Mandy Patinkin: Monday Near the Park with Mandy

In that film, Patinkin plays a character patterned after Julius Rosenberg, the alleged Soviet spy executed with his wife Ethel for espionage. The scenes in which the Rosenbergs say goodbye to their children were actually filmed in Sing Sing penitentiary in suburban New York, and, characteristically, Patinkin played the scene not as a martyred Jew but as a helpless parent.

"The key moment was when I had to say goodbye to the kids," recalls Patinkin. "Sidney Lumet was kind of worried about me--he even had a stretcher ready--because I was making all kinds of excuses not to do the scene, smoking cigarettes... I was completely flipped out. We did the scene in one take. Afterwards, we got outside the door and I fell down, and Sidney came over to me and I just started weeping and he held me in his arms. And I remember saying to him, 'A real human being had to really say goodbye to his children, and it was real and nobody said, 'Cut!'"

Patinkin concedes that at earlier points in his career he may not have been the easiest person to work with. Though he believes that Mike Nichols always wanted Jack Nicholson, not him, for the part of Carl Bernstein in the doomed 1986 comedy, Heartburn, Patinkin thinks he could have handled the way things went on that troubled shoot a bit better.

"From the very first day, Nichols was saying to me, 'Do it like... oh, you know how Jack Nicholson does that stuff,'" recalls Patinkin. "So he fired me and hired Nicholson. Jack wasn't very good in the movie and for me to see one of my favorite actors struggling was a great lesson to me. It wasn't his fault. It was the fault of the material. But Nicholson did it anyway. He made his $5 million. And it didn't hurt his career."

All of which taught Patinkin that you sometimes have to go with the flow, especially when a movie project you had high hopes for--as Patinkin did for, say, Alien Nation--ends up as just another cops & robbers & Martians Saturday matinee movie. Patinkin says it would have been worse had he not persuaded the powers-that-be to let him reshoot a couple of scenes. With a resigned sigh, he explains, "It's kind of like when you go out and buy an old apartment, and you put on a coat of paint, and buy some new curtains and fixtures and shutters. It's still a beat-up old apartment, but it makes you feel better."

If you make movies, some of them will prove disappointing--that's the name of that particular game. But there have been times when Patinkin really had to bite the bullet, as on Yentl, when Barbra Streisand was belting out nine--count 'em--nine interchangeably unforgiveable songs, and Patinkin wasn't given so much as a quarter refrain to hum.

"It killed me that I didn't sing in Yentl," he says. "We talked about it, we talked about it, but it just kind of disappeared. I forgot about it, but don't think it didn't kill me." Later, he adds, "I don't have a f*cking clue why I didn't get to sing in that movie."

Patinkin recently endured another of life's cruel ironies when he sang a duet in Dick Tracy with Madonna, who, whatever her other gifts, can't sing worth spit.

"The frustrating part of it was that three-quarters of that song was me," recalls Patinkin, who does not share this writer's contempt for Madonna's singing or acting. "You see us together, but it cuts away as soon as I start to sing again." Does that bother him? "Yeah, it kills me, but you say to yourself, 'Hey, I'm not the main role in the film, I'm not the star.' Besides, her songs were cut up in the film, too."

Patinkin can soon be seen in Impromptu, a film about the love affair between novelist George Sand and pianist/composer Frederic Chopin. "I play Alfred de Musset, a tortured, alcoholic poet who dreams of being with, Sand forever, but who knows it can never be," says Patinkin. "It's directed by James Lapine, who did Sunday in the Park With George. It's hard to believe it's his first movie."

True Colors is not Herbert Ross's first movie. In this tale of two lawyers--one good, one bad--Patinkin plays a corrupt local businessman who drags one of the lawyers down into the gutter, and is then destroyed by the other. "He's kind of a Mafia-type fellow," notes the actor, "and eventually he gets prosecuted, as many of these people do."

Does Patinkin have any film projects lined up for the future? "I have none. I have none. I have none," he laughs. "That's three nones: N-O-N-E." What we have here is a guy who's an intelligent, versatile stage actor, a phenomenally gifted singer, a devoted husband, a loving father, and a cordial host. What we have is a guy who is loyal to his friends, devoted to his craft, and willing to take artistic risks to prevent his gifts from stagnating. What we have here is a guy who could be in the wrong business.

Patinkin doesn't try to hide that he's clearly miffed over the fact that he turned down various film offers while waiting to hear from Oliver Stone about the role of Che in the on-again, off-again film version of Evita.

"I put away six or seven months waiting and waiting, turning down this and that, saying I can't do it, because I'm waiting to hear about Evita," he notes. "I did Winter's Tale on stage which put me in the crapper financially, and here I am off to England to do another theater piece."

If Disney has their way--and they usually do--Madonna will reportedly star in Evita, so there remains that possibility on the distant horizon. But, for now, it's off to semi-rural England to appear in Peter Hall's musical version of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, whose hero is a man trying to avoid turning into a rhinoceros. It's set in an L.A. mall, and called, of all things, Born Again.

"I love the idea of one man trying to struggle against the herd," declares Patinkin. "Which is what I try to do every single day of my life."

_____________________

Gavin Borg writes for everyone but The Atlantic and The New Yorker.

Pages: 1 2