Word: dreyfusses
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...first three a No. 4: sometimes he doesn't know when to shut up. Faster than you could say William Shakespeare, Dreyfuss was reciting one of the bard's sonnets over the coffee cups: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment...
...list could go on, but one word sums it up: energy. In person and onscreen, Dreyfuss, short, gat-toothed and, until recently, distinctly chubby, generates enough electricity to light up a small town-Cleveland or Chicago, say. "He has an energy that just flies off the screen," says Neil Simon, who wrote The Goodbye Girl. "He doesn't fall into any of the usual acting categories. He's not a handsome-man type like Redford or a dramatic-actor type like Pacino or De Niro. Rick can do anything-and he is funnier than any of them...
...right, of course. He is good as the star-struck hero in Close Encounters, but he is nothing short of wonderful as Elliott Garfield, the brash but vulnerable actor in Goodbye Girl. In fact, the character is so like the real-life Dreyfuss that Simon would have saved everyone some trouble by just calling him Rick in the first place. The part was so natural, admits Rick himself, that "I could have done it as a 9-to-5 job for the rest of my life. Imagine! Sixty years old and still shooting The Goodbye Girl...
Only halfway to 60 now, Dreyfuss has already had at least 60 years of acting experience. He can hardly remember a moment when he was not acting-if only for himself. He was born in New York City and spent his early childhood in Bayside, a pinkish nook of Queens. His grandmother had been private secretary to Socialist Leader Eugene Debs. His father was a passionate Zionist, and his mother was always peddling leftist petitions. "When you were poor and Jewish in New York," says Dreyfuss, "you were either a left-winger or you were dead...
...When Dreyfuss was eight, his family moved to Beverly Hills. Rick was in his first production at the local Jewish center when he was nine. "I never got less than the lead after that," he boasts. By the time he was twelve he was reciting Shakespeare before the bathroom mirror. His dream-then, now and probably for-evermore-was to play Cassius in Julius Caesar. Though the world has made a villain out of Cassius, the leader of the plot to kill Caesar, the scion of political iconoclasts knew that he was really a good fellow. "Cassius was sympathetic...