A bright ‘Evening’ star

Frank Langella likes the way his acting “process” has evolved over the decades.

“The older I get, the more the men I play inhabit me in ways that didn’t as much as when I was younger,” says the 69-year-old actor over the phone from New York City. “I just become them.”

And the three-time Tony Award-winning actor, who transfixed female fans three decades ago on Broadway as the super sexy “Dracula,” seems to have cast aside every aspect of his own personality in his latest film, “Starting Out in the Evening,” which opens today.

Langella gives a quietly subtle, complex and ultimately heartbreaking performance in the drama as Leonard Schiller, a once-famous New York novelist with a bad heart who is struggling to finish his last novel. Emotionally shut down, even to his adult daughter (Lili Taylor), Schiller’s solitary life is upended when a beautiful graduate student (Lauren Ambrose) enters his life to interview him for her thesis.

Based on the novel by Brian Morton, the low-budget indie was directed by Andrew Wagner, who also adapted the book with Fred Parnes.

“I didn’t read the novel,” Langella offers. “I thought what Andrew and Fred Parnes created for a film was extraordinary. The man spoke to me when I first read the script.”

Langella encounters men like Schiller in his Upper West Side neighborhood on a daily basis. “So many men like that are walking around,” he offers. “I could have actually walked up to any number of them and ask ‘Can I have that sweater?’ ‘Can I have that tie?’ ”

He felt he needed to play Schiller as man who was “deeply imploded, deeply and powerfully locked down and fighting to hang on in a particular way. And if he allowed anything in, the emotion would overwhelm him and knock him down. Better to feel very little to control his life and keep it all in.”

For Wagner, Langella was the only actor who could do justice to Schiller because of his ability to “sit for the camera and just by his presence alone suggest the kind of substance that tells the collective history of a man,” the director says.

Not only did Wagner find a collaborative partner in Langella, he discovered that the actor was open and willing to “strip himself bare in an effort to link up with the loneliness and longing and the disappointment of the character,” he explains. “He was adamant that he give a performance that was much more closely aligned to being and existing rather than acting. He also understood that at this stage in his life and this moment in his career he could give a performance on skill, virtuosity and mastery alone, but those were the very things he wanted to abandon. He wanted to tap into the humanity of this man. . . . “

In a filmed interview Laurence Olivier did in the 1960s, the legendary thespian talked about his acting process -- that he created a character from the outside in. “Most English actors believe that,” says Langella at the mention of Olivier, with whom he appeared in the 1979 film version of “Dracula.”

“I am the reverse. I don’t subscribe to the notion that the outer stuff can help trigger [the internal being of a character]. I am a big believer in lucky accidents. Sometimes you can pick up a hat or a cane or some piece of costume, anything that contributes works. But I don’t think working on the outer necessarily brings you to the inner life of a character any quicker. Sometimes in my opinion, it can hinder you because you are so caught up on the surface that you never really get to the soul. And to me, it is the soul that matters. If you haven’t got the soul of the character. . . .”

That being said, Langella adds, “I know this sounds contradictory but the day I buzzed my hair off was a great day. It just helped with Leonard being practically bald and without him necessarily having to do anything to primp himself . . . that gave me a quality of the sort of sad aesthetic efficiency of his life.”

These are good times for Langella. He recently reprised his Tony Award-winning performance as Richard Nixon for director Ron Howard in the big-screen version of the hit play “Frost/Nixon,” which will be released in 2008. Michael Sheen, who played British journalist David Frost opposite Langella in London and New York, also repeats his acclaimed performance.

“It’s the full play as we performed it,” Langella says of pulling the stage performance into the film. “They haven’t cut anything from the play and he’s added a dozen insights into each man’s private life in between the interviews. I never looked at the [script] after we closed on Broadway. It allowed my adrenaline to take over. I felt if I kept studying the script I would take a certain edge away. I wanted to be edgy. I didn’t want to come out with any tried-and-true line readings.”

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susan.king@latimes.com