with theater publicist Kim Garfield, the West Coast office for distinguished New York publicist John Springer, a noted theater and film historian as well.

Back on Stage With Seasoned Roles

Stricklyn never reminded clients or the press of his previous career, and took only four roles during his 13 years with Springer. The office, however, did represent Bette Davis, whom he remembers with affection. “I know she could be difficult, but she was kind to me,” he says.

In 1982 Stricklyn began a tentative return to acting, culminating with his portrayal of Mr. Nightingale in Tennessee Williams’ “Vieux Carre” at the Beverly Hills Playhouse in June 1983. At last matured by some lines on his face and gray in his hair, Stricklyn was deeply moving as the Williams alter ego, a dying homosexual residing in a seedy New Orleans boardinghouse.

But this was but a warmup to “Confessions of a Nightingale,” drawn from interviews with Williams by Charlotte Chandler and C. Robert Jennings. It opened at the Beverly Hills Playhouse in January 1985. Stricklyn unforgettably became Williams before the audience’s eyes: ravaged yet gallant, scabrously funny and ultimately brave. When Stricklyn opened in New York in 1986, New York magazine’s much-feared John Simon lauded him for his “fine job” as Williams. “All those small mannerisms, tics, idiosyncratic intonations, hesitancies, shifts of mood are fraught with authenticity,” Simon wrote. Stricklyn would tour as Williams for the next decade.

When asked what he learned in writing his memoirs, Stricklyn replies quickly: “In rereading my book I decided I had done better than I thought I had. I discovered that I had a lot to be grateful for, and I decided that I should quit knocking myself.”

But Stricklyn added, in that Southern drawl so like Williams’, “that doesn’t mean I didn’t want more.”