Arkin, Alan

Mar. 26, 1934- Actor

Biography from Current Biography (1967)

Like Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Alan Arkin is a successful alumnus of the school of improvisational theater that originated in Chicago in the mid-1950's. And like other Second City graduates, he is adept at playing dislocated people--comic strangers in an absurd world they never made. By his own admission, acting has always served as therapy for the self-analytical Arkin--part of his continuing search for identity in a society he finds obsessed with the themes of success and failure. His ability to improvise, to mimic, and to master dialect have brought him to his present eminence as the fastest-rising actor in the United States. Mike Nichols, who has called Arkin "the best actor in America," has cited his ability "to become any person he's observed, and to make it both real and a comment on the person at the same time."

Alan Arkin was born in New York City on March 26, 1934, the first of three children born to David and Beatrice Arkin. He has one brother and one sister. His father now teaches industrial drafting in Los Angeles, and his mother specializes in the instruction of emotionally disturbed children. As the firstborn in a family of childless aunts and uncles, Arkin became the focus of attention as a performer at family gatherings, and an aunt recalls that Arkin once told his playmates, "Let's play circus. I'll be everything." After seeing his first motion picture at five, Arkin determined to become an actor. A self-styled "film junkie" all his life, he wanted to break into the movies because of the permanency of that medium and because of the immortality it offers the performer in contrast to the transiency of the stage.

When Arkin was eleven, his family moved from Brooklyn to Highland Park, California, not too far from Los Angeles. In 1951 he graduated from the Benjamin Franklin High School in Los Angeles. According to Arkin, there were two kinds of students at the school--athletes and fans. He was neither. "I loathed school," Arkin told Mel Gussow for Holiday magazine (October 1966). "I went out for cross-country because I wanted a letter. I was terrible. I kept stopping to catch my breath." His one fond memory of school was his winning of the Spade Cooley talent contest for his imitation of Danny Kaye. Arkin took his trophy, sat on a hill overlooking Los Angeles and said, "This is mine. Tomorrow the world!"

That same year Arkin enrolled at the Los Angeles City College to study drama, where he was equally unhappy. "They taught you acting straight out of the 18th century: how to act in an amphitheater with masks on your head," he explained to Bernard Weinraub in an interview for the New York Times Magazine (March 12, 1967). In 1952 he entered Los Angeles State College, where he remained for one year, and began private acting lessons with Benjamin Zemach. In the following year he accepted a drama scholarship to Bennington College for women, in Vermont, where for two years he took the male lead in plays presented at the school. Apparently Arkin was under the impression that the Bennington drama department would accept his former drama credits toward a degree, but the college had no such intention. It is uncertain whether Arkin dropped Bennington or whether Bennington dropped Arkin, but, at any rate, in 1955 Arkin left his third college, still without a degree.

Going to New York City, Arkin turned from acting to folk singing, capitalizing on his self-taught virtuosity with the guitar and his talent for composing songs. He has written more than a hundred, and still receives royalties from their recorded versions, either by himself or by others. In 1957 he joined Erik Darling and Bob Carey in a folk trio called The Tarriers. The group traveled the nightclub circuit and toured for two years before Arkin realized that this was at best a roundabout route to the theater, and in 1959, while on a European concert tour, he decided to leave The Tarriers.

Back in New York City once more, Arkin began making the rounds for a theatrical assignment, meanwhile supporting himself with royalties and an assortment of odd jobs. For a time he was a vacuum cleaner repairman (self-taught), a clerical worker (for as long as an hour and a half) and a writer (two science fiction stories in Galaxy magazine). He was handicapped by the fact that he resembled neither a leading man nor a juvenile. At last Arkin landed a minor part in a successful Off-Broadway production of Heloise which lasted for eight months. He sang three lines, played the lute, and wore tights. After Heloise closed, Arkin joined the Compass Theatre in St. Louis, where he experienced his first taste of improvisational theater. Returning only briefly to New York he soon left it again to become a member of Second City, an improvisational group in Chicago, named after A. J. Liebling's best-selling book. Arkin went to Chicago resigned to the prospect that he would bury himself in the Midwest. Instead he found himself.

During Arkin's nine months in Chicago, he refined his technique and feeling for the improvisational method, and began receiving his first public notice. In an interview with Roberta Brandes Gratz for the New York Post (September 10, 1966), Arkin recalled, "None of it came natural to me.... When I first went with Second City I didn't understand or know how to be funny, shape a scene or mold a character. I was awful for a long time. Finally I arrived--it took about six months--at one character I could play. Then I found others and soon I had a library of those I felt free in." Among Arkin's library of characters were Khrushchev, a fifteen-year-old delinquent, a beatnik guitar player, and an eighty-seven-year-old pretzel vendor patterned after his own grandfather. He made his Broadway debut when the Second City troupe opened at the Royale Theatre on September 26, 1961, in a revue called From the Second City. The production received favorable reviews, several of which gave Arkin honorable mention, ran for three months on Broadway, and then settled down for a year's run at an Off-Broadway theater in Greenwich Village.

In April 1962 Arkin not only provided the incidental music for William Herman's one-act play Man Out Loud, Girl Quiet but also appeared in that avant-garde playlet, performing on a whistle, bongo drums, a tin ukulele, and a recorder. His antics prompted Edith Oliver of the New Yorker (April 16, 1962) to applaud his clowning, mimicry, musical score, and performance. In December of that year Arkin was cast as David Kolowitz, a stage-struck Bronx delivery boy in Joseph Stein's Broadway farce, Enter Laughing, based on an autobiographical novel by Carl Reiner. When the comedy opened at the Henry Miller Theater on March 13, 1963 Arkin was listed as a supporting player for such veterans as Sylvia Sidney, Vivian Blaine, Alan Mowbray, and Irving Jacobson, but soon after reviewers pronounced him the hit of the play, he was elevated to star billing.

The din of acclaim surprised Arkin, who had serious reservations about a performance that he tailored to suit the requirements of the playwright and director rather than to please himself. Convinced that the performance he turned in was a fluke, he was puzzled by such comments as that of Melvin Maddocks in the Christian Science Monitor (March 16, 1963): "Mr. Arkin applies his personal alchemy. He not only makes brassy jokes turn into gold, but he gives ... once or twice, the whole play--a kind of confused tenderness quite beyond the depths of the script." Most reviewers agreed that Arkin had turned what might have been a strained and unsteady farce into an indisputable hit. For his performance Arkin won the Tony Award for 1963 as the best dramatic actor, the Theatre World Award for 1963, and the Variety New York Drama Critics Poll.

After his success in Enter Laughing, Arkin had to avoid becoming typed as an hysterical teen-ager. He served a stint as a folk singer in a coffeehouse on Martha's Vineyard, then happily returning to the stage, co-starred with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson in Murray Schisgal's Luv, which opened at the Booth Theater in New York City on November 11, 1964. Part theater of the absurd, part low farce, and part vaudeville, Luv soon attracted long queues to the box office. Arkin found the role of the would-be suicide, Harry Berlin, in Luv more congenial than that of the distraught delivery boy in Enter Laughing, for Harry Berlin came closer to Arkin's own idiosyncratic style. The affinity resulted in a performance that elicited such reviews as that of John McCarten's in the New Yorker (November 21, 1964): "Mr. Arkin ... is really superb as an intellectual lost in a sea of uncertainty because a dog once mistook him for a fire hydrant." "It's as if Alan jumped into Harry Berlin's shoes the first day of rehearsal," Murray Schisgal has said, "and they became his rather than mine." Luv provided Arkin with his first experience in working with Schisgal and with Mike Nichols, who directed the play.

Fulfilling his childhood ambition, Arkin next made his debut in motion pictures. He was offered the lead in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (United Artists, 1966), as a bumbling, well-meaning writer who, while summering on a New England island, is suddenly confronted with a landing party from a grounded Russian submarine. After reading the script, however, Arkin coveted the role of leader of the landing party. It required that the actor look, speak, and act like a Russian, and Peter Ustinov was being considered for the assignment. Norman Jewison, the producer and director of the movie, decided to give Arkin a screen test that would convince his superiors in Hollywood of Arkin's suitability. The test consisted of three scenes, brilliantly improvised by Arkin, of a Russian actor, a Russian officer, and a Russian prisoner. He got the part.

A semi-shaggy moustache, left over from his days in Luv, helped Arkin to look more Russian, but since he had to sound Russian as well, he studied the language for three months before beginning rehearsals. One-third of his speeches were delivered in Russian, and after practising for weeks, Arkin said, "I think I could fool anyone but a Russian." (At the Washington screening of the film, the Yugoslavian ambassador told Arkin he could understand everything he said.) He did strenuous physical things so that he could feel that he was the leader demanded by his role. "Before a film or play I find myself walking like the character I'm going to be," he told Bernard Weinraub. "I find myself looking at clothes that the character would wear and not me. I can't take my mind off the character. I ... find myself falling into a thought pattern not my own, a speech pattern not my own."

Arkin remembers the first week of filming, at a coastal village in northern California, as "absolute terror." He recalled for Mel Gussow: "I was used to getting laughs in rehearsal. When the director said, 'roll 'em,' there were no laughs. I thought, God, I must be blowing the thing. After a week and a half I realized they couldn't laugh. We were on sound." A hyperactive person, Arkin was unable to stand still, and half his head kept jumping out of the frame during the close-ups. Whenever Jewison wanted a close-up, he had to stick Arkin in an apple crate. At the close of the film, when the submarine leaves, Arkin seems to have tears in his eyes. He assured Frances Herridge of the New York Post (May 23, 1966) that they were genuine. "I was that sorry that the work was finished," Arkin explained. "I've never been so happy in my life.... I'll be grateful to Norman Jewison ... for the rest of my life for taking a chance on me."

From first rushes to final cut, it was obvious to those at private screenings that Arkin would be a star. Offers of other roles began coming in, even before The Russians Are Coming was released. After seeing two reels, Martin Ransohoff and Mike Nichols agreed that Arkin was their choice to play Yossarian in the film version of Joseph Heller's best-selling novel, Catch-22. He appeared with Shirley MacLaine in Woman Times Seven (Embassy, 1967) and with Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark (Warner Brothers-Seven Arts, 1967). For the near future Arkin has at least three more film roles lined up--as Inspector Clouseau, the comic French detective originated by Peter Sellers, as the rabbi in Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, and as Singer, the deaf-mute in Carson McCullers' novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Arkin's salary for The Russians was $75,000, but now is reputed to be $300,000 a picture. In July 1966 Arkin took time out to film his first starring role for television, that of the lead in Murray Schisgal's The Love Song of Barney Kempinski, the opening show of the American Broadcasting Company's experimental ABC Stage 67. Reviews were mostly favorable, with only the influential Jack Gould of the New York Times (September 25, 1966) registering a dissent.

When The Russians Are Coming was released, the critics seconded the opinions of private viewers. A critic for the National Observer (May 30, 1966) wrote: "You will be forgiven for insisting that no man alive can upstage the likes of Carl Reiner, Jonathan Winters, and Paul Ford--singly and in combination--for upwards of two hours ... [but] the act is accomplished [by] a young master of dialectology named Alan Arkin, and the achievement undoubtedly will make him a Big Hollywood Star." Louis Chapin, in the Christian Science Monitor (June 3, 1966), called Arkin's a "Chaplin-esque style that is still clearly his own." The film attracted the favorable attention of Senator Ernest Gruening, who praised it in remarks inserted into the Congressional Record in May 1966, and Moscow's Pravda officially recognized The Russians Are Coming in a review that observed: "This extremely funny film is based on a very sad situation in the world--the Cold War.... The conflict is made to appear very simple. Would that it were this uninvolved." For his performance in his first motion picture, Arkin was nominated for a best actor award in 1967 from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

As a change of pace, Arkin turned to directing after The Russians Are Coming was completed. He was signed to direct Happily Never After, a comedy by J. A. Ross scheduled to open in New York in March 1966, but he left the play in Boston when he grew unhappy with revisions in the script. When the play reached Broadway, it opened to disastrous reviews and closed the next day. Adopting the name of Roger Short, Arkin stepped in as director of Henry Livings' Eh?, an Off-Broadway production, about two weeks before it opened in November 1966 and after two directors had quit. He used a pseudonym because he was under contract to begin direction of Hail, Scrawdyke! only a week later. Eh? received mixed reviews and Hail, Scrawdyke! closed within a week of its opening in December 1966.

Alan Arkin lives in an apartment in the Brooklyn Heights section of New York with his second wife, Barbara Dana, his leading lady in Enter Laughing. The building is owned by Norman Mailer, with whom Arkin exchanges a grunted greeting whenever they meet in the hallway. By a former marriage to a Bennington girl that ended in divorce, Arkin has two small sons. About six feet tall and weighing about 170 pounds, the sleepy-eyed Arkin looks more like an escapee from the library of City College than a successful actor. Restless and brooding offstage, he finds idleness oppressive. In his leisure time he taught himself to play the recorder, flute, and fife, and he wrote an unpublished children's book and an unsold movie script. An excellent photographer, he would make photography his second choice as a profession. His own severest critic, he fears new roles, but once he has made the initial breakthrough, he becomes completely lost in his work. He has often appeared at civil rights benefits and signed anti-Vietnam war statements. Asked by Bernard Weinraub what he was doing to stop the war, Arkin replied, "I sit home and curse a lot." He is a member of the Screen Actors Guild, Actors Equity Association, American Federation of Musicians, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.

N Y Herald Tribune p2 IV Je 30 '63 por; N Y Times Mag p30+ Mr 12 '67; Biographical Encyclopaedia & Who's Who of the American Theatre (1966)