“O'Neill demands your best all the time - no, no
less - and the best you have. And it doesn't matter if it's as good as
somebody else or worse than somebody else, none of that matters. It only
matters that you give him your best. And then it works.”—Actor Jason Robards, Jr.,
describing the demands on actors’ stamina, skill and courage by playwright
Eugene O’Neill, interview for “Eugene O’Neill: A Documentary Film,” in The American Experience series
(2006)
Shakespeare had Richard Burbage; George Bernard Shaw,
Rex Harrison. In the second half of the 20th century, Eugene O’Neill’s finest interpreter was
Jason Robards Jr., born on this date
in 1922. The actor might have been best known to mass audiences for his
consecutive Best Supporting Actor Oscars (All
the President’s Men, 1976; Julia,
1977), but his heart belonged to the stage—and no playwright claimed his
allegiance more thoroughly than the only American dramatist ever to be awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Part of his affinity for O’Neill might have stemmed
from a common gene for self-destruction, one the actor shared with another
Irish-American literary genius, F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Robards starred onstage
in an adaptation of Budd Schulberg’s novel The
Disenchanted, in a role based on Fitzgerald’s ill-starred attempt at screenwriting in Hollywood, as well as the 1961 screen adaptation of Tender is the Night.)
But Robards discovered other similarities between O’Neill’s
life and his own. Both, for instance, had fathers who abandoned relatively risky
but emotionally satisfying stage work for roles that spelled easier money
(James O’Neill, in the role that made him rich but typecast him, The Count of Monte Cristo; James Robards
Sr., in silent films). Both went to sea in their early 20s.
And both knew all too much about substance abuse and
the guilt of survival. O’Neill witnessed in his family the scourge of
alcohol (in brother James Jr.) and morphine (in the case of his mother), and
his own despair led to a suicide attempt at the New York dive Jimmy the Priest’s
in 1912 (the same year in which The
Iceman Cometh is set). A legendary hellraiser even among his fellow actors,
Robards got into a car accident that required massive plastic surgery. The
shock of the incident may have helped him at last stave off the alcoholism he had battled
for more than two decades.
Above technical skill, O’Neill—from the moment
Robards played the career-making role of Hickey in the off-Broadway 1956 revival
of The Iceman Cometh—required from the actor unflinching
courage, the ability to stare into a psychological abyss and endure it all. Every
night, he would have to dredge up a lifetime’s worth of regret about family
loss and dysfunction. Robards would go on to do so with masterful effect in
such other towering O’Neill dramas as Long
Day’s Journey Into Night, A Moon for
the Misbegotten, A Touch of the Poet,
and Hughie.
(1975 photo of
Robards at the Lago Mar, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., by Roy Erickson; State Library and
Archives of Florida)
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