Langella is an agile interviewee, taking the conversation toward anything but the specifics of his nonacting life. There are a few known facts here - a marriage, two children, a divorce, a reputation as a tomcat, an affair with Whoopi Goldberg - but he will not give specifics. “I was obsessive then, deeply in love and then out of love.” “They are so twisted and tormented with stuff I let go years ago,” he said. But when he teaches acting classes, he said, he sees parts of his younger self in his students. Langella, 69 and still maintaining his catlike charm, said that he was not the same person he had been when he wrote that essay, that he was now much more at peace. Frost in a drunken (and fictional) late-night phone call about “the people whose respect we really wanted. Many of the insecurities discussed in the essay sound remarkably like those of Mr. Langella said he identified with Nixon nevertheless. It’s curious: What is admired as authenticity in a politician could just be seen as incompetence in an actor. Nixon, he said, was not no matter how hard he or his handlers tried, he could not hide that he was “an unbelievable bag of neuroses.” Langella cites Barack Obama as skillful in this kind of theater. Paley, the chief executive of CBS, in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” and, for that matter, Perry White, the editor of a major Metropolitan newspaper, in “Superman Returns.”īut the media interest him less than how people have to act out the roles the media define for them. Langella has had a chance to study recently, for his film roles as William S. The cat-and-mouse game of the news media is something Mr. Grandage described the play as a thriller. Now onstage it’s up to Michael Sheen, playing David Frost, to chase down and draw that visceral Richard Nixon out. Then, he said, “I sort of put all the factual information away and allowed the visceral to take over.” Langella said he did far more research than he had ever done for a role, interviewing journalists and Nixon associates, visiting Nixon’s childhood home and watching tapes of Nixon, including one that he enacts at the start of the show. “Peter and I were just very, very clear that we wanted to find an American actor of such stature that when they came onstage, it would be as close as you could come to a president coming onstage,” Mr. Frost paid Nixon $600,000 for the chance to prove he could play hardball and nearly blew it when Nixon swatted away his questions with anecdotes and generalities. Nixon, who had resigned from the presidency three years earlier.
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Jacobs Theater, is a play about the series of television interviews David Frost conducted in 1977 with Richard M. “Frost/Nixon,” which opens on Broadway Sunday night at the Bernard B. “The first week of rehearsals all of the actors were doing him, and I finally had to say, ‘You have to stop.’ ” “Nixon was a great monster for good and bad, a delicious person to caricature,” he said. But there may be no caricature as permanently etched in the American imagination as the one he’s playing now. Langella, one of the most celebrated stage actors of his generation, has tackled both Dracula and Sherlock Holmes he knows what it means to step into a role that is already cemented in myth. IN a quiet corner of the bar at the Hotel Plaza Athénée in New York, Frank Langella raised his hands in victory signs, furrowed his brow and shook his jowls violently: the International Symbol for Richard Nixon.
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