The year 2022 saw many of our most treasured luminaries dim and disappear from our firmament. Through the years I have interviewed many of those who passed, leaving lasting memories of our brief time together.
I remember Sidney Poitier, who retained his elegant gravitas even as he aged. He told me that when he was still a teen he was working as a dishwasher but wanted to be an actor. The problem was that he couldn’t read very well.
“I began reading everything I could get my hands on, mostly newspapers. I was working in a restaurant washing dishes, and after 10 o'clock the restaurant closed, and we cleaned up. One old Jewish waiter saw me every night, night after night, reading the Journal American or one of the newspapers of the day.
“He said, ‘If you come across any words you don't understand, or if you want to pronounce them, you can ask me to point them out to you.’ Every night after we finished work — he as a waiter, I as a dishwasher, we'd sit in back of the restaurant and every word I didn't understand or know how to pronounce he would explain the meaning of the word, its pronunciation, and he would frame the word in a sentence so that I could understand.
“We did that night after night after night. Years went by. Here in Hollywood I was given the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, and in my thank-you remarks I said that one of my regrets is that I never knew the name of that waiter because I would certainly want him to know — or if he's no longer with us I would want his family to know — what an effect he had on my life. “
There was something sad about Louie Anderson even though he earned his living as a comic. He’d grown up in the projects with an abusive alcoholic father. “When I do my comedy, I could be helping someone else get through it, “ he told me.
Stand-up was his first love. “I’m trying to find the funny in inclusion and exclusion,” he said. “So I go back to my childhood — my dad excluded, and my mother included — so I try to find what’s funny in that. I want people to feel better and do better and laugh more.”
He said he thought stand-up comedy was in his DNA. “I think you can’t help yourself. I don’t think you have any choice,” he said. “I don’t need it, but I love it, it’s part of who I am. People need it and I need it. I get the love. I think I do it for love.”
Nichelle Nichols proved legendary as Lt. Uhura on “Star Trek,” which was created by Gene Roddenberry. But Nichols longed to perform in musical theater and was determined to quit the show.
“When I went in and told Gene I was thinking of leaving because I was being offered roles that were going where I wanted them to go – musical theater. It was a Friday I’ll never forget. He said, ‘You can’t do this. Don’t you realize what I'm trying to get done here?’ I said, ‘Well, I think you’ve done a fantastic job, Gene.’ He said, ‘OK, take the weekend and think about it and if you still feel that way Monday morning you'll go with my blessings.’
“The next day, which was a Saturday, I was a guest at an NAACP fundraiser. And one of the promoters said a fan wanted to meet me; he was a devoted fan. So I thought it was a trekker. And I said, ‘Oh, certainly.’ I got up and crossed the room to the face of Dr. Martin Luther King. He smiled and said, ‘I am the biggest Trekkie on the planet.’ I’ve never been at a loss for words, but my mouth just opened and closed. I was stunned. He told me how important the role was and the manner with which I’d developed the character with strength and dignity.
“All I could say was, ‘Thank you so much, Dr. King, I’m going to miss my co-stars.’ I said, ‘I'm leaving the show.’ He said, ‘You cannot leave. It can wait. It’s part of history now.’”
Naomi Judd was deeply religious but also a seeker. She told me, “You have to know yourself because as women, we don’t know how to be straight. We’ll say, ‘There’s nothing wrong, leave me alone, I don’t want to talk about it.’ But it’s the antithesis. We are in psychic pain. We want to talk about it. We want someone to be demonstrative. We want someone to be in charge, to come to us when we’re weak. I think, first of all, you have to know who you are because you can't know what makes you happy. You have no idea what makes you happy unless you really know who you are.”
Ray Liotta, the star of “Goodfellas,” was one himself. But he didn’t take to Hollywood phonies. “I don’t go to premieres,” he told me. “I’d much rather see a movie at my leisure when nobody's around. Sometimes I think a lot of these actors feel like they need to feel they're big and huge, so they need entourages. Between ‘action’ and ‘cut,’ I guess they need someone to keep letting them know how great they are. People make too much out of acting. ... I don’t see anything special about being an actor. It’s a great job, but it’s not above anything else.”
Henry Silva always played the bad guy in films like “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Above the Law” and “Code of Silence.” In person he was anything but. "I decided to be an actor when I was 8,” he told me.
“I was sitting on my bed. It must've been the weekend 'cause I wasn't in school. I made up my mind I was going to be an actor. So I haven't progressed emotionally much beyond that age. I got my initial inspiration from Mickey Rooney and the ‘Andy Hardy’ films. I grew up in an environment where my father was missing. He left when I was a year old.
“I always wanted a family, and I experienced family life through the movies. So it hit a deep chord in me, and I always wanted to be that which was on the screen, because my own life was not as fulfilling. Movies filled an enormous void in my life. I was raised in a ghetto, and I had this incredible fear of having to remain there. So that was the fuel I used to get me out.”
Silva left home at 14. “I did a lot of odd jobs and saved money to go to acting school: dishwasher, delivery boy, waiter, bus boy, longshoreman. Way back then there were newsstands in the subway, I did that — anything I could get to make money. In my life I never borrowed. I was never in debt. That's what I learned very early on. That's the way my mother was. She never owed anybody anything. My mother gave me my emotional stability. She was very honest, never told a lie, ever. My mother was a total illiterate. She could not read or write any language, so she wasn't able to help me with my homework.”
Kirstie Alley was a force of nature. Forthright and candid, she was convinced she’d lived before. “I believe we’ve had billions of past lives,” she said. “But I know I was a movie star the last time. And I sort of came in and it didn’t hit me until later on that I wasn’t STILL famous. I came in like, ‘Where are the Jaguars and the down-pillows and the men? Give them to me!’”
William Hurt loved philosophizing about life. “I really work hard at reminding others the difference between me and my work,” he said to me. “I can be skeptical, but I also think one of worst things you can do is exercise contempt prior to investigation. So I don't think skepticism is contemptuous. I believe wonders take place. I believe sometimes you don't see the hand that drops them.
“There were many times that I thought someone was looking out for me. To the extent that I'm not the creator but I'm created, therefore the creator is within me. I know if it were not for incalculable risks against it, I would not be here; I would be gone. I experience life as an incredible privilege and experience the opportunity to be aware of consciousness, the opportunity to appreciate the relationship between sensibility and consciousness. I'm almost always quietly awestruck about it.”
British actor Robbie Coltrane famous for his portrayal in “Cracker,” told me it took some time for him to settle down. “I had a lot of nice affairs when I started to be successful in the ‘80s,” he said. “I had a pretty good life, really, no responsibilities. There is something terribly romantic about just hopping onto a plane somewhere with just a suitcase and a script. It is like being an adventurer really, and nobody worrying about when you come home, or if anything you left at home will be there when you get back. I rather enjoyed that. Gypsies and vagabonds — that's what they call actors.”
Anne Heche was often troubled, but she told me: “My whole life was a journey of trying to find peace with myself and find my own health. So I would say every single step along the way ... was probably a catalyst — even the dark roads were a catalyst to help me understand where I wanted to go. And if I saw places I didn’t want to be, that redirected me toward where I wanted to be. It was a 30-year journey to my health, and I had very many people helping me along the way.”
James Caan was sure he’d changed since he first began performing. “In many ways I’m a different person than I was years ago,” he told me. "I try to absorb a little more than I used to. I'm still rambunctious and I still like activity.''
His acting technique, which he honed at the Neighborhood Playhouse, never changed, he said. "That technique is looking up to God and saying, 'Give me a break!' That's my technique.''
Chiklis stars and directs
It’s one lucky actor who gets the opportunity to direct projects as well as act in them. Michael Chiklis is such a fortunate fellow. Chiklis, best known for the precedent setting cop show “The Shield,” is starring in the first episode of Fox’s new anthology series, “Accused,” premiering Jan. 22.
He’s also directing another one. Based on the successful British series, “Accused” begins with the subject on trial, then works its way backward to the crime, revealing how it came about. Chiklis says helming a project is far different from acting in one.
“I thought one of the things that was really refreshing as a director is I didn't feel constrained,” says Chiklis. “When I've directed episodes of, say, ‘The Shield,’ that was a very specific template, and you had to really adhere to it.
“Because this is an anthology series, they're sort of stand-alone featurettes, and there was a huge difference in terms of tone and tenor between the pilot episode that I starred in as an actor and the episode that I directed.”
Chiklis thinks his move from actor to director was inevitable. “Some actors are sort of trailer actors,” he says. “They go and they sit in their trailer and they wait, or they're sort of off-set. But I've never been that kind of an actor, and most actors are very curious people naturally.
“So I've spent a tremendous amount of time on set and asking questions and making directors’ and photographers’ eyes roll because I was simply bothering them with questions. ‘Why are you doing that?’ ‘What's that do?’ from when I first started as an actor.
“I just think directing is a natural progression for an actor, and that's why there's so many examples of actors who do it well and successfully — because we're storytellers at our core. We're natural storytellers, and if you give me motion pictures, music and sound and say, ‘Go tell a story with all of those tools’ — so there you go.”
Judge joins the cabal
From Faustus to Walter White to Don Draper, drama is often about men who sell their souls to the devil. Bryan Cranston’s disgraced judge in Showtime’s “Your Honor” is one of them. Cranston returns on Sunday for Season 2 of the series, which finds the former judge in the depths of despair.
Cranston thinks that man’s fall from grace makes perfect fodder for drama because it’s universal. “It's a generalization, but the testosterone that pumps through a man's body makes him do stupid things,” says Cranston.
“We've known that forever. And part of that is ego and thinking that ‘I can do this.’ ‘I can control it.’ ‘Watch me!’ That type of thing. And that invariably gets men in trouble. ... With the passing of the queen, I was thinking the other day, ‘God, I wish there were more women at heads of state around the world because I truly believe that there would be far less war, far less aggression.’ That's a generalization too, of course, but it's tied in with hope that there might be a more civil, kind and generous world for us to live in. And I think men, deep down inside, that's what we are looking for too. We just don't always know how to find it.”
'Witches' coven streams on Thursday
The new eight-episode series, “Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches,” streams on Shudder, Sundance Now and Acorn beginning Thursday. Based on Rice’s trilogy “Lives of the Mayfair Witches,” the series stars Harry Hamlin and Alexandra Daddario. Hamlin says he wasn’t familiar with the trilogy but began listening to it on tape before filming began.
“The thing about this show is it's so mysterious and exotic and wonderfully sick in so many cool ways,” he says. “And the character that I play has all of those things combined in kind of a delicious bouillabaisse of exotic New Orleans food.”
The series is filmed in New Orleans, and that adds to the mystique, says executive producer and writer Esta Spalding. “We had a witchcraft consultant, and in fact we also had a Latin consultant. ... And there are lots of spells we've been given help on,” she says. “I mean, we're shooting in New Orleans. The book is set in New Orleans. The city is full of all of this mythology, and we've tried to tap into it everywhere we can.”
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