Frank Langella critica

CHARLES MCGRATH

The New York Times

FRANK LANGELLA, who plays Richard M. Nixon in Ron Howard's movie “Frost/Nixon,” doesn't look a bit like the 37th president. He doesn't look like anyone, really. He has a large, monumental head and the kind of exaggerated, all-purpose features you see on Easter Island statues. He's a big man, 6 foot 3, with hands the size of toolboxes, who nevertheless moves with the lightness of a dancer.
And yet there he is on screen, hunched over in that familiar Nixonian stoop, his limbs jerking, his brow furrowed, his shifty eyes darting. “You do any fornicating last night?” he says leeringly to Michael Sheen, who plays the British television interviewer David Frost, and the voice comes out not in Mr. Langella's mellow baritone but in Nixon's rumbling basso, the one that sometimes sounded like a dark parody of Jimmy Stewart.
By the end of the movie Mr. Langella seems even more like Nixon than Nixon did. You could swear that in the last few scenes he has donned a prosthetic schnoz to better suggest that little ski jump at the end of the Nixonian beak. “A lot of people have said that: that as the movie goes on, I look more and more him,” Mr. Langella said recently in New York. “I take it as a compliment, but it's just an illusion, because I didn't do anything differently, and some of the later scenes were actually shot earlier. What it means, really, is that gradually you've accepted me in the part.”
Playing Nixon posed a challenge, he said: “It took me a long time to figure out how to walk the line. On the one hand I didn't want to get into Rich Little territory. I didn't want to do an impression; I wanted an evocation of him, an essence. And I also knew that whatever I did, I could never satisfy some people, especially the ones who just want to hate Nixon.” He paused a moment and said firmly: “But why shouldn't he be human? Why shouldn't he be sympathetic and touching, along with all the rest — vicious, cruel, a liar and a crook?”

To prepare for the role Mr. Langella visited the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., spent hours watching tape at the Paley Center for Media, the broadcasting museum in Manhattan and interviewed Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Frank Gannon — anyone he could think of who actually knew Nixon. And in the end, he recalled, he tried to forget everything he had learned.
“I ignored it all,” he said. “But two things stuck with me. One was his desperate need for greatness. This was a man who had immortal yearnings. He wanted greatness and understood greatness; he knew what a great statesman should be. The other is the way he was a victim of what he called the voices in his head. All of us are victims of those voices to one degree or another. They're why so many people are self-destructive. But in Nixon those voices screamed louder even than our intellect, our reason, our sense of right and wrong.”
Remarkably, Mr. Langella, who created the role in Peter Morgan's stage version of “Frost/Nixon,” first in London and then on Broadway, where he won a Tony for the part, was not Ron Howard's first choice for the movie. He saw the play in London, Mr. Howard recalled, and decided almost on the spot to make a movie of it, but after he arrived at a budget he “methodically explored the casting options.” Mr. Sheen, who was David Frost in the play, quickly became a front-runner after his success as Tony Blair in “The Queen,” but Mr. Langella, Mr. Howard said, came from “deep in the pack.”
“The studio thought this was a bravura opportunity for one of our established studio actors,” he said, and among those rumored to be in contention were Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and Kevin Spacey. “But at the end of the day Frank was just a lock,” Mr. Howard said. “To not use him seemed almost karmically imprudent.”
That Mr. Langella does not leap to mind as an established A-list star is not for want of talent or durability. Now 71, he has been acting for almost half a century and won three Obies and a Tony before he was 40. He has been Shakespeare, Zorro, Cyrano, Sherlock Holmes and Perry White, not to mention a lizard (in Edward Albee's “Seascape”), a bluish humanoid (Skeletor in “Masters of the Universe”), a being from the planet Bajor (Jaro Essa in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”). And of course a vampire, probably his most famous role of all: Mr. Langella's bouffant-haired Dracula on Broadway and in the 1979 film anticipated by decades the current heartthrob of the undead.
Recently he has been on the kind of roll that even A-listers would envy. He received excellent reviews as William Paley in George Clooney's “Good Night, and Good Luck” in 2005, and last year he was even talked about as an Oscar contender for his role in Andrew Wagner's under-appreciated “Starting Out in the Evening,” in which he played a lonely and aging New York novelist. For most of the fall he was Thomas More in the Roundabout Theater Company's Broadway revival of Robert Bolt's “Man for All Seasons” — Paul Scofield's signature role, to which Mr. Langella brought an immensely appealing physicality absent from the more cerebral Scofield performance. Here was a St. Thomas who was also completely at home in the world and in his body — the kind of person Nixon ached to be.
But Mr. Langella also has been in some appalling duds, like the unwatchable 1981 movie “Sphinx,” and there have been lulls in his career when, as he recalled recently, he couldn't get an agent, let alone a part. He made some bad choices, and along the way he also lost his looks — or his hair, anyway — which changed him from a matinee idol into a character actor. One of the most touching moments in “Starting Out in the Evening” comes when a young graduate student in love with Leonard Schiller, the Langella character, now frail and ailing, snoops in his office and finds some pictures of a younger, much more handsome man. They're high school and college photos that Mr. Langella dug out of his own archives.
“I somehow kind of knew that look wasn't going to last, and I watched it go, hair strand by hair strand in the basin,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘You must evolve, Mr. Langella, whether you like it or not.' Actually, I welcomed it.” He laughed and added: “A number of friends of mine, guys in their 70s, are having plastic surgery now. And I say to them: ‘Why the hell do you want to pull your face back so you can look 20 years younger? Most of the actors our age are dying or retired. But now you're going to have to fight for parts with guys who are in their 50s.' ”
Nor has it helped that Mr. Langella, famously private, goes out of his way to avoid publicity. You have to Google for hours and sift through reams of clippings to glean even the barest personal information: a marriage, a divorce, two children, a long relationship with Whoopi Goldberg. (They met on the set of the 1996 basketball flick “Eddie,” in which she's a fan and limo driver and he owns the Knicks.) “I'm not in the business of confessing,” he said, “and I'm deeply offended by people who are.”
About career managing, he said: “The courting part is very difficult for me. I'm not above it, but I would really much rather have this kind of career on my own terms. For another kind of career, I think the price is enormous. I find it personally just too high.” And he added: “That said, it isn't as if I haven't had periods when I've sat back and said: ‘Frank, you're really messing up. So-and-so is moving up, and so-and-so is getting a part you might have had.' If you look, I've made a number of films that are complete disasters. In fact I have never, ever made a choice that was career based that didn't go wrong. But look at ‘Frost/Nixon,' this little play that I thought I would do for about eight weeks. I had two lucrative film and TV offers at the time, but I chose this, and look what happened: It turned into a train.”
In person Mr. Langella carries himself with an almost papal bearing. He accepts compliments graciously but with a little nod that suggests you're not telling him anything he doesn't know already. Yet he's reserved without being grand, and Mr. Howard and Mr. Wagner both marvel at his work ethic and his eagerness to delve into a character. “We made ‘Starting Out in the Evening' for $500,000 in 18 days,” Mr. Wagner recalled. “There wasn't a lot of time for shooting, so Frank threw himself into preparing beforehand. We rehearsed four to six hours a night for six weeks, and it was amazing to watch Frank break himself down to the point of identifying with Leonard Schiller's failure. To that end he sought a kind of egoless simplicity.”
About the making of “Frost/Nixon,” Mr. Howard said: “It interested me to see how lost he would get in the character, to the point where he almost forgot about what he was doing technically. I think in some ways the movie was a revision of choices and possibilities he had explored and possibly rejected for the play, and he made them all relevant to the character again.”
Mr. Langella has little patience for actorly angst or pretension. “I'm a worker bee,” he said. “I had a teacher in college who said to me, ‘Frank, act in spite of your neurosis, not because of it,' and I was smart enough to know what he meant.” He added: “I sometimes give master classes, and I tell the students: ‘Don't lie in the garret with all the shades drawn. Deal with the present. Make love to your wife, take your children to school, go shopping. Churn yourself up with all these things so that when you come to the theater you've lived all day long.' ”
At the same time he has a partly tragic view of life and his profession. He believes in Nixon's voices, or the demons, as he has called them, who misdirect you. He says that our parents sometimes lay stones in our path that are hard to budge. And he got into acting because of “an inability to chart the world at an age that was fragile and tender.” After high school in New Jersey, he went on to Syracuse University to study drama. “I was profoundly uncomfortable with myself as a kid,” he said, “and I think most actors will tell you the same thing.”
The other thing about actors, he said, is that they're always waiting for the phone to ring with the next job. “I'm pretty certain that at my age I'm not going to get a lot of great parts; the last five years or so I've been very fortunate,” he said, and added: “I think you have to score every time out. Even in a small role you can land a homer. I remember asking Gielgud once why he was playing such small parts in the movies, and he said, ‘Oh my dear boy, I take them gladly if they're effective.' ”
Da The New York Times 4 gennaio 2009

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

The New York Times

It seems logical, somehow, that an actor who became famous for playing Dracula should have his greatest success playing Richard Nixon — no disrespect to Dracula intended. Frank Langella has been on stage and screen now for almost a half-century. He has taken on roles from Antonio Salieri to Sherlock Holmes, the Daily Planet editor Perry White, the Lolita-loving Clare Quilty, the CBS chief executive William Paley in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” Cyrano de Bergerac and a White House chief of staff in Ivan Reitman’s “Dave.” Moving laterally — and vertically — from one room in the West Wing to the Oval Office, he has now received an Oscar nomination for best actor in “Frost/Nixon.” Watching Langella become Richard Nixon during the course of Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of the Peter Morgan play, I thought it seemed fitting that this performance should come at this late stage in his career. As Langella has remarked, his leading-man days are over; he’s a character actor now, and Nixon is, you might say, the ultimate character.

I saw “Frost/Nixon” on Broadway, with Langella as Nixon, and admired it greatly, but onstage, Langella’s Nixon was half the show, along with Michael Sheen’s David Frost. With all due kudos to Sheen, this is Langella’s movie. When he’s not onscreen, you’re waiting for him to come back on. I reflect that I spent a good part of my youth wanting Richard Nixon to go away. Langella has managed to make me want more of him.
He told Charlie Rose, “I just didn’t think it was in my bag of tricks,” but he threw himself into the research as he never had before. He visited Nixon’s boyhood home in Yorba Linda, Calif., and spent an entire hour in the tiny bedroom Nixon shared with his brothers, soaking up the humiliation and inadequacy that Nixon grew up with. He talked to everyone, watched the tapes, and “then flung it all away and said, it has to be my Nixon. It has to be the essence of the man rather than an imitation.”
Several scenes into the movie, I thought, Incredible — he’s playing it as comedy.
Explaining who Irving Lazar is to his aide Jack Brennan: “This is my literary agent from Hollywood. Hygiene-obsessed.”
Coyly admiring Frost’s Italian loafers: “You don’t find them too effeminate? I guess someone in your field can get away with it.”
More:
“I wouldn’t want to be a Russian leader. They never know when they’re being taped.”
“You’re probably aware of my history with perspiration.”
“Two million?” he says when Frost tells him what the production is costing. “I didn’t realize we were making ‘Ben-Hur.’ ”
What makes these lines so desperately funny is that they’re spoken by one of the 20th century’s most tragic figures. As another president might put it, you feel the man’s pain. But then — finita la commedia, in the (entirely fictional) scene in which a tipsy Nixon phones Frost to rage at the people who have looked down on him all his life and to tell him that in the final interview, he’s going to come after him with everything he’s got, and only one of them will survive.
In the movie’s climactic scene, the April 22, 1977, interview, Frost nails Nixon to his own, handmade cross and extracts the famous apologia. “I gave them a sword, and they stuck it in and twisted it with relish.” Nixon is as helpless, pathetic and broken as Bogart’s Captain Queeg, unraveling under José Ferrer’s cross-examination.
There is an almost Pinocchio effect, as some have observed: Nixon’s ski-jump nose seems to grow during the movie. In interviews, Langella has refuted the suggestion that his prosthetic proboscis increases over the course of the drama. It just seems that way, which in itself is proxy tribute to the inner transformation that Langella is illuminating.
Nixon has been played by a number of actors over the years. Anthony Hopkins earned an Oscar nomination for his Nixon in 1995, and Lane Smith turned in a memorable Nixon in “The Final Days,” alongside Theodore Bikel’s Henry Kissinger. But Frank Langella now owns Nixon, as surely as Gielgud, whose Shakespeare recordings Langella listened to as a young actor in order to shed his New Jersey accent, owned Hamlet for a time.
In the movie, Frost decides, as a gamble, to start off the first of the four, 90-minute interviews by asking Nixon, “Why didn’t you burn the tapes?” It fails, as a trap. Wily — rather, tricky — Nixon ties him up in videotape by prattling on endlessly about how all the presidents before him taped, and how essential it was to have accurate recordings of high-level blah, blah, blah. We never get the answer.
I met Nixon only once, about a year after the “Nixon-Frost” (as they were called) interviews were shown, and somewhat cheekily asked him that exact question. He paused, nodded pensively, averting his eyes, then said, slowly, “Well . . . there were those at the time who said that would be . . .” — I thought, Is he actually going to say “wrong”? — “. . . for the best. But we didn’t and . . .” — a rueful, pained smile played across his face — “here we are.”
That moment has stuck vividly in my mind for more than 30 years. But now, as I summon it from memory, it’s Frank Langella who’s sitting in that armchair high up in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, smiling at me sadly, wishing it had been otherwise.
Christopher Buckley is the author of “Losing Mum and Pup,” a memoir of his parents, due out in May.
Da The New York Times Magazine, 5 Febbraio 2009

PRESSBOOK

Tre volte vincitore del Tony Award Frank Langella è uno dei più straordinari attori teatrali americani viventi. Sebbene si sia fatto notare anche come attore cinematografico negli anni ’70, il palcoscenico è sempre stat oil suo primo amore.
La sua carriera off-Broadway è partita con un Obie Award nel 1965 per la sua interpretazione in The Old Glory: Benito Cereno del poeta-drammaturgo Robert Lowell. Le sue altre maggiori produzioni off-Broadway includono Cyrano di Edmond Rostand, After the Fall di Arthur Miller, The White Devil di John Webster, Il principe di Homburg di Heinrich von Kleist, L’immoralista di André Gide e La Tempesta di Shakespeare.

Rassegna stampa di Frank Langella