From Parade Magazine, 2/16/97, by Michael Ryan. http://www.shadow.net/~mrl/law/lawnof.htm
Why He Plays the Hero
"I've been able to do things that allow me to hold my head up and still be popular," Sam Waterston told me. "I don't think playing a villain is my greatest talent. If I have to be typecast, I'd like it to be as Abraham Lincoln."
This week, Waterston, 56, can be heard as the voice of another President in Ken Burns' new PBS documentary, Thomas Jefferson, airing on Tuesday and Wednesday (check listings for time). The film portrays Jefferson as one of the major framers of American liberty. But it does not shrink from confronting the unhappy fact that he was also a slave-owner and may have fathered children by one young slave, Sally Hemings. In his performance, Waterston conveys these contradictory aspects of Jefferson's character without flinching. Though he never appears on camera, he brings to the role the same sense of earnestness that made him a success in the Broadway production of Abe Lincoln in Illinois.
"You gravitate toward things that suit you," he explained, "Wherever you come from, that's what develops your tastes. You know what the Jesuits say? Give me a boy before he is 7, and I'll have him for the rest of his life. It's true."
For more than three decades, Waterston has portrayed characters who combine intelligence with a keen sense of morality. In the 1974 file The Great Gatsby, he played the narrator Nick Caraway, opposite Robert Redford in the title role. Eleven years later, he earned an Oscar nomination for portraying the morally tormented reporter Sydney Schanberg in The Killing Fields. He then played a lawyer grappling with civil rights issues in the TB series I'll Fly Away. And since 1994, he has been known as the zealous prosecutor Jack McCoy on NBC's Law & Order.
I visited Waterston on the Manhattan set of L&O. I wanted to find out how much of what we see on TV and in the movies reflects the real man. I remarked that moral issues have weighed heavily in his choice of acting jobs as well as his personal life.
"I guess that's right, isn't it?" Waterston answered. "But, that's what it's all about. That's what's important.
"I think it's funny when people say somebody 'decided' to do something in show business. If there's any business that instructs you in the strong hand of fate, it's show business. You can plan and plan, but it's what happens to you that really determines what your career will be like."
Sam grew up in New England, the son of George, a schoolmaster from North Andover, Mass., and his wife, the painter Alice Atkinson. As a child, he acted in school productions and in plays directed by his father, an amateur dramatist.
Waterston's family was affluent though not indulgent. The world that bred him emphasized discipline. As a boy, he was sent to Groton School, an exclusive Massachusetts boarding academy known for its emphasis on personal integrity and civic responsibility.
"These schools have a hold on you sort of permanently," Waterston said. "It doesn't mean you always live out their ideals, but they bear on you all your life."
In 1958, he enrolled in Yale certain he wanted to be an actor. "In those days, in interest in the theater was sort of regarded as a disease. It was not a serious occupation for a young man. My family was concerned about me making a living. But being involved in the arts was not anathema to them."
In fact, Waterston's parents encouraged his career choice. "They lived a few hours away, but they came to every production. In a way, I felt I was living out things that they wondered what it would have been like to do themselves. They were really wonderful parents." His mother died 3 years ago, his father in 1995.
After Yale, Sam established himself on the New York stage, acting in Broadway production of Abe Lincoln in Illinois and A Walk in the Woods. But it was his role as Nick Carraway in the film The Great Gatsby that brought him fame.
"The role was widely coveted," he recalled. "I chased it aggressively. I went in there and told them, I know this stuff, I know this character. If there were other actors who knew the part, I eliminated them from my imagination." Waterston's performance was critically praised, though the film drew mixed reviews.
Many actors might have used the acclaim to build a Hollywood career. But Waterston clung to the East Coast, acting on Broadway and performing Shakespeare at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in Manhattan. There also were personal reasons for staying. Sam had been living in N.Y. with his first wife, Barbara Rutledge Johns, and their son, James. The two eventually were divorced and Sam met his current wife, Lynn, on a blind date. They married in 1976 and decided to live in Connecticut. "My family is my main interest in life. We've never lived in L.A. We've never been into the who's got the bigger BMW competition." Sam's son James, now 27, was graduated from Yale and acts in the N.Y. theater. His oldest daughter, Elisabeth, attend Yale and also is thinking of following in her father's profession. Sam's other children, Graham and Katherine, live at home in Connecticut. "Outside my work I spend all my time with my family."
Over the years, he has acted in 35 movies. He played a villain in the expensive 1980 flop Heaven's Gate, but roles in the Woody Allen films Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors were praised by critics. In 1995, he produced and acted in The Journey of August King, about a runaway slave girl in the antebellum South and the white man who risks his life and social standing to help her.
A high point in Sam's career was his performance in The Killing Fields as the reporter Sydney Schanberg who covered Cambodia in the 1970's during the Khmer Rouge's bloody reign. He played a mesmerizing scene in which Schanberg, back in his N.Y. apartment, listens to a wrenching Puccini aria while thinking about his friend Dith Pran, whom he left behind when the Khmer Rouge began their genocide. The troubled conscience and grief of the character leaped off the screen. Yet Sam declined praise for his acting. "That character's moral dilemma was so obvious, a stone would have been moved. I talked to Schanberg a long time. He certainly had a conscience of his own."
I asked Sam why he took the role of Jack McCoy on L&O. "It couldn't have come at a better time in my life. My youngest boy is 13, and for the first 10 years of his life, I was on the road all the time. I was in Thailand when he was born. Before that I was always at my wife's side when our kids were born. I was in danger of missing a lot, not just with him, but with my whole family."
Though McCoy's single mindedness is nothing like his own. Sam said L&O's scripts mirror his view of life. "They don't wrap up the moral questions in a comfortable way. The bad guys don't always get punished and the good guys are not necessarily pure. The best shows we do are sort of indigestible. All the points of view have some place and no resolution could be satisfying. Like life, we leave messy questions."