"I hope that what I do has some meaning," Kevin Kline said. "When you compare three hours of the greatest Shakespeare in the world or the greatest film in the world to saving a life if you're a doctor, or saving a psyche if you're a psychiatrist, or saving a country if you're a politician, then artistically creating something beautiful seems relatively unimportant. It seems foolish at times. Insignificant. There are times when I despair that it's utterly absurd."
The winner of two Tony Awards and an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, Kevin Kline is considered by many to be one of the great, versatile actors of his generation - as well as an ebullient and optimistic presence. And so I was surprised by the question that troubled him: "Is what I do worth much of anything to anybody?"
We spoke in the empty hall of the Public Theater in downtown Manhattan, where only recently Kline, 46, had been appointed associate producer to help revitalize one of the country's most important theatrical venues following the death of its founder, Joseph Papp.
I asked Kline about his childhood and how he had found his way to acting.
"My father wanted to be an opera singer," he recalled, "although there's no one else in his or my mother's family in any way connected to show business. He loves music, and when he was very young, he gave it a shot. But he was pressured by his family to come into the family business. They indulged him for a year or so: 'Go ahead and try opera singing, and then come back into the fold.'"
His father's family is of German-Jewish descent, and the family business was a chain of retail stores. Kline's father, Robert, owned the largest toy and record store in St. Louis. While their father was an agnostic, Kevin and his older sister, Kate, were raised in the Catholic faith of their mother, Peggy Kirk Kline.
"My father was passionate about music, but not passionate enough to devote his life to it," the actor continued. "Our house was always filled with music."
Like his father, Kevin Kline wanted to be a musician. He learned to play the piano well and was interested in conducting and composing. "Music for me was transcendental," he said. "It made me feel more alive." In the film Sophie's Choice, he played a selection from Robert Schumann's Kinderscenen ("Scenes From Childhood").
"While my father had opera in his background," Kline said, "my mother was, and continues to be, the really dramatic, theatrical character in our family. She's way larger than life. Her kind of Irish...I don't know what it is -- she's nuts!" Kline threw back his head laughing. "I think I learned comedy watching my father react to her, because you had to have a sense of humor because, well, she's formidable!
"We'd have nightly gatherings around the dinner table that usually ended in a harangue by my mother, in truly Wagnerian volume. She'd rail against whomever was the Republican President at the time, blaming him for this or that social injustice. An opera-singing father and a mother who could really make herself heard when she got up on her soapbox -- I guess that's how I learned to project my voice onstage."
From grades six through 12, Kline attended St. Louis Priory School, a parachial school for boys run by Benedictine monks. He's remembered as a good athlete and as a student whose aptitude for languages was so exceptional that he was encouraged to study for a foreign-service career.
"I went to Mass every day for six years," he recalled. "I calculated that if you work out the number of Sundays over a lifetime, I'm all paid up. but I'm still religious. I still pray.
"I was a cutup in school. I couldn't resist challenging arbitrary authority. The French teacher hated he. I'd aggravate him every day, and he'd throw me out of class. It got to the point where I'd stick my head into the classroom and ask, 'Should I leave now?' And he'd shout, 'Yes!' and out I'd go. It'd crack up the class. I enjoyed getting a laugh at the teacher's expense."
After high school, Kline went on to Indiana University, majoring in music for two years before switching to drama. "It was at Indiana where I tried this acting thing, and I really loved it," he explained. "By the middle of my sophomore year, I realized I couldn't do both acting and music, because they both require full-time discipline. And I was really a mediocre musician. I started too late and didn't really have the discipline. But acting was new, exciting, seemed absolutely impossible yet so attractive.
"There was this group of us who kind of broke away from the university theater and formed our own theater in a coffeehouse," he said. "The group was the Vest Pocket Players, and it specialized in topical satirical revues. That was where I really got excited about theater,because we built our own stage, we did our own plays, we had our own playwright, and then we did improvisational theater. I got great confidence from standing on that stage that I helped build. It was our theater to do with what we wanted. While I was doing plays like Mother Courage and Threepenny Opera in the university theater, we were also doing our own material down at this coffeehouse. Oh, I had a great time and learned a lot.
"By 1970," Kline continued, refering to the year he graduated from Indiana University, "I knew I really wanted to train as an actor and do nothing else but concentrate on that. My sister, Kate, read about the acting program at Juilliard and said, 'This looks like the place to go.' For a graduation present, I asked my parents for a ticket to New York, so I could come and audition."
The newly formed Juilliard Drama Center had been founded by the actor-producer John Houseman as the drama department of the Juiliard School at Lincoln Center. Kline was accepted as a student, and in 1972 he joined 17 other members of the first graduating class -- among them William Hurt and Patti LuPone -- to form John Houseman's Acting Company, a touring professional repertory company. He remained with it for four years, visiting more than 50 cities around the country and performing contemporary and classical plays.
I spent years in that company," he recalled, "doing a four-week season in New York and the rest of the time basically traveling on a bus. And I thought, like, 'Wow! This is exciting!'"
Kline is very animated when he speaks -- gesticulating and modulating his voice and accent to emphasize an irony or to skewer himself when he says something he suddenly finds pompous. He'll arch his eyebrows and roll his blue eyes in an exaggerated exasperation with himself. He is tall, 6 feet 1, with graying brown hair. He carries himself with a becoming physical grace.
Kline's first big break came in 1978, playing Bruce Granit, a hapless, narcissistic womanizer in the Broadway musical On the Twentieth Century. He won a Tony for his performance and was on his way. Since then, he has been in constant demand as a stage actor. In the 1980-81 Broadway season, he won his second Tony for The Pirates of Penzance and also starred in the film version. He went on to make Sophie's Choice (1982), The Big Chill (1983) and other motion pictures. He won an Academy Award for the 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda. Last year, he starred in Dave, a hit political comedy. His latest film, Princess Caraboo, opened last month, and this fall he is working on a romantic comedy set in France, called Paris Match.*
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