Actor Steve Guttenberg talks about starring in panto at The Churchill, Bromley (From News Shopper)

Actor Steve Guttenberg talks about starring in panto at The Churchill, Bromley

5:10pm Wednesday 19th November 2008

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Ahead of starring in panto, Police Academy star Steve Guttenberg opens up to Kerry Ann Eustice about everything from John Travolta to philosophy

When I arrive at Steve Guttenberg’s swanky Victoria hotel — fitting digs for a movie star — he’s already in the middle of a phone interview.

Surprisingly chipper for someone who’s facing a day of back-to-back interviews (The Stage waits in the wings for me to finish) and endless Police Academy questions, he’s bantering with the current journalist and displaying an excellent grasp of the brand of British humour we like to assume Americans don’t get, sarcasm.

“What there’s other cast members?” quips Steve with mock indignation down the line. “I thought I was doing the Steve Guttenberg show.”

And while these jokes flow throughout our interview (anything from Quantum of Solace banter “What? He doesn’t say I’m Bond, James Bond in the movie?” to his Paul O Grady Guinness World Record win) — during which he sips a steady stream of detoxifying hot water with lemon — he’s also very deep and philosophical.

His thoughtful outlook on life was in part inspired by the writing of Eckhart Tolle and ideas expressed in his books, The Power of Now and The New Earth, are echoed in what Steve says about living in the moment and dealing with criticism.

“Yeah, Eckhart Tolle,” he said when I notice his philosophical outlook. “He has this great book, it’s all about the ego and if you can control your ego and realise the ego, you’ll be in great shape. Put the ego in a box.

“If you’re standing in line, you’re standing in line. ‘I’m waiting’. You’ve got to control the ego.”

And while Steve admits to having had “bouts of I’m so great” he seems, for a major movie star at least, incredibly grounded.

“I’m just the luckiest guy in the world,” he said. “I’m just an ordinary guy in an extraordinary job and I’m just one of six and a half billion people. The fact I get to be on television or in movies or plays or articles, that’s just an illusion. That’s not real because in the end I get the same amount of real estate as anybody — 6ft by 3ft or a little urn. But I just feel like the luckiest guy in the world.”

Sure, he admits you have to go out and master your craft to succeed in the movie business but he attributes it largely to luck.

“I’m not here just me,” he said. “I’m standing on all these people who came before me and helped me.

“Actors aren’t like doctors where you study. Actors are born with a certain face. Brad Pitt has to kiss his mother’s and father’s ass everyday because if he looked like Benny Hill he wouldn’t be with Angelina Jolie. It’s just the way it is.

“I always say I’m part of the lucky sperm club. I had a great mother and father, they’re personable and good looking and they made me and I got to live this life. But it’s just luck.

“And then you study your craft and you study your art and you have to make something of it. I just think I’m really lucky and I think you have to have humility about it.

“I try to keep my head. In my family, I’m just another family member, in fact the least important member, I think, and definitely not the smartest. But this is something I’ve always wanted to do and I’m lucky to keep doing it.”

It’s an outlook which means he doesn’t sit too comfortably with the cut-throat nature of Hollywood and the commercial film industry. He may have wanted to be an actor since he was 10 years old, looking up to thesps such as Ronald Coleman and Laurence Olivier, but it didn’t stop him from quitting after his first year and going back to school to be a dentist.

“I hated the Hollywood culture. I still do,” he said.

“It’s all based on who’s the most successful. You could be a murderer, but if you have a hit movie everyone loves you. That culture doesn’t make sense with me, so I did quit for a while and go back to school. But then I got some offers and got drawn back into it and stayed with it.”

He has a great story to illustrate the fickle favour of fame. When we first sit down to chat, I tell him along with Grease that Three Man a Baby (and the Little Lady sequel) were my favourite films as a kid.

“Ah Travolta,” he said. “I love that Travolta. I do. I love him for a lot of reasons.

“Isn’t it cool that there was a time just a few years ago that no-one care about Travolta. That’s what’s really interesting about the world, about life.

“That just a year ago the economy was soaring, now it’s in the doldrums. Nothing stays the same. And never count anything out or anybody.

“We’re so quick to make judgements ‘oh he stinks’ ‘you were short when you were a kid, you’ll never be tall’. It’s just wonderful. It’s just that eternal lesson you know.

“Travolta is a great lesson. I remember being in a famous hotel in Los Angeles and eating lunch. Travolta walked in and the producer I was with put his hand over his face. He said ‘I don’t want Travolta to see me. I don’t want anyone seeing me talking to Travolta’ because he was so unsuccessful and such a has-been.

“That guy was big and then he fell really hard. Isn’t it amazing how we bring him back and now they kiss his ass. Now he gets $23m for 10 weeks, a chef for his Iguana. ‘How many chefs do you need John? ‘Two chefs for the iguana, a massage for the iguana?’ “I’m just so happy he’s super successful and working and working and working. Because he knows it could all fall apart again.”

No wonder he’s been reaching for philosophy books having to contend with an industry like that. Just does a decent sort survive in such an environment?

“You inject your brain with heroin,” he jokes. “And that’s the only way to it.”

“No. I think you have to realise you’re an artist, not a business. It’s one thing for Starbucks to close 600 of their stores in the US or for Circuit City to out of business or one of the great restaurants here in town to go out of business because that’s a business. But when you’re out paining pictures, making music or doing theatre, television or film, you’re an artist.

“What’s happened with the media is it’s created everyone into a business. Madonna is an artist, the fact that people love or hate her or whatever; she’s an artist, she’s not a business.

“You have to realise it is art. Sometimes they buy your paintings sometimes they don’t. The way I look at it is I paint pictures. Sometimes they like them, sometimes they don’t.”

Steve goes on to talk about how the American dream “have a car, chicken in a pot, white-picket fence and a nice house” has been replaced by people wanting nothing more than to be TV.

“That used to be the universal dream, the English dream, the French dream to have a successful home. That’s not the dream anymore; the dream is to be on TV. That’s the dream.

“Turn on the television now and there’s a reality show with somebody totally proselytising themselves just to get on television. Eating bugs, living in the jungle, cutting crazy hair cuts, having your house redone. People will do anything to be on TV today.”

Despite his distaste for this culture, he loves film and watches one every day. The Godfather awaits after the interview. Plus he peppers his stories with fascinating Hollywood anecdotes such as this and uses other actors and their ‘great lines’ to illustrate his points.

He said of his love of acting: “James Caan had a great line. ‘Wanting to work is a luxury, having to work is not’. And I’ve just got a great luxury. I want to work. I just love to do my craft.”

You can hardly blame him, Steve has starred alongside glitzy names such as Sharon Stone, Mickey Rourke (“deep and sensitive guy” apparently) Number 5 in Short Circuit and greats such as Laurence Olivier, a childhood idol of Steve’s, on The Boys from Brazil. “He was just one of the most down to earth fellows ever,” he said. “Immediately he told me to call him Larry and was just so kind and so giving.”

Of course he shares a ‘great line’ Larry passed from Humphrey Bogart to Steve about stardom. “He said ‘Humphrey Bogart had a great line’ it was something Bogart had told Olivier when he had asked ‘What’s it like being a star?’ He said ‘Stars are in the heavens. I’m just a man and I just happen to have a job and look like I look and act how I act but we’re all the same’.”

It must have been amazing to be passed a gem from someone you admire like that, I tell him.

“Yeah, especially for a super star, a guy who if he wanted to could have someone clipping his toe nails.”

And as if avoiding one of Olivier’s greatest regrets (reputedly never playing a dame in panto) Steve will appear as Baron Hardup in The Churchill’s Cinderella.

”It’s just a theatre show. It’s like being a carpenter, you build a barn, you build a house, you build a shed, you fix one of these pipes. Acting is all the same; you’re doing a panto, a drama, a musical, a television show, a talk show, a play, a movie, all the same.”

Perhaps he has missed working on the stage – where he started his acting career – I wonder.

“No, I don’t miss anything. It’s a waste of time. I’m really happy now,” he says coming back to Tolle’s Power of Now ethos.

“You have to stay in the moment,” he said. “I’m in this room right now. This is the only moment that counts. I miss people I love, but that’s all.”

Taking measures to prevent missing his family while he’s in the UK, Steve has Skype (“so I can literally be with them every day”) before the whole clan (mother, father, two sisters, nieces and nephews, brothers in law”) fly in on December 27.

Also while he’s in town he plans to catch up with friends including Strictly’s squeakiest judge Arlene Phillips who he worked with on 1980 musical comedy Can’t Stop The Music. He also hopes to catch Rain Main starring Josh Hartnett in the West End – a show loosely based on the Tom Cruise-starring film by Barry Levinson, who also directed Steve in Diner.

“I want to go check that out,” he said. “I love theatre. Mostly because I just get to sit there and watch and don’t have to work, I can just sit there.”

Not that Steve feels he needs a rest. He’s not buying any of this panto is a slog or acting is hard business you sometimes hear. Not even the prospect of 12 shows a week appears to scare him.

“It’s the same as everything else,” he said of panto season’s notorious schedule. “You do it. It’s not a gruel.

I always say, ‘go work at Boots as a cashier’, that’s hard work, ‘go fix the streets, go stand in front of the palace as a guard’. “This isn’t hard work. That’s ridiculous.

“I hear it all the time, ‘oh, it’s so hard’.

“You hear the interviews with people,” he said before adopting a woe-is-me voice, “The say ‘oh I had to learn how to fence, it was two months of oh so hard,’ or ‘they put me in a corset, it was so hard, I had to get there early for make-up it was so hard’. Ok, then go work in the subway, the tube and collect tokens, see how you’ll run back to that stage.

“It’s such bullshit when I hear people complaining about working in theatre, television and movies. Get out there. There’s only about a billion Chinese people who will take your place in about a second. You have to have an attitude that it’s not so bad.

“Everyone is so coddled. I can see the point of making certain rules because you want to make it efficient, but I don’t think it’s hard. It’s one of the most sough-after jobs in the world, other than being Prince Charles.”

When I point out how busy Prince Charles is with charity work and public commitments Steve laughs and says it must be terrible to have someone brush your teeth everyday.

He has little time for bad reviews and criticism too. When I ask how he feels when the Police Academy follow-ups were badly received he said: “What people say is meaningless. It’s just words and they’re just morons.

“The greatest thing we all want is to be important. Everyone wants to have attention, that’s what it’s all about. Why, I think, are you spending time on me? Because you love me, that’s why. Why would I even think about Lindsay Lohan and her craziness? Why? Because I love her. She this coked-out maniac getting all this attention and I love it. Why would I even think about it? So if anyone says anything about me, they love me. The opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is indifference.”

In-keeping with his other answers, Steve goes on to tell a top-notch story about Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. Grant invited Loren to visit the beach with him, an offer she refused indignantly believing she would be mobbed. After some time and seeing Grant was being little bothered she made her way down to the beach covered up in her bath robe, her hair wrapped up in a towel and, of course, wearing her trademark sunglasses. Remaining anonymous doesn’t suit her for long, after watching unnoticed as Grant was asked for a steady stream of autographs, she soon whips off her robe to reveal a bikini and relished in the attention which followed.

“You want to be important. We all want to be noticed. It’s what it’s all about,” said Steve concluding the story.

Bearing this in mind, alongside the fact Steve was one of the Screen Actors Guild’s busiest actors in the 1980s, second only to Gene Hackman, I dig out and read one of the questions I collected from our office before I set off for today’s chat.

‘The first three Police Academy films came out in a three year period from 1984 to1986, along with Short Circuit and Cocoon. Were those two years the best of your life?’ “No,” he says with some justified incredulity. “Are you kidding me? No way. I haven’t lived the best year of my life.

“But I did have the best day of my life which was my 50th birthday. I woke up that day with my girlfriend, who’s just the greatest girl in the world. I looked over at her and she’s just really happy and smiling, she’s got the greatest attitude in the world, and I got up and had a great breakfast and went ahead an played golf with my brother in law, nephew and my best friend, then went to my mom and dad’s house, went swimming and had lunch, then across the street, where my sister lives, and went over there and had a party and had the best day of my life so far.”

“I’m a thing to people, not a person,” he added. “But I’m a person. Could you say the best year of my life was when I got a great job? Getting jobs is probably like the millionth most important thing in my life. There are so many moments, like my niece and nephew being born.

“I do realise when people meet me I’m a thing. They don’t want to know are you sick, did you not feel good today, they want ‘hi, let’s do a scene from Police Academy’. And me too, when I meet a famous person, before I get to know them I’m thinking ‘god you’re the Terminator’. He’s not, he’s Arnold and that’s who he is.”

Being treated as an object may be frustrating for the actor but he’s still extremely mindful when he’s approached by fans and the affect being around someone famous may have on them. He recalls something Sean Connery once said about you might be the only celebrity the only famous person they’ll ever meet in their whole life and that one minute that they meet you will affect them for the rest of their lives and the recent story about the American Idol contestant who commit suicide.

“I think you’ve got to be really nice to everybody. Some people live their whole life and their walls have pictures of you.

“There’s a bunch of people who have parties for me in their houses, I really want to respect these people. It’s so important to have a good attitude and be nice to people. One day nice will be cool.”

The ‘nice being cool’ prophesy reflects his relentlessly positive outlook. For example, when I ask Steve if he has anything to add he says he just hopes his story can inspire someone, make people realise they can be anything they want to be.

He said: “Right now there’s some kid, who’s going to read your interview and say ‘wow, I could be a doctor, a lawyer, an actor. I would like to inspire people and say you can do and be anything you want at any age, any age.”

“It’s important to talk this way, there’s a lot of negative stuff around and that’s why I try to talk positive.”

Well, he has plenty to be positive about. There’s a bunch films coming out such as Treasure of the West, “sort of a Home Alone movie” a possibility of movie in Berlin and he a psychological drama called Fatal Rescue. Like in so many of his 1980 hits, Steve also got a happy ending.

He said: “Having this job in Bromley is a great job, to be at The Churchill theatre - which this one journalist told me was his favourite theatre in London - I’m lucky to be there and work with all these really cool people and a great company. This is great stuff.

“I’m really happy. I have a very nice life. It’s afforded my family, my friends and me opportunities I only dreamed of as a kid. I’ve gotten to eat with one, two, three presidents. My mom and dad, I’m able to take care of them and bring them to London. My dreams have all come true.”

Here’s hoping the star returns the favour for Bromley audiences.

Cinderella starring Steve Guttenberg, Dec 5 to Jan 18, The Churchill, Bromley. 0870 060 6620.

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