The Actor Within: Intimate Conversations with Great Actors

Hector Elizondo

46 i Hector Elizondo You name it—police detective, surgeon, hotel manager, chef, judge, crossdresser , hijacker—and Hector Elizondo has probably played it. For starters , he is a perennial favorite of director Garry Marshall, who has cast him in almost every one of his films. Elizondo has also appeared on scores of television shows and is recognized as one of the industry’s most reliable actors. I visited him at his Encino home to inquire about his life as a working actor, with a long list of screen and stage credits and awards. ‘‘Do you feel that you’ve fully actualized the actor within you?’’ ‘‘I’ve come close, but the fact that I haven’t is probably my own fault. While I still had the energy and the interest and was at the top of my game, I passed up some good opportunities due to an inexplicable lack of ambition. I never had that wind beneath my wings. I could have made better choices.’’ ‘‘On what did you base your choices?’’ ‘‘Paying rent. I grew up with my parent’s Depression-era mentality. Having a steady job was the thing. Acting is never steady. Their voices echoed in my head. What do you mean you haven’t worked in three months? Where I come from, if you don’t work in three months, you’re a bum. Art? What do you mean art? A man works, and that’s what he does. If you don’t work, you’re not taking care of your family. I remember when my mother came to see me on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Prisoner of Second Avenue. After the show, I asked her, ‘Ma, what did you think?’ ‘Very nice, very nice,’ she said, but I knew she was really thinking, When are you going to get a real job, like in a bank, and wear a tie? And my father would always say, ‘A man has to lift heavy things.’ There had to be some sweating, some backbreaking component, to what you do. I think a vestige of that thinking exists in me.’’ ‘‘In spite of that, you chose an acting career. Why?’’ ‘‘When I first started acting on the stage, I experienced wonderful transcendent moments that taught me what it means to be an actor and confirmed for me that I’d entered a noble profession. The actor is the intermediary between author and audience, the delivery unit. I’m part of the storytelling that conveys what it means to be a human being. I became 48 The Actor Within very serious about theater in the 1960s, but nothing much came my way after appearing in Steambath (1970). I could have bided my time, waited for good roles, and made choices that o√ered better opportunities for the future, but I didn’t. Instead, I took commercial work, movies and television . If I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t pay enough attention to the arc, and take control of my so-called career when I could have.’’ ‘‘I understand you started out as a musician and a dancer.’’ ‘‘Mypathwasnevercleartome,butIdidhavethisvaguesensethatthere was something out there waiting for me. I expected that it would reveal itself to me through some sign. In the meantime, I was a great dabbler and didn’t say no to too many things. I was very easily distracted. I’d hear music, and I’d go after it. I’d see movement—oh, isn’t that beautiful—and, before I knew it, I was drafted into a professional dance troupe—Ballet Art Company of Carnegie Hall.’’ ‘‘How were you drafted into this dance company?’’ ‘‘I’d been working as a musician, playing the conga drums as accompaniment for one of their jazz dance classes, when one day the choreographer said, ‘I need a male dancer, and I know you’re athletic and you move well. Can you just walk through something for me, just block it? And I’ll get a real dancer tomorrow; take o√ your shoes.’ Take o√ my shoes? Real guys don’t take o√ their shoes. But I tried it. ‘You’re great!’ the choreographer told me. ‘You’ll be the dancer in this show.’ What? I’d never taken a dance lesson in my life. So here I was in my twenties performing in a dance company. Yikes, I ached in muscles I didn’t know...