THEATER

Back on stage, a flair for truth

In "The Royal Family," Daniel Gerroll propels Tony Cavendish over the top and into the limelight.

By Hugh Hart , Special to The Times

April 27 2004

From the moment he races onstage in "The Royal Family" and strikes a self-dramatizing pose showing off his profile to best advantage, it's clear that English actor Daniel Gerroll has the nose, the dash and the darting eyes to propel Tony Cavendish over the top and into the limelight.

In Gerroll's hands, Tony, rapscallion actor, manages to upstage his own formidable clan of scene-stealing drama queens — matriarch Fanny (Marian Seldes), sister Julie (Kate Mulgrew) and niece Gwen (Melinda Page Hamilton) — when he sweeps into their Manhattan duplex on the lam from a litigious ex-lover and an irate Hollywood director.

Aside from a few swashbuckling moments inspired by Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks, Tony was modeled after John Barrymore, who was America's biggest silent film and stage star in 1927 when George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber wrote the play as a thinly veiled portrait of the Barrymore family. And though Barrymore's brand of florid histrionics became passé half a century ago, the Tony Cavendish/John Barrymore archetype, in Gerroll's view, never really goes out of fashion. "The flamboyant lead has existed since time immemorial," Gerroll says. "He's the sort of personality that lives well on stage, certainly, and in some cases on film too. Peter O' Toole pulled it off beautifully in 'My Favorite Year.' "

To prepare for the role, Gerroll, 52, studied Frederic March's performance in the 1930 film adaptation and read Hollis Alpert's biography "The Barrymores." But as soon as he saw the script, Gerroll grasped the key to his character.

"In a way, Tony's like this hyperactive child who never calms down, even with adults in the room. When I saw the set design, I realized if there's a piece of furniture in the way, he'd just walk on top of it to get over. Salvador Dali was like that. He could walk into a restaurant like this wearing pajamas and they wouldn't throw him out."

Gerroll first felt the stirrings of his own acting gift when he found himself enchanted by the larger-than-life pantomime shows he attended as a child in his native London. "These were huge entertainments, with the whole cross-dressing thing where you had these actors filling big costumes, filling the room, making you laugh," Gerroll recalls. "I was just crazily shy as a kid, and seeing that at the age of 6 or 7, it was as if these people were gods."

Gerroll quit law school and auditioned for London's elite Central School of Speech and Drama, dazzling the admissions board with a reading from "Look Back in Anger." Things went downhill from there. "Once I began classes, simply being gifted was not enough," Gerroll says. "I went into a depression for three years. I didn't get any roles I wanted. My mouth would dry up. I'd turn to wood. They said, 'We've made a terrible mistake,' and asked me to leave the school. I was the only actor to come out of my class of 30 without an agent."

Gerroll rebounded. Charming an agent who considered him "kind of cute," he honed his craft for four years in England's regional theater circuit before getting his big break playing, he says, a "Cockney version of the Fonz" in the Royal Court's 1977 hit comedy "Once a Catholic." Three years later, after a featured role in "Chariots of Fire," Gerroll moved to New York and piled up credits in dozens of shows, including "The Holy Terror," "Plenty" and "The Homecoming." He met his wife, actress Patricia Kalember, at an audition. They started a family and moved to Los Angeles in 1989, when Kalember was cast in "thirtysomething," followed by a four-year role in the TV series "Sisters."

"We lived here for seven years," Gerroll says. "I'd done a huge amount of work in London and New York and thought maybe I should give it a rest and make some money in film and TV." Gerroll played a succession of villains, womanizers and gay characters in TV series like "Seinfeld," "Cheers" and "Knots Landing." "My niche in Hollywood was where they really needed an actor, as opposed to, like, a model," says Gerroll dryly.

In between the guest spots, Gerroll savored the downtime. "God how I loved being out of work here," he half jokes. "The sun, the beaches, the tennis.

"But as much as I loved it, I realized that whatever [gift] I had was being totally wasted. I spent my prime years when I should have playing all the leading roles in Shakespeare bobbing around on an inflatable raft in the pool reading Homer. So when my wife wanted a third child, we went back to New York and I had to start all over again because they forget you like that," he says, snapping his fingers.

Rebuilding his stage career, Gerroll starred in "Psychopathia Sexualis," "High Society" and "Blithe Spirit," earning a 1999 Obie award for "sustained excellence." "Royal Family" director Tom Moore saw Gerroll last spring in the Broadway production of "Enchanted April" and offered him the Tony Cavendish role. "I didn't have Danny read," Moore said. "We didn't even discuss the piece in depth. I just knew, here's a man who understands style.... He's got an extraordinarily fast mind as well as incredible technical dexterity."

For Gerroll, the outsized role called for an all-or-nothing swan dive guided by lickety-split timing, peak physical condition and a certain insouciance that mirrors Barrymore's own devil-may-care charisma.

"You could really be hanging out to dry when you act on this level," Gerroll confides. "You never know if you're going to fall flat on your face, because if you go over the top in a bad way, you lose the audience. .

"But it's a weird thing. I once had a bad gambling habit. I'd go to the casino at midday till curtain time, do a performance, then go back to the casino till 2 in the morning. It was a horror. I lost everything. So, nothing really scares me after that. Sure, you take a risk when you dash into a play like this, but what can it hurt?" As Gerroll sees it, audiences will only go root for Tony so long as he tethers the melodrama to a recognizable human heart. "You can have a lot of fun and make all your friends laugh if you parody what somebody like Barrymore was doing, but that's just tired acting. You have to mean it.

"The words 'real' or 'natural' are actually pretty deadly. The real word you're always going for, even when you're trying to do what I'm doing in a 2,000-seat barn, is 'truth.' Because if what you're doing is somehow truthful, they'll know it, but if it isn't, it stinks."