Word: hamlets
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...gotta say, this is really a terrific skull," Kevin Kline informs me as he holds Yorick's skull in his hand. We are at the Players club in New York City, standing in the private bedroom of Edwin Booth, the legendary 19th century actor whose Hamlet once defined the role. Kline strokes the skull slowly, lovingly. "Smooth. Very smooth...
Kline has contemplated his fair share of Yoricks. Inside the green canvas bag slung over his shoulder--along with a pack of Marlboro Lights and two recently bought pairs of wire-rim reading glasses--is a copy of Hamlet, a play he has carried with him almost constantly since he moved to New York a quarter-century ago. It is hardly as though he needs to read Hamlet again; he can recite the role from memory and has no current plans to perform the lead, having already done so twice in the past 12 years to warm reviews...
Charmed indeed. Shuttling constantly between plays and movies, Kline has earned two Tonys and an Oscar by finding and playing variations of Hamlet in other men who suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He first confounded moviegoers in 1982 as Nathan Landau, Meryl Streep's psychotic lover in Sophie's Choice. A year later, he backflipped effortlessly into the running shoes of Harold Cooper in The Big Chill, a successful entrepreneur at odds with his counterculture roots. Even his dual character in Dave--the story of an ordinary man pretending to be President--reflected a Hamlet-like internal...
...Kevin is exactly like Hamlet," says acting coach Harold Guskin, his first drama teacher at Indiana University in the late 1960s and still a close friend. "Both as an actor and a person. He always makes the illogical choice. He loves doing exactly what you least expect him to do and making it work. Right from the very beginning, when he quit a good job on [the TV soap opera] Search for Tomorrow and didn't have a job for months, he has trusted his instincts. And for good reason...
...with mass-market aspirations, In & Out feels it has to be cautious. We do discover Howard's sexual preference but not whether he ever exercised it with anyone, or even if he knows what it is. Kline is denied a nice, fat double-life monologue; he's no Hoosier Hamlet here. It turns out that the movie isn't about being gay. It's about being tolerant of sweet-souled men--guys who love the Lake Poets, show tunes and all things Barbra...