Word: klines
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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...
With his performance as Howard Brackett in In & Out--the Frank Oz comedy about an Indiana schoolteacher who is outed as a homosexual during a former student's televised acceptance speech at the Oscars--Kline brings his Shakespearean inner torment to a comic apex. "I always assumed he'd always known he was gay since adolescence," Kline says of the character. "But like most of us, he has found a way to accommodate that denial." His portrayal of Ben Hood, a father torn between responsibility and lust in The Ice Storm, a 1970s period drama set in suburban Connecticut, also...
There is even a Shakespearean theme to the commemorative album of photos from the set of The Ice Storm in Kline's Manhattan East Side apartment. The album was a gift from Sigourney Weaver, who plays his mistress in the film. It seems that Kline was rehearsing a benefit Shakespeare performance during shooting and spent every spare moment reciting speeches to the cast and crew. Weaver got director Ang Lee, co-stars Joan Allen, Christina Ricci and others to pose while yawning, sleeping or looking otherwise bored during Kline's endless classical recitations. "I always wait till the yawns...
There have been very few of those since Kline landed in New York in 1970, a drama student at the Juilliard School under John Houseman. As a member of the drama department's first class, which also included William Hurt and Patti LuPone, he played the lead in classics of Shakespeare, Chekhov and Ibsen. Good parts came easily after school too. One of the last roles he remembers not getting is the marine biologist in Jaws. "I remember I told Spielberg at my audition that I knew a marine biologist and he could really help," Kline recalls. "Spielberg said...
...most of his career, however, Kline has got nearly every job he wanted. The roll began with a Tony-winning supporting part as Bruce Granit, an egomaniacal actor in the 1978 musical On the Twentieth Century; that led sitcom producer Norman Lear to beg unsuccessfully for his services. Another Tony followed for his performance as the Pirate King opposite Linda Ronstadt in The Pirates of Penzance in 1981. Movie roles came just as quickly after he landed the highly coveted male lead in Sophie's Choice, opposite eventual Oscar winner Meryl Streep; in 1988 Kline won his own Academy Award...