July 26, 2009. Copyright 2009, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Actor and director Kevin Spacey, living his dream at 50
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, July 26, Graphic News:  It is more than 20 years since Kevin Spacey crept quietly onto the big screen as a subway thief in Heartburn, then briefly harassed Melanie Griffith in the back of a taxi in Working Girl. For a while, the accomplished stage actor, who had already played Liv Ullmann's son in Ibsen's Ghosts, on Broadway, seemed destined only for minor movie appearances. A deep lover of film from childhood, when he had watched obsessively the likes of Bogart, Spencer Tracy and James Stewart, the Juilliard scholar, who quit his drama course to get on with the job of acting, entertained people with his mimicry of the big stars, but seemed unable to follow them.
 
A High School production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons convinced the young New Jersey-born Kevin Fowler -- Spacey was his mother's maiden name -- that the stage was for him. "Something was happening between me and the audience that I hadn't recognised before," he recalls. But progress was slow. It took a pep talk from his hero, Jack Lemmon, to make him realise that overnight stardom actually came to very few. Working with Lemmon on Eugene O'Neill's play A Long Day's Journey into Night, Spacey is said to have come to terms with the frustration he felt at not gaining recognition early in his career. When fame did finally arrive, and Spacey accepted a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in American Beauty (1999), he dedicated it to Lemmon and said, in interviews at that time, that he had drawn inspiration for his role as Lester Burnham from Lemmon's portrayal of C.C. Baxter in The Apartment (1960).
 
A deeply private man -- Spacey has never married, has no children and doesn't discuss his personal life -- it was at the height of his celebrity, at the turn of the millennium, that he found himself eschewing the Hollywood lifestyle he'd spent so long trying to achieve. Despite acclaim for films such as Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), The Usual Suspects (1994), for which he won the Oscar for best supporting actor, and Seven (1995), where he had his name removed from the billing to preserve the film's surprise ending, Spacey longed to be part of a theatre troupe again. Then came the opportunity to join the board of London's Old Vic. "What I care about," he said, on taking up his 10-year appointment as Artistic Director, "is working with people...being able to be a part of bringing people together." He poured his own money into the revival of the theatre, filling the house with his performances in 2005 as Richard II, directed by Trevor Nunn. While some productions have flopped -- notably when Robert Altman tried to bring together a star-studded cast for Miller's Resurrection Blues -- Spacey's reputation and A-list movie status continue to lure a younger generation of theatre goers. "I'm living my dream," he says. "I'm doing it the way I want to do it." 
 
Meanwhile, his film career goes on. An independent sci-fi thriller, Moon, has just been released, in which Spacey lends his voice to a highly intelligent computer called GERTY. And he has been filming in Toronto, Canada, on the set of Casino Jack, due out next year. This autumn, back at the Old Vic, Trevor Nunn will direct him again, this time in a production of the legal drama, Inherit the Wind.
/ENDS