A Well-Oiled Career

"I didn't want to meet the director, I wanted to meet the author. Of course they were the same person," Langella says of Andrew Wagner.

"He said to me, 'You are going to be in my movie.' I said, 'You have no budget, no time frame.' He just smiled and said, 'Yes, but you are going to be in my movie.' Several months later, I was in his movie."

Langella contrasts the short, frenetic 18-day shoot with the Hollywood style that has nurtured him for many years. But asked if the shoot was intense, he subtly reedits the question, finding the word "intense" inappropriate. "It was concentrated, not intense. When you wait for hours while your leading lady puts on her makeup and there is too much money and too many toys, that's intense."

Now, how does Frank Langella, who is, after all, tall and handsome and graceful, play Leonard Schiller, who is internal and intellectual? "Well, I've known some writers. I knew Saul Bellow, John Updike. I was close to Styron, Tennessee Williams. Gotten to know Gay Talese. Writers are my heroes. But what I actually think happened: I tapped into all of me that is Leonard. How can I look like him, how can I dress like him, what kind of glasses would he wear, what kind of ties? I wouldn't call it 'building a character.' He was a man I'd never portrayed, but I recognized him. I allowed him to run me."

And now Frank is suddenly hot in the movies.

"It's a surprise, I admit. I had begun to resign myself to 'And Frank Langella as Ned Brockett,' " his shorthand for the kind of awkward credits ex-stars get when they've fallen to character roles, in parts too small to be above the title but with faces too known to be hidden in normal actor listing. "I've always been around. This is a particularly good two years. I won't let it change me. I know better."

He has been around. His first film made him an instant star and set the paradigm that even now keeps him employed. He was George Prager, a narcissistic, self-serving writer with whom "the mad housewife" (Carrie Snodgress) had an affair in 1970's "Diary of a Mad Housewife." Impossibly handsome and self-assured, he swept her off her feet but never fell in love with her and, in the end, crushed her with the reality of his cold emptiness. Next, he starred in Mel Brooks's "The Twelve Chairs." Probably the highlight was his starring role in "Dracula," in 1979, opposite Laurence Olivier. He starred in the same role on Broadway.

"It was great. I loved that. I was Elvis Presley for two years."

But then, as he puts it with almost comic bluntness, "that went away."

So it goes in the movie business: You're the sexiest star in town, and then all of a sudden nobody answers your calls.

"I went back to Broadway and played Salieri in 'Amadeus.' Then 'Dave' " -- 13 years later! -- "got me back into movies, and it was the start of my character years."

In "Dave," he played the scheming Bob Alexander, the White House chief of staff who tries to cling to power by putting a look-alike in the Oval Office when the president is incapacitated. The stand-in, a temp agency owner (Kevin Kline) with an eerie resemblance to the Great Man (who's in a coma) brings common sense and humanity to the job, to Alexander's fury.

But the role was the beginning of the character years. "People said: 'He got bald. He got fat. What happened to him?' But it was all right. I enjoyed it. I remember later I was on the set waiting for a friend to arrive. He was still a star, and I was a character. And he was fiddling with his face, his assistant was there, they were all worried whether or not his cheek looked too fat and he needed more makeup or better lighting or whatever, and I was just worrying about my performance and I thought that was fine. Nobody is coming to see me because I'm cute. They're coming to see me because I can act."

Asked why he chose to take the "hard route" (live theater, independent films, lengthy return to New York) as opposed to the "easy route" (prosperity, film stardom, playing the silky lizard who makes waitresses cry forever), he once again gently rearranges the question.

"To me, the 'easy route' is really the hard route. It's [expletive] boring. You're so unchallenged. You wake up early, go to a trailer in West L.A., deliver dialogue you don't believe in and worry yourself to death about box office or ratings.

"To me, the 'hard route' is easy. You don't live beyond your means, you don't do a lot of things you don't believe in, you care about your work. I don't even have a publicist. I can read a page and go wow, let's do that. . . . It sort of stopped a dozen times. What do I do now? . . . But somehow, something always came up."

Frank Langella is on the cusp of 70 and things are still coming up.