{"id":59613,"date":"2012-10-23T22:09:42","date_gmt":"2012-10-24T02:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=59613"},"modified":"2012-10-24T06:19:48","modified_gmt":"2012-10-24T10:19:48","slug":"interview-with-dabney-coleman-must-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=59613","title":{"rendered":"“A consummate pro. He was no prima donna. He was all right.” – Dabney Coleman on Elvis Presley"},"content":{"rendered":"

The A.V. Club has a juicy terrific interview with Dabney Coleman<\/a> up that is one of the best things I have read in ages. I will leave a couple of choice excerpts here, but it really must be read in its entirety, so please, go check it out. <\/p>\n

Dabney Coleman on Telly Savalas:<\/p>\n

By the way, a lot of people don\u2019t realize, but Telly Savalas was about as good as it gets, also. I mean that literally. I remember I saw him years and years after I\u2019d done Kojak as kind of a no-name character. [Laughs.] But I\u2019d made some kind of name for myself, and I saw him in a restaurant one time after he had retired from Kojak, and he said, \u201cWell, Coleman\u2026\u201d Lighting up a cigarette. \u201cThey want me to do more Kojak.\u201d This is years after the fact. He says, \u201cWhat do you think?\u201d I said, \u201cI think you ought to do Macbeth if you want to.\u201d And he kind of paused, and he said, \u201cThank you.\u201d He knew that I was serious. And I was, by the way. He was a great actor. That guy was one of the few people that could do this stuff just totally at ease. There\u2019s four or five of \u2019em that have no sense of tension whatsoever in their speech and their body language and that I believe in a heartbeat, and he was one of \u2019em. Danny Aiello\u2019s another. It\u2019s falling off a log with these guys. Henry Fonda was one of those. Geena Davis is one of those. There\u2019s not many, but they\u2019re around, and Telly was one of \u2019em. I meant that quite seriously; I think he was quite equipped to play Macbeth. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To say that my heart cracked after reading that is an understatement.<\/p>\n

Dabney Coleman on working with Mickey Rourke in Domino<\/i>:<\/p>\n

I remember citing this just the other day, but\u2026 you get a compliment from somebody that matters to you every now and then, and I got one from Mickey Rourke, who I think is one of the great actors in the business and has been for years. He gave me a great compliment. I did a scene on a balcony, and it was kind of over my shoulder, down onto him. We came down and we\u2019re just shooting the breeze, and somewhere out of the blue he says, \u201cBy the way, I thought that was some pretty good acting up on that balcony.\u201d And I still remember that to this day. Obviously, since I just told you about it. [Laughs.] But I told some friends about it last week, too. It meant a hell of a lot coming from him, because he\u2019s a great actor. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With all of the great tidbits in this interview, I was hoping against hope that he would talk about Trouble With Girls<\/i>, one of Elvis’ later movies, and a really good one. I wrote about it here<\/a>. Coleman has this awesome tidbit about Elvis:<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t work much with Elvis [Presley] on that, if at all. I was only there for a couple of weeks, and I don\u2019t think we did any scenes together. But one day, one lunchtime, we played touch football. He had a little entourage, and they had, like, about a six-man team. And I gathered together some crew members, I guess. I was pretty good at touch football. I was All Intramural at the University of Texas three years in a row, \u2019cause I could catch the hell out of a ball. Anyway, my guys were\u2026 not good. So I ended up throwing the ball, tossing the ball, and I never had much of an arm, but I was better than these guys, that\u2019s for goddamned sure. But we lined up, and we played for the lunch period. We beat \u2019em, and at the end of it, I remember as he passed me, he said [in a vague Elvis impression], \u201cHey, man, you got a hell of an arm.\u201d [Laughs.] That was it. That\u2019s all he said to me in two weeks. But I\u2019ll take it. Coming from Elvis, that\u2019s kind of classic. But that\u2019s my only Elvis story! I must say, though, that he was always punctual and prepared and congenial. A consummate pro. He was no prima donna. He was all right. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It almost gets boring after a while hearing stories like this from Elvis’ colleagues. “He was nice, polite, professional.” You would be hard pressed to find any evidence to the contrary. As a matter of fact, when anyone says anything about how they didn’t like working with Elvis – their testimony is immediately called into question. It stands out. Like Stella Stevens on Girls! Girls! Girls!<\/i>. The main response to her ungenerous comments about Elvis from everyone who knew him, even briefly, was, “What the hell was HER problem?”<\/p>\n

Dabney Coleman’s generous comments on working with Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda in 9 to 5<\/i>:<\/p>\n

The next thing I think of is how great all three of those girls were to me, because they were several steps up the ladder from where I was in my career. All of \u2019em were well-established. To varying degrees, but all extremely successful already. Almost icons in their fields, if you want to break it down like that. And here\u2019s this guy coming off of Mary Hartman, which is not too shabby. [Laughs.] But it was late-night TV. Anyway, what I\u2019m alluding to is that all three of them went out of their way to make me feel equal. There\u2019s no other way to put it. Status-wise and talent-wise, they all made me feel extremely secure and were very supportive. I worked with Lily a couple of other times, most notably on The Beverly Hillbillies, but on both that and Nine To Five, I remember every now and then, she\u2019d say, \u201cDabney, I don\u2019t know what to do. I don\u2019t know what to do! I don\u2019t know how to make it funny. What should I do?\u201d And I\u2019d look at her and just say, \u201cLily, come on. I\u2019m not gonna say shit, because I have a feeling you might just come up with something that\u2019s gonna be very, very funny. Don\u2019t ever ask me that again, okay?\u201d It was just very cute. Lily Tomlin asking me how to be funny. Unbelievable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is also a fantastic anecdote about Steve McQueen, which is quite terrifying if you think about it from Dabney Coleman’s point of view, but his “take” on it is so illuminating. <\/p>\n

Please go read the whole thing.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The A.V. Club has a juicy terrific interview with Dabney Coleman up that is one of the best things I have read in ages. I will leave a couple of choice excerpts here, but it really must be read in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[2095],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59613"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59613"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59618,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59613\/revisions\/59618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}