'I'm an actor, not a star' (Weekend Standard, 2005-07-09~10)

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'I'm an actor, not a star'

Lynn Smith
Weekend: July 9-10, 2005

Ed Harris and Paul Newman in Empire Falls

Ed Harris has lived in movie-star country, on a shady piece of Malibu hillside high over the Pacific Ocean, for much of his fruitful 24-year career.

He rarely drives to Los Angeles for meetings or lunch with moguls. Watch the balding actor, dressed in faded cotton, walk past two pickup trucks and some rusty patio furniture and you might mistake him for one of the workmen spiffing up the neighborhood estates.

The way he sees it: "I'm not a movie star. I'm an actor.'' As Hollywood's Mr Everyman, Harris has parlayed an open, middle-American face and persona into a career of diverse supporting char-acters, from lover (The Abyss) to serial killer (Just Cause) to imaginary federal agent (A Beautiful Mind).

"The roles I've had that are leading roles I've either produced the film myself, or else they're films that nobody's seen,'' he says.

Now 55, Harris is playing two central characters - one larger than life, one seemingly smaller - in productions that take him from a dying mill town in Maine to the gilded salons of 19th-century Europe.

As Ludwig van Beethoven, in Copying Beethoven, an independent film now in production in Budapest, Harris tackles his first period role but one that recalls the largest effort of his career when he directed himself as another intense artistic genius, Jackson Pollock, in Pollock.

In HBO's two-part Empire Falls, Harris is the operator of a small-town grill, the touchstone for the other townsfolk in a high-profile ensemble cast that includes Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

In this drama, based on Richard Russo's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, playing the character Miles Roby allows Harris to show off what friends say is another side to the actor: The smart, decent man of few words.

Acquaintances call Harris serious, independent-minded and bluntly honest, the sort of guy who would tell a stranger his toupee was slipping, the sort of actor who prepares so thoroughly he winds up embodying the characters he's playing.

"He picks the characteristics he wants to investigate and he underplays them,'' says Newman, who plays Harris' crusty old goat of a dad in Empire Falls. "What you have is not a performance so much as character behavior, which I admire.''

"People are recognizing more and more just how good he really is,'' says Empire Falls director Fred Schepisi.

In the ensemble piece, he adds: "Everything is about connections. His part is affected by what happened in his past and his relationships to all the different strata of society which had a personal impact on him. He's got to convey an awful lot of what's going on in his mind without looking boring. You need to be very sure of where you are in the progression of the character at all times.

"He conveyed all the turmoil inside of him without it ever seeming precious, and certainly not boring. It was quite a feat.''

Harris has acquired neither the persona of a star nor the US$20 million-per-picture (HK$156 million) fee that goes with that status. He doesn't much care if he's on Hollywood's A-list.

"I'm on my own A-list,'' he says. Yet audiences identify with him because he seems like an ordinary guy.

An ordinary guy, of course, would not spend 10 years working on a movie about a troubled artist, even building a studio to perfect his own drip-painting technique over the years. Or try to start a theater company. Or build a playhouse with dormers, rafters and patio for his daughter that has a better ocean view than his own.

In conversation, Harris is shy yet blunt, profane and intense on the topics of art, politics, and the media.

He is concerned that quality films are an endangered species and that the industry's starmaking machinery chews up young actors.

"The business is so ready to grab anybody with the potential to be a young star and it throws them into these movies and hopes one of them hits. If three of them don't, you never hear from this person again. There goes your career.''

If there's one thing he's learned about Hollywood, he says, it's this: "You can't rely on the business to provide you with the opportunity to act. If what you want to do is act, you've got to find the situation where you can do that. If what you want to do is become a star, then good luck.''

The middle child of a bookseller and a travel agent, Harris grew up in the diverse environments of New Jersey and Oklahoma. He didn't start acting until he was college age.

"It was 1969, a lot of things were going on, football ceased being fun and I figured I might do something else,'' he says.

He left Columbia University, moved to the Los Angeles area and started working at a small theater in Pasadena. He took bit parts in many of the TV shows of the era - Lou Grant, Rockford Files, Hart to Hart - but kept auditioning for stage work through the 80s.

He met his wife, Amy Madigan ("It was interest at first sight''), when they were cast opposite each other in the film Places in the Heart. They married two years later.

"I love the theater,'' Harris says. He and a group of colleagues, including Holly Hunter, James Gammon and Tom Bower, commissioned architectural plans for a small theater they hoped would emulate Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater Company, an ensemble of actors, directors, playwrights and filmmakers.

Although they found a space, now occupied by the Edgemar Center for the Arts in Santa Monica, he says they couldn't raise the money to make it work.

"The last 10 years would have been a lot different if we'd been able to get a space there,'' he explains.

He went on to make his own luck in films, nominated for Oscars in supporting roles for Apollo 13, The Truman Show and The Hours. He also famously spent a decade rewriting the script for Pollock, which he then directed, casting himself in the starring role. That earned him an Oscar nomination for best actor.

Marcia Gay Harden, who won an Oscar for her role as Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, calls Harris "unorthodox'' as a director, an actor and a person.

While filming Pollock, rather than call "Cut!'' and take 20 minutes to make adjustments, he would simply interrupt the actors with the cameras rolling and then move on. To get her attention in one scene, he unexpectedly threw a chair.

As a result, she says: "He helped me get to a place I would never have achieved. He gave me a lot of trust.

"He makes me smile because he's so serious.

"He makes me feel like a mischievous little sister.'' As an actor, she says, Harris "insists upon playing men, not boys. There's nothing about Ed Harris that's a boy. Except his grin. And then he's a bad boy.''

Last month, Harris began what he calls the most challenging role of his career as the title lead in Copying Beethoven. To prepare, he not only read biographies but studied violin, piano and composing, which is even more daunting than action painting, he says.

"With Pollock, I could build an art studio and take most of the decade to get to the place where I could cover a canvas with paint in his style and create something that had some rhythm and movement to it and some beauty, maybe. In this situation, I have not composed my symphony yet. Or my etude ...''

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