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| Jeff Daniels unwinds in his dressing room before an evening performance of Yasmina Reza’s satirical domestic comedy God of Carnage. Photo: Hal Drucker |
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| Jeff as Alan, - his ubiquitous cell phone in hand- takes his ease on the living room set of God of Carnage, co-starring James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden and Hope Davis. Photo: Joan Marcus |
Click Here for Hal Drucker’s review of the play in Slice of New York.
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| Jeff Daniels is Jerry Farlander in film director Sam Mendes’ Away We Go (2009). Photo: François Duhamel © Focus Features. |
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Daniels is Senator George Fergus, Russell Crowe is investigative reporter Cal McAffrey, in the political thriller, State of Play(2009).
© Universal Pictures |
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| A talented literary couple, Daniels and Laura Linney as Bernard and Joan Berkman, portray parents in the midst of an acrimonious separation in the riveting motion picture, The Squid and the Whale. (2005). © Samuel Goldwyn Pictures. |
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| David Harrower’s extraordinary two-person drama marked Jeff Daniels’ return to the New York Stage after an extended hiatus. As Ray, he is visited in his place of business by a mysterious young woman Ina with whom it develops he had a sexual liaison when she was 12 and for which he served time. The script is in verse form and deals with her motives (and his) in possibly rekindling their ardor … legally. Ina was played by Allison Pill, who along with Lauren Ambrose, in my view are our two most talented young actresses. (2007). Photo: Joan Marcus. |
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| Dumb and Dumber was a 1994 gross-out cult comedy starring Jim Carrey as Lloyd Christmas and Jeff Daniels as Harry Dunne. Daniels has been quoted as saying, “to the 15-year-old set, it’s Citizen Kane.” |
Jeff Daniels has five loves: finger-picking a gi'-tar, song- writing, play-acting, wife and family and the Detroit Tigers.
To this observer, if Daniels, at 55, did nothing more than The Squid and the Whale in the movies and Blackbird in the theater, his place in Actors’ Valhalla (located either in Shubert Alley or Grauman’s Theater – or both), would be secure.
Of late, an integral part of my cardio-fitness regimen has been to ascend the storied steel stairwells leading to the cramped dressing rooms of such actors as Stockard Channing, and for purposes of this interview, Jeff Daniels. Seems like there is always a guy at the stage entrance, clipboard in hand, whose name is Doc, much like such backstage movie musicals as Gold Diggers of 1933. This time I ascended the Everest of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater led by my personal sherpa, the intrepid publicist, Christine Olver. After a baker’s dozen of huffs, wheezes and puffs, I shook hands with Jeff Daniels, one-quarter of the cast of that irresistible hit show God of Carnage that is lighting up Broadway. I was sufficiently acquainted with Daniels’ enormous body of work on the screen and stage, from James L. Brooks’s Terms of Endearment to Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, to last season’s remarkable two-character play Blackboard. What I did not know, until I received a brace of CD’s from uber-agent Wendy Morris, was Daniels’ facility for performing his own words and music. For several hours in my den, I listened in jaw-dropping astonishment to a guitar-playing singer intoning such original folk-type songs as The Lifelong Tiger Fan Blues and If I Weren’t So Stupid, You Wouldn’t be So Smart.
In timbre, humor and reedy delivery, I thought to myself, ‘this guy is the second coming of Tom Glazer.’
Tom who? - you may ask. Don’t fret. Jeff Daniels never heard of him, either. Glazer, was a contemporary of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Josh White. From an album entitled Songs of the CIO, he sang such social protest songs of WW II as:
I’ve got a brother on a Chinese farm, I thought you know’d ,
Got a brother on a Chinese farm, He’s a way down the road,
Got a brother on a Chinese farm, And he needs bandages for his arm ,
so I’m gonna put my name down.
On the flip side of the coin, Daniels, has been a staunch Michigander who grew up rooting for the Detroit Tigers. In his Lifelong Tiger Fan tribute, a stanza goes :
Bring back Kaline, Bring Back Cash, Bring Back Cecil
and all the homers he’d smash.
Mickey Cochrane, Schoolboy Rowe, Ty Cobb and Rocky Colavito.
To me, it summoned up Dave Frishberg’s Van Lingle Mungo , a song comprised solely of major leaguers’ names. Mungo was a pitcher for the Dodgers and Giants.
Heinie Majeski, Johnny Gee, Eddie Joost, Johnny Pesky,
Thornton Lee, Danny Gardella, Van Lingle Mungo
Daniels was too polite to show me the door. In fact he showed genuine interest. “When you find you’re remembering back, are you remembering things better than they were?“
Yes, I concurred, that is certainly true of many stage revivals which, more times than not, I compare unfavorably to the originals.
“I do that with baseball,” he said. “Al Kaline, right field for Detroit. Youngest player to lead the league in batting. Never made an error, in my head. Pitcher Mickey Lolich. Never threw a ball, just strikes. I loved those guys. When I was 8 or 9 in the mid-sixties. Dad took me to Tiger Stadium.
They all had a pureness. Rod Carew, [in speaking of the Minnesota Twins Hall-of-Famer ] had such a pure swing. Want to know what is unpure? It’s the DH. [designated hitter]. Who do you regard as the best baseball broadcaster of all time?”
I told him there was no one better at the microphone than Red Barber.
“Better than Mel Allen?”
Yes, Barber contributed to our lexicon, not only for baseball, but for life. A ”rhubarb” was not a vegetable, it was a confrontation between a player or manager and/or an umpire. Another Barber homily was, “they’re tearing up the pea patch,” which was reserved for those occasions the Brooklyn Dodgers were blowing out the other team. He was erudite enough to have appeared on the cerebral radio quiz show, “Information, Please.” Most important, though a southerner, Barber’s unstinting support eased the way for Jackie Robinson to succeed in his rookie season.”
“The CD’s were an attempt for me to raise some money for the Purple Rose Theater in South Eastern Michigan. We did all those live shows. Well, I thought, why don’t we record it, throw it out there and see if we can raise a thousand bucks? Christine Lavin heard it and put me on her XM radio show. At my Purple Rose Theater (168 seats) —75% of the plays are other people’s works. I’ve sort of backed into the routine of writing a play for them every year. The other three plays we do each year are either regional work by playwrights or we’ll haul in an American Classic. Woody was very good about letting me lift the name Purple Rose from the movie we did. He even sent a generous donation to the theater.”
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| Daniels is safari-suited movie hero Tom Baxter who steps off the screen and is also Baxter’s portrayer Gil Shepherd in Woody Allen’s 1985 comedy The Purple Rose of Cairo. © Orion Pictures. |
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| Mia Farrow as Cecilia morphs from the audience into the movie screen, joining cinema stars Kitty Haynes and Tom Baxter. “ Jeff Daniels was my sweetheart in The Purple Rose of Cairo,” Karen Akers (left) who played Haynes, recalled. |
How did it begin with you and Woody Allen?
“It was 1985. Michael Keaton was shooting Purple Rose of Cairo and they mutually agreed that it wasn’t going the direction either one of them wanted it to go. They decided to make a change. And so within 24 hours , I’m meeting Woody Allen. Terms of Endearment, in which I played the philandering husband of Debra Winger, had been released 10 days before and became the number one movie, which was a bit of a surprise in the world of Raiders of the Lost Ark and those kinds of films. It was the first character-driven movie to succeed that well in a long time. So I went in and met Woody, which took all of two minutes; he couldn’t have been nicer. And then two hours later I get this message, ‘go up to Peekskill, New York and you’re going to screen test for this movie.’ So somebody named Walter picks me up, drives me out there. I’ve got these two scenes. ‘What’s the character,’ I ask. ‘Oh, we can’t tell you that.’ Okay.
“’In this scene we want you to dress in a safari suit.’ Next scene you’ll wear a fancy sport coat and play an actor who wears a safari suit. It’s 1930s Hollywood. The Director of Photography Gordie Willis was there. I tested and I never met Woody until he comes up to me afterwards and says in that familiar Woody Allen cadence. ‘You know that was good, that was good. Er, what have you done?’ As I looked at Woody Allen, I completely blanked on Terms of Endearment and I said, ‘I was a guest criminal on Hawaii Five-0.’ And I said, ‘Woody, thank you’(as if I would never see him again). No matter what, I thought, what a story I’ll be able to tell my kids. Have a good life.
“Next day they called and I got it.”
Vincent Canby, NY Times movie reviewer wrote: I’ll go out on a limb: I can’t believe the year (1985) will bring forth anything to equal “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”
What was the first movie you ever saw?
“First movie? Probably Goldfinger in a movie theater. I wasn’t one of those kids who went to movies all the time. For me, it wasn’t movies, it was television, it was The Ed Sullivan Show and seeing people like Jerry Stiller and Ann Meara, George Carlin, Jackie Vernon, Wayne and Shuster. All the people who did comedy on Ed Sullivan. I was interested in the craft and precision of what those guys were doing. Then it bled into the quiet comedy of Andy Griffith and Don Knotts on The Andy Griffith Show and Dick Van Dyke on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Van Dyke had the ability to do slapstick and still be believable; his timing was impeccable. Call it osmosis; I take it, put it in, see how it feels and the next thing you know you are doing it. Van Dyke bled into Peter Sellers with Dr. Strangelove, Alan Arkin with The Russians are Coming and Jack Lemmon. [At this point Daniels does a spot-on replication of a stammering Jack Lemmon.] In looping a movie, sometimes I can kick myself because I see myself doing Jack Lemmon; it wasn’t that he stuttered; he was thinking himself through the line.”
Same with Jimmy Stewart, I suggested.
“Jimmy Stewart is another one – yeah. Van Dyke, Lemmon, guys like that kind of led me into Stewart and back into Preston Sturges’ satirical screwball comedies. I really liked Eddie Bracken in Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero. And certainly, Joel McCrae in Sullivan’s Travels, and Lady Eve with Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. Seeing Fonda being funny but completely oblivious to the comedy, was a treat. He knew he was being funny but – he wasn’t a straight man. He got the jokes but you never saw him going for the jokes.
“There was this choir director I’ll never forget,Diane Elroy, in this little town in Michigan who did community theater and did musicals. I would do Cornelius Hackle in Hello, Dolly, Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. She was teaching music to the sixth graders. In order to kill an hour, (she was bored with teaching that day), she had us do sketches. We didn’t know what improvisation was but that’s what she had us do. She had me get up and do a politician who is giving a speech and as he’s giving the speech, he realizes his pants are falling down. Pretty simple stuff for a sixth grader. But I did about 10 minutes. By the end of it I was literally hanging on to my pants as, I spoke about how we needed to fix the waste treatment facilities here in the community. And everybody was dying. She went to my parents and she said ‘ watch this one. There’s something going on.’
“If you wanted to chase the stage or figure out what the stage was or acting was, you did musicals. I did everything in high school. I did Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, I didn’t have a clue as to what being Jewish was, but there I was . Let’s put it this way, I saw the movie six times so I did a dead-on impersonation of Topol. Then I did Fagin in Oliver. I loved that part. El Gallo in Fantasticks (El Gallo), Jud Fry in Oklahoma!
“My first feature film, was Jimmy Cagney’s last: E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Cagney at 81 was NY Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo . I played a cop, P. C. O’Donnell. Did I talk to him? No, I watched him. He didn’t think he could do the role. Though he hadn’t done a movie in 19 years, [Director] Miloš Forman really wanted him to do it. It was the Fall of ’80. Forman rented out a TV studio. Cagney came down from his upstate farm. Kenny McMillan, who played the racist fire chief Willie Conklin and Howard E. Rollins, Jr. as Coalhouse Walker were there. And they brought in Kenny and Howard and three or four policemen including me. They had a card table with a folding chair. We were going to do the scene in which we’re all out in front of the commissioner. It was about four pages long and Cagney comes in with his assistant. He’s on two canes, kind of just getting to the table. We started to do it and he couldn’t remember the lines. Miloš cut it down to three pages and then to two pages. It was about an hour in and Kenny is acting up a storm and we’re all pulling for Cagney. And Forman boils it down to four or five lines. And Miloš kept working and working; you could see a little black and white monitor up there.You could see the closeup of Cagney’s face. McMillan would say a line and Cagney would look down, get the next line and then look up and become Cagney. Then Kenny would talk, go away and Cagney would get the line ‘Come back again.’ And Miloš knew he could cut it and put it together. It was something for a young actor to be in this room to watch this guy become himself, to be that guy whom we grew up with and loved.
“The only other guy I had seen do that was Clint, with whom I did Blood Work in 2002. When the camera rolls, he becomes that thing. He knows exactly what he’s doing and he does it and he comes out of it. Cagney and Eastwood were the only two I had ever seen doing that.”
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In George Clooney’s compelling Good Night, And Good Luck, Daniels is CBS television news pioneer, Sig Mickelson (2005).
© Warner Independent Pictures. |
How was George Clooney to work with?
[ Clooney co-wrote, directed and acted in Good Night, and Good Luck] a black and white movie about Edward R. Murrow’s heroic denunciation of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy on his celebrated March 9,1954 telecast. Daniels played Sig Mickelson, CBS News pioneer and George was Fred Friendly, Murrow’s partner. David Strathairn was Murrow, and Frank Langella was CBS CEO William S. Paley.
“The good thing about George is that he’s passionate for good material. He’s a very, very smart man. He hires actors and tells them ‘I want you to decide what it is you think you should do and I want you to do it.’ As an actor that makes you to want to come through for a director like that. Whether it’s a Woody or a Clint or a Robert Altman or a George. They’re all the same guy. ‘I hired you because I expect you to be good. And you bring your best to it and maybe it shapes you a little bit.’ He wants you to bring it. It was a great set to be on. That was George. Everybody cared about the Edward R. Murrow story. “
Daniels married Kathleen Rosemary Treado on Friday the 13th, in 1979. They have three children: Benjamin (born 1984), Lucas (born 1987), and Nellie (born 1990).
“I knew her from the community theater group. And after I’d been in New York for a couple of years, she wrote me a letter. I looked her up. Within a year we were married and everybody gave us about a year. It will be 30 years in July.” In 1986, the Daniels moved their home to the town where he and his wife grew up, Chelsea, Michigan. Five years later, he founded the Purple Rose Theater Company. His father, Robert Lee Daniels, still runs a lumber yard, with Jeff’s brother.
“If I didn’t make it in acting, I guess I would have been in the lumber business. Only trouble is I’m lousy in Math, and you definitely need to know trigonometry and geometry to saw wood.”
Jeff Daniels has more than his share of accolades, awards and, in the case of his alma mater Central Michigan University, an honorary docotorate. But his opposite number in God of Carnage, James Gandolfini (late of HBO’s The Sopranos), no slouch in the acting department himself told the New York Times,
“If you have any brains, you watch him and listen to him.”
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