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He acts with heart of congealed suet

By Dan Knapp

L.A. Times/Washington Post Service BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.

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Frank Langella, who plays the writer with a heart of congealed suet in "Diary of a Mad Housewife, has a number of things going for him that may push him to the top of Hollywood's make-believe mountain.

Though he has a solid background in classical and contemporary theater, Langella, like the proverbial seventh son of fable and song, . .. can make little girls go outa their head. And like the fellow in the immortal Mae West line, he is tall (6 feet, 2 inches), dark (Italian (Italian extraction) extraction) and at 30 somewhat boyishly handsome in a way that provokes in shapely young birds a moistly heated manifestation of the mother instinct.

Everyone from the Via Venetto to California's Culver Blvd. is after him to star in a picture. "It's unbelievable," he says. "On the one hand, everybody wants you. And on the other, I've had as many as three solid offers fall through in the space of a single day. And the scripts. Some of them are so awful they're beyond description.

"I hate an awful lot of what is around the making of movies. About 80 per cent of the people involved in it I would rather not come in contact with anywhere.'

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Just the same, Langella wants to make as many movies as he can. He spent six years performing more than commendably on the New York stage and in sum-

mer stock in such plays as "The Immoralist,” “A Cry of Players" "The White Devil" and "Good Day." He's won three Obies for outstanding work in the offBroadway theater and a

Vernon White Drama Desk award. Since his youth in Bayonne, N.J. (his father is the president of a barrel and drum manufacturing firm) and college days at Syracuse University, he's appeared in the plays of such authors as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw and Albee, just to name a few.

"And yet," he says, "who ever heard of me outside the New York drama beat; it took me just 13 days, after all these years of sweating and caring about my craft, to shoot my scenes in 'Diary.' And on the basis of those 13 days, my career suddenly zoomed.

"You know," he went on, "when I was a kid I went to the movies every chance I could. I've always wanted to be in the movie industry ever since I can remember. After I became a stage actor, I played with movie stars and I heard all the awful stories. I got to be good friends with some of them and they told me about all the things that had been

Frank Langella

done to them by people in the film industry. And not having been in movies up until that time, I wondered: why: why even go near an

industry that treats actors and actresses, human beings, so horribly. And they'd say things like "There's something irresist-

ible about it.' Or 'there's a magic about being in films that you can't explain.'

"And you know what I would say to myself? I'd say, 'Bull.' They're just in it for the money. But then I got into it a year or so ago and I realized that all the excuses, all the things they said were true.”

"No matter how ugly it

can be, there is something magic about your face, your talent being displayed 80 feet wide and 40 feet high on hundreds of theater screens all over the country. It has to be magic when 13 days' work makes you known to more people than all the theatergoers who attended the plays you were in for more than five years."

As another case in point, Langella has been the victim of a curious sort of fal-

lout that resulted from his sharply believable portrayal of George, the womanbreaking novelist in "Diary."

"At the end of their break-up scene," says Langella, "Carrie Snodgress calls him a fag. And in the version now on the screen, his reaction is so violent that you are led to believe that her assessment is right on. Well, quite a bit of film was cut out between her ac-

cusation and the point where he throws her out ef. his apartment bodily.”

"It's too bad, because whether George is a homosexual or not is really secondary. What he really is is a man who for a variety of reasons is incapable of allowing himself to feel emo tion, and that's a far more serious problem than homosexuality."

Ironically, many filmgoers have wondered, asthey will, whether the result of director Frank Perry's cutting a latently homo-sexual character corresponds in any way to Langella in real life. In addition, double-entendres have crept into reviews of Langella's second film, "The Twelve Chairs."

"One critic said some thing about an effete por-

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trayal," he says. “Well look. Any time I read that sort of long-distance psychoanalysis, I promise you I'll laugh all the way to the bedroom.'

Currently in negotiation over three films (as well as the leadle in the play "The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail"), Langella chooses at this point to ignore the insane and ridiculous and concentrate on the magic.