You can't help recognising Robert Prosky. The actor, who is making his Irish stage début, is a screen veteran, writes Peter Crawley
A flash of recognition followed by a smoke trail of uncertainty: such are the mixed blessings of life as a character actor. And with his warmly familiar features and quietly impressive CV, Robert Prosky has received more than his share of double-takes. "If I were Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis they would know why they recognise me," says the genial American, a veteran of more than 200 plays, 35 films and a slew of television shows. "But most people don't know why. They think I'm a long-lost cousin or that I come from their home town."
Once, he recalls, he was stopped in a hardware store in a small American town and forced to recite a litany of his credits to a demanding stranger. Perhaps the penny dropped when Prosky mentioned the criminal mastermind in Michael Mann's Thief or his crooked baseball-team owner in The Natural. Most likely it was his three years as the crusty Sgt Jablonski in Hill Street Blues, Stephen Bochco's seminal 1980s police drama.
"Oh yeah!" the stranger finally exclaimed. "You look just like yourself."
Sipping coffee in a Dublin hotel before returning to rehearsals for the Gate Theatre's production of The Price, by Arthur Miler, Prosky has hair that is a perfect white and features that are pleasant and doughy, and where his screen persona has tended towards gruffness his natural disposition is friendly and relaxed, with a dry, boyish laugh never far from his throat. He is the type of man you want to call Gramps. And although he insists that his 50-year career has been almost accidental, his story is a quintessential narrative: the plot of the American dream with an acute understanding of its cost.
The only child of a Polish grocer, Robert Porzuczek, who is 73, was born in Philadelphia in 1930. The family altered its surname after arriving in the US, unhesitatingly shedding the old for the new. "My father wouldn't let me speak Polish," says Prosky. "He wanted me to be an American. I hated the sweaters that my mother would knit for me, because they branded me as an immigrant's son."
The US that was slowly emerging from the Depression was not an environment for fanciful desires. "I never had the guts to think that I could be an actor," Prosky says. "I knew that all my aunts and uncles and my father were very hard workers. Money was hard to come by, and you didn't run off to be an actor from that sort of environment." Instead Prosky studied economics before enlisting in the air force during the Korean War. When his father died suddenly Prosky received a hardship discharge, and he returned to run the family store.
"My father died trying to be somebody," says Prosky, drawing a poignant association with Willy Loman, the casualty of the American dream in Miller's Death Of A Salesman. "The store was too much for him. He was great, gregarious, and the neighbourhood loved him, but he didn't know how to turn that into profit. He borrowed money from his relatives. The stress of it finally gave him a heart attack. He was 43."
Prosky's interest in amateur drama soon began to interfere with the business, although his professional springboard would arrive via another medium. Winning a talent contest on local television - "competitive acting", he remembers - Prosky's prize was to appear in a play with Walter Matthau, where he was encouraged to study acting. He earned a scholarship - through "competitive auditions", he recalls - to American Theatre Wing's school in New York. He is evidently not shy of a little competition.
The life of a starving actor followed, as Prosky worked fitfully on the stage before a role in a sex farce, opposite a burlesque stripper, saved him from a job in a bank. "I've done that," he says, arching his eyebrows, "but I've also done King Lear. I don't know which is the high point of my career. But survival is the name of the game. If I didn't get that job I'd probably be a banker today. From then on I worked steadily."
He went to the Arena Stage, in Washington DC, to perform one play in 1958 but stayed for 23 years, meeting his wife during the first season, getting married by the second and starting a family by the third. "At the time I wanted to do something for a larger audience: you make more money," he says. "Two things kept me there. First of all it was a steady pay cheque. To my Polish background that was important," he says, laughing. "Plus the fact that artistically it's an incredible theatre and it was always very challenging. . . . That's where I really learned to be an actor."
But auditioning for films was a Sisyphean ordeal. "You usually saw the assistant casting director, the second assistant and then the casting director. It took a couple of trips until, finally, you got on to the guy who says no."
By 1981 Prosky finally broke into film with Thief, and his career shifted up a gear. "I was in my late 40s. It was a time when most men's options begin to close in on them, and all of a sudden mine were going in the other direction," he says. "There was certainly a lot more money. I had three sons who were about to go to college, and I could never do it on just a stage actor's salary."
A few short years later Prosky was in the Broadway production of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, complaining backstage about the lure of television. "I was in a Pulitzer Prize play on Broadway, and I got this offer to do Hill Street Blues for an awful lot of money to me then. But I was in a really great endeavour on stage. So which do you take?" His co-star Joe Mantegna was archly sympathetic: "Another troubled day in paradise."
Prosky's enthusiasm for his first television series, in which he inherited the morning roll-call, carried the hallmarks of a career divided between disciplines. "The show was full of classically trained stage actors," he remarks. One wonders where he stands on the old actors' adage to do film for money, television for fame and theatre for art. He laughs. "Well actually it's a little different than that. You do theatre for art, cinema for recognition and television for money."
He continues: "The thing that makes theatre fascinating to me is that it's an event built on communication between the live human being in the audience and the ones onstage. Together they build the performance which is unique to that night. It exists in the moment. . . I feel that that experience is one of the most civilised of human endeavours. The problem is that communication - that co-operation of audience and actors - doesn't happen in a film. So it has watered down an experience that has been part of man's joy and understanding of himself since the caveman."
For someone to whom the screen has been so kind he sure has a lot of trenchant things to say about it. On the other hand he will also happily reflect on roles in Gremlins 2: The New Batch and Last Action Hero and offer, with an amused pride: "You know, I'm one of the few actors I know that's on two bubblegum cards." He is an actor by the skin of his teeth, he reflects before seizing a line from Miller's autobiography, Time Bends: "So many tremendous decisions in life are made because it is five o'clock." Thus he deftly steers us to the matter in hand.
A skilfully structured play written during the Vietnam War, The Price, at its simplest, is a story of two brothers meeting years after an angry break-up to divide the family's possessions after their father's death. Under the direction of Mark Brokaw, Prosky makes his European stage début as Gregory Solomon, a 90-year-old second-hand furniture dealer, consummate performer and master salesman who disburses philosophy and wisdom through a Russian- Yiddish idiom while schlepping his cases around."Solomon is a very, very funny character," says Prosky. "It's almost like Miller became Neil Simon, but the character also has a great deal of depth and wisdom."
He believes the play and its chastening depiction of capitalism and family loyalty - where everyone deals with their personal crash - have particular relevance to contemporary Ireland.
"There's been a huge explosion here in commercialism, creature comforts and consumerism," he notes - something Solomon diagnoses vividly with the remark: "Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didn't know what to do with himself - he'd go to church, start a revolution - something. Today you're unhappy? Can't figure it out? What is the salvation? Go shopping."
Although Prosky speaks engagingly about the moral systems, religious allusions and politics of the play, on stage his intellect takes second place to his intuition. Theatre, he says, is the art of the now. "I do a great deal of research, but I don't make decisions based on that research. I make decisions while I'm on my feet, doing the play, in rehearsal and in performance too."
As we conclude he has a request for the article. "Mention The Price a lot, will you? And the Gate Theatre." It is typical of Prosky - and perhaps Miller, too: balancing the rewards of art with the life of a salesman. In his stage directions Miller introduces Solomon, one of his most complex creations, with understatement and awe: "In brief, a phenomenon." Robert Prosky seems like the man for the job.
The Price opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, on May 11th, with previews from Thursday