He insists he does not have a sense of humour, and perhaps it’s true—certainly none of his quotes on his IMDb page are funny. Many are passionately political, and he self-identifies as a socialist and an atheist. One of the quotes suggests that everyone who’s seen The Princess Bride “goes out on the street,” which is why so many people he encounters recognize him from it. I’m not sure if he’s aware of his current success as a rebuttal to bad arguments; I suspect it would have to be explained to him. He is primarily known for comedy now, a field that is a closed book to him. But at least the joke is seldom at the expense of his appearance, as it was in his first film role, in Woody Allan’s Manhattan.
I suspect but cannot prove that one of the films that has meant the most to him was his minor role in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. His father is not a character in that (though he is portrayed by Bob Balaban in Capote), but the founding of The New Yorker is a plot in the movie, and William Shawn was its editor for many years. His mother, Cecille, worked there as well. He is a noted playwright, though the critics can’t agree if the plays are any good are not—one is a monologue designed to be performed in an apartment to what logically must be a very small audience. They are extremely political.
Not exactly the kind of man, all things considered, whom you’d necessarily expect to become an actor of note, much less a comedic icon. And indeed, he has a BA in history from Harvard and studied at Oxford with the initial intention of becoming a diplomat. He’s taught English in India and Latin in New York. Before his casting in The Princess Bride, he’d done mostly arthouse fare; I don’t even know if he was entirely making a living at it. I’m not sure how he even came to be cast as Vizzini; perhaps someone has seen My Dinner With Andre. (Okay, reading his Wikipedia article provided this information, and yes! Janet Hirshenson, whom we discussed last week. Apparently, he says “inconceivable” in it, and she knew he was the right person. I told you she was worth discussing!)
Almost all of his TV work is post-Princess Bride. An episode of One Life to Live, back in the ’60s. Two episodes of Taxi. Two TV movies I’ve never heard of. And then, in 1987, steady work. Famously, he was the Grand Nagus on Deep Space Nine. A dozen episodes here or there of all kinds of shows. My personal favourite is his Dr. Howard Stiles on Crossing Jordan (a show that also featured Mahershala Ali, still going by Mahershalalhashbaz), who is actually—in the nature of Crossing Jordan characters—quite skilled at his job and just a bit eccentric as well.
In movie work, he says he still gets recognized from Clueless—where the joke, if anything, is his age and his intellect; the movie is extremely affectionate toward him, as it is toward most of its cast. He is Uncle Vanya in the intriguing and underrated Vanya on 42nd Street—underrated perhaps being the wrong word for a movie I simply seldom hear discussed at all. He’s Bob Parr’s tiny, angry boss in The Incredibles and of course Rex in the Toy Story movies. It’s not all translating Brecht for him, though I wonder if he sometimes wishes it still could be.
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