Stephen Tobolowsky
Stephen Tobolowsky was born in Dallas on May 30, 1951. He was named for his maternal grandfather, Samuel Weinstein, who passed away that same month, taking the S to become Stephen. His mother's side of the family had roots in Pennsylvania, while his father's parents lived in Dallas. He grew up in Oak Cliff as the middle child, with an older brother, Paul, whom he admired as a teacher and protector, and a younger sister, Barbie. He remembered his grandmother's kitchen full of lima beans and chicken soup, and his grandfather shouting at televised wrestling matches. As a boy he had a secret and dangerous hobby of hunting snakes with a neighbor.
Tobolowsky attended Williamson School, Jeff Davis Elementary, and John W. Carpenter Elementary, and he vividly recalled many teachers, including Mattie Lee Smith and Miss Middleton, who helped him believe in himself again. He was in seventh grade at Carpenter when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and he remembered recognizing all the familiar places in the news coverage. His father, Dr. Dave Tobolowsky, was a tireless family doctor in Oak Cliff who made house calls, and his mother he described as the kindest person he ever knew. During a long illness around age thirteen he began reading plays, and at Justin F. Kimball High School he found his passions in debate and acting, winning honorable mention at a state competition.
He studied fine arts at SMU and then earned a graduate degree in drama at the University of Illinois before moving to Los Angeles. After years of struggle, a turning point came when agent Jeff Hunter signed him following a performance in Beth Henley's Miss Firecracker Contest in Buffalo. He went on to a long career, including memorable roles as Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day and in Memento, a 2002 Broadway run that brought a Tony nomination, and guest parts on shows like Law and Order. He married actress Ann Hearn, and they have two sons, Robert and William. Reflecting on his life, he urged the next generation to be less afraid and to have good manners and kindness.
Full Transcript
stephen 1951 dallas texas yes let's go back to when you're just a little boy what do you remember well from may 30th 1951 i remember nothing that was the day i was born one of the earliest memories i kind of have is that my grandfather on my mother's side samuel weinstein passed away that same month and that is kind of how i got my name stephen because his hebrew name was uh shmuel samuel and so i took the s and i became shlaim hess and i became stephen toboloski and my cousin simma who we call sima bema she lives in houston she was born at
around the same time and she got the familial s2 and became sema so that's sort of the earliest uh ideas i have about who i was now your grandfather they were in pennsylvania your grandparents my mother's grandparents were there and my dad's father and mother were here in dallas okay okay what did your grandparents do oh who knows my grandfather here in dallas my grandfather yelled at the television set in wrestling during wrestling he was he was convinced that there were crimes going on there unreported to authorities and we had no idea what he was saying but he was screaming in some sort of language
and i remember my uncle sylvan and my uncle sam who were sitting in the same room would say papa papa it's all phony it's all fake no one's getting hurt papa but apparently these remarks did not cut to the heart of grandfather's complaint and and as far as i remember he sat in that rocker and just yelled at the set it was beautif we had a we didn't go to shabbat uh saturday school we went to sunday school back then because we were reform we went to temple manuel and sundays after sunday school after temple manuel we went over and the beginning of the the
the afternoon festivities was i ran in to see grandmother and grandma was always in the kitchen manning the pots and pans and she always had one pot of lima beans going and one pot of chicken soup or something going the smells you could grab it was so delicious and grandmother always used to play a game with me she had these vanilla cookies she kept in a jar in the closet and i had to guess which hand she held the cookie in let's see she cheated she had a cookie in both hands siblings siblings my brother paul okay so he's just the one brother my sister
barbie oh i was in the middle and my brother paul you could not have had a better big brother he was a teacher to us he was a protector to us and he kind of created the narration of our early lives what was it that you and your brother and sister would do that you would die if your parents ever knew you were doing it well the main thing we did that my parents never knew we did now this is just me okay uh i was a secret member of the dangerous animals club which uh billy hart who lived across the alley in oak cliff
and me were kind of the only two active members charlie harp who lived down the alley also wanted to be a member and mark dombroski who lived down the road also said he wanted to be member but they really didn't come on many of the excursions billy hart and i made a list of every horrible deadly thing in the state of texas and there are tons of them rattlesnake copperhead coral's coral snake is deadly water moxen tarantula black widow spiders scorpions centipedes the worst so what i would do is i'd be home i go mom um i think i'm going to go out and play
with billy hart and she says okay honey have a good time bye and i go out and we would go out and we would hunt water moccasins and uh and it's one thing to hunt a water moxen it's a completely different thing when you catch a water moccasin and once we caught a water moccasin and i reached down into the grass to grab a baby water moccasin and i guess it crawled under its mother or something like that in a protective mechanism i didn't see the mother i reached down and i ended up picking up a four foot water moccasin not safely behind the head
as they do on mutual of omaha's wild kingdom i grabbed around the fat middle of her body and she looked back at me and opened her mouth with these huge fangs and was trying to bite at me and so i started started swinging the water moccasin around my head and crying and i said to billy hart what do i do now and billy hart says well not much because water moccasins will track you they'll track you they'll track you where you live uh i said but what if we run fastest doesn't matter she'll track you by scent it could take days but she'll find you
and so i ended up helicoptering the water moccasin back into creek and i ran home all the way crying ran and sat at the table mom gave me dinner and says did you have a good time playing with billy hart yeah mom yeah do you lock the doors at night because yes stephen yes thank goodness did the water officer never make it home never made it never made it i assume it was just one of those fabrications that seven-year-old boys make where'd you go to grammar school grammar school what is that word grammar do we even use that anymore i i went to kindergarten at
williamson school but i don't think we learned grammar the only thing i remember about williamson school was we had a cookie break and i think the rest of the time we just chased each other and then after that we went to jeff davis elementary school before it was barbara cartland elementary jeff davis it was in oakland that was through first through fourth grade and then after that i went to john w carpenter elementary school fifth through seventh grade do you remember any teachers did any teachers have a bearing on you oh i remember a ton of teachers i a lot there was maddie lee smith
who was my first grade teacher i was so proud to go to school in first grade i felt like i was a real grown-up and i made straight ones i don't know if they still have that designation here in dallas do you do the abcdf system well back in the old days we had one through four and one was good that meant you were making rapid progress four minute you were an absolute failure but in mattie lee smith's class i made straight ones and the one moment that of great difficulty that brought me shame was i had to go potty in her class and i
was embarrassed to raise my hand to say i had to go potty because the bathroom was in the cloak room at the back of the class and i ended up peeing in my pants which created an unscheduled trip of mom coming to school with an extra pair of pants but that was the only stain on my career in first grade i don't think you raised your hand from that point i uh i drank less water at school second grade left a mark on me miss cooper that left a mark on me that's too long of a story i think for this uh needless to say
i i didn't have a good time in miss cooper's class and from that point on i fell off the cliff of scholarship i was no longer a good student in second third grade miss murphy even worse fourth grade i felt like i'm going to be one of the guys who smoked cigarettes behind the wood shop i was not a good student at all and miraculously we had to switch schools to carpenter and in fifth grade and sixth grade with miss middleton she believed in me and i believed in her and i began to be a good student again wow so it's amazing you remember all
their names oh i do seventh grade miss gardner is when kennedy was shot and i still remember the amazing events of that day we were i was out on the playground and a boy i was playing with saying like i hope they kill him and i go why and they say because he's a nepotist and i thought wow a new insult i had never heard that word before and i was going what's a nepotist and he said well that's when you give jobs to people who are in your family and then i was thinking oh no my uncle jaime is a nepotist you know uncle
jaime had gave me a job working at em cans downtown when i was 14 years old here then some kids with the transistor radio were saying the president's been shot the president's been shot and i said to the kid next to me do you think he's going to be all right and he said oh sure somebody just did it to scare him like we lived in a world where we thought it was going to be okay to be shot we went up to our homeroom class and mr moffatt our principal announced that john kennedy president of the united states was shot and killed in dallas
12 around 12 o'clock in the afternoon and a girl in our class stood up and screamed and ran out of the classroom and nobody moved to stop her and mr mother continued with saying we'll now bow our heads for two minutes of silence in honor of president kennedy and you could still hear the girl screaming running down the hallway it was such a haunting moment that was seventh grade what was what was it like for your family when you came home that day i don't remember anything odd in our family except we sort of sat around the tv and watched the news and i remember
the next day they had the biggest headline i ever saw in my life and none of it was real until i mean it was not real at all until that second afternoon when they had it took a long time for news to get on tv i mean it they filmed it all and when they had pictures of all the places i knew there was the texas school book depository where my mom bought me school books and down the road was iam cans where my uncle jaime had his store right by the triple underpass and there was the texas theater where they caught lee harvey oswald
where i always went to kid matinees on saturdays so once i saw all of these places i knew it all came home tell me about your parents my dad dave toblowski doctor family doctor worked harder than anyone i ever knew and have ever known since dad was a family doctor in oak cliff and he made house calls which meant he was on call all the time uh middle of the night there was no time off for dad he was always and this was of course before the age of cell phones so he was always hanging around the phone or uh anywhere we went he had
to go to a pay phone find something that was close my mother probably in my life the kindest person i've ever met still to this day remarkable idiosyncratic nutty i i still think of things mom said and did and and it's just hilarious and hilarious the things she put up with my brother and i uh my brother used to invent games as i said that we used to play together one of the games he invented was indoor golf indoor golf and we played this with real golf balls and golf clubs well my mother was you know pleased the furniture pleased the walls i mean we
were hitting a three iron from the living room and and it was basically a putting game and uh when my sister was out of the house my uh my brother took my sister's favorite doll appropriately named dolly and put it out as a sand trap and i hit the ball into the sand trap and accidentally beheaded dolly with a pitching wedge just as my sister came in from playing outside and the screaming and crying and my mother bless her soul she got masking tape because she said it was flesh colored and she said barbie honey we're going to fix dolly right now and she got
dolly's head and started wrapping it up with masking tape and said see good as new and barbie saw dolly with her head kind of like this with the masking tape and began screaming again and mom mom was always there to make lemonade out of the lemons high school life oh dear where did you go to high school i went to high school justin f kimball uh i had a primary event in my life and that i got sick when i was around my 13th birthday and i was sick for like two years and i couldn't i couldn't do sports really i couldn't go to gym
and uh i hadn't it was great because i got notes that i get out of gym and got to go to study hall hey got to go to study it that was probably added to me becoming a better student and also missing jim was always good but i missed jim but it was in these study halls that i began reading plays more and i began being interested in other vin avenues for my energy and so when i went to high school i saw a couple seniors they were recruiting for the debating team and in our history class they did a practice debate after school and
i came and i saw that and i said this is what i want to do the rest of my life i want to be a professional debater uh it's not a really good job occupation uh so i began in high school studying debate and speech and from debate and speech our debate and speech teacher was the same as our drama teacher and someone dropped out of a school play in 10th grade called a different drummer was the play and because i was good on the debate team miss mary curtis uh now mary forrest uh said stephen would you like to be in our play and
that was kind of the first play i mean i always did plays as a kid but this was one of the formative plays that made me think maybe i wanted to be an actor and at the end of 10th grade i had the lead in the one act play which was in competition so it was a competition thing and we won our district and we went to state and at the state finals i won the award well it's not really an award is it uh i won honorable mention for for playing arpeggon a 60 year old man in the miser but you could say i
was kind of bitten with the acting bug so from then on in high school i concentrated on debate and acting in plays after high school you know turbulent time in the country vietnam war was raging you know what were you thinking what's going on in your head we were traditionalists us toboloski's we we believed in you know our government and our country and our war and everything was right and then vietnam happened and i knew if they called my number i would be dressing up like a woman crossing the canadian border just like that and mom said stephen you're not going to that war i
will take you to canada myself you will not go to that war i remember being a freshman in college and it was around that time either freshman or sophomore year in college i'm thinking maybe sophomore year where they were going to call off student deferments because student deferments weren't fair what ended up happening is all the people who didn't have the money to go to college even though college was not nearly as expensive as it is now but basically your poor farm boys and people who lived in the country ended up going to fight and people who could go study drama at smu got a
student to vermin well they were going to call that off and everyone was given a number and my number there were three batches of numbers whoever was in the first batch was going to vietnam who was ever in the third batch was not going to vietnam and whoever was in the second batch may or may not go to vietnam depending on how long the war went on i was at the top of the second batch and it's interesting we we always like to think of life as being composed of the decisions we but so much of life is composed of the times when no decision
can be made when either you don't have the information the power is not in your hands uh you are living at a particular time in history dot dot dot where you cannot be master of your life and this was me in college i was at this period where i didn't know if i was going to live through my college era if i would be shipped to vietnam and it was horrifying it was terrifying and i think it made me do what happened to a lot of young men my age i fell in love i went to the love i didn't go to the drug the
drug era you know a lot of people my age went to drugs to handle the not knowing what to do with their life i went to the love era and i fell in love with a girl who was a year younger than me in college and we were together for many years after that like 16 years we had a relationship but that was my drug of choice to escape the terror of indecision now smu is where you went to school yes when you graduate from smu what are you going to do probably be a bartender you're filled with all sorts of hopes and dreams when
you're getting a degree in the fine arts and then you realize that you are just walking a real long plank off of a pirate ship uh we had some people wonderful actors who ended up working in a shoe factory some who worked for their father's air conditioning company some sold real estate some sold socks i ended up going back to school that's another option i went to graduate school at the university of illinois in drama and made the plank on the pirate ship that much longer two more another year longer yeah where was the turning point for you boy where do you where do you
define a turning point it's where do you where do you find the beginning of a story i could say maybe the turning point where some of these are was was the fact that i couldn't get a job after smu and had to go to graduate and at graduate school i began to lose my hair which i thought was the end of me i thought i'm done i will never play a leading role in shakespeare again everything i studied for was done i'm not going to play romantic lead i'm 25 years old and losing my hair i didn't know that i was i was grooving my
life to be a character actor at this point once you lose your hair early you look the same for especially if you have glasses and lose your hair you can look the same for decades it was at graduate school that my girlfriend decided she didn't want to be an actress anymore she wanted to be a writer and she ended up winning the pulitzer prize in you know from her from our our detour to illinois so i thought maybe the best thing in life is that you don't know what you're doing i came out to los angeles after that couldn't get a job still and began
working in children's theater doing plays about sacagawea three times a day it was the death of a thousand cuts i didn't then i thought well maybe i'll be a rock and roll star except i couldn't sing or play an instrument it was it was it was torture there was there was nothing and i think i think a real turning point for me was i went to the studio arena theater in buffalo to do one of my girlfriend's plays the miss firecracker contest her name was beth henley so you left l.a to go all the way back to buffalo yeah and and at this point i
was massively depressed d e p r e s i mean i thought in fact i was so depressed people didn't want to be around me so the only thing i could do was get a job for my girlfriend i went back to buffalo and i did a delmont in the miss firecracker contest in the lead in our show catherine grote she felt that she wanted her agent to come see this play because it was so good her agent was a big shot jeff hunter who came from manhattan to buffalo to see the show he saw the show on a sunday matinee monday afternoon i get
a call from new york jeff hunter and says stephen this is jeff hunter you have an agent i said no sir he says you do now he says uh can you come into the city i said well monday's my day if he says come into the city next monday i'll take care of you i drive in from buffalo to manhattan which is not a short journey i went in to see him he sat down with in a matter of a few minutes he said do you need to play state do you need money do you need a job he set me up with about 18
interviews he called up his associates in los angeles is i have a new client stephen toboloski he's going to be your client now jeff hunter moved me from being an actor who was completely unknown to being in a good agency i had a mantra when i was a student and that was get a job get an agent get a good job get a good agent now i jumped to the head of the class i had a good agent now i was more likely to get a good job i was on broadway in 2002 and i was nominated for a tony award when people say they
were nominated for a tony award that means they didn't win that's what we say when we lost so i was nominated for a tony award and annie my wife and i went to the tony party and there was jeff hunter who i had not seen since i only saw him that one time in the office that one time in the office when he set me up with those auditions and then i was back in los angeles with all of his associates never saw him the rest of my life until 2002 so i did that play to give you a time frame i did the miss
firecracker contest in buffalo about 1981 didn't see jeff until 2002. that sounds like 21 years to me i saw jeff hanson no not jeff hunter jeff hanson's another important man in my life boy they're all named jeff wow i'm sensing a trend uh so i see jeff hunter at the tony party and i came up to him i said mr hunter you made such a difference to me in my uh i would not have had the career i had today nothing would have happened for me i wouldn't have been in this play if it hadn't been for you helping me out he goes who are you he had no idea who i was oh my gosh
so for him it was like manna from heaven an absolute stranger coming up and saying you mattered to me in my life so that was a big turning point jeff hunter uh got me a good agent and from then on i was being sent out on real jobs and tv in real jobs and movies what do you prefer television movies or stage oh well movies are the best for the lazy man they give you a lot more money and you work a lot less television is there's a lot more jobs in television so frequency of job opportunity is higher but they work you they work
you to you drop dead you know everybody wonders like why do people who are on like law and order svu they're doing that great job why do they quit why do all these people they quit because they're 18-hour days and you don't get a life and you don't get to see your family so tv is hard work but i love it because it's frequent there's nothing like the thrill of being in theater because it is live every night you and the audience and you could always go up in flames nothing is a given in theater and the risk and reward are enormous so often you
know you know people not in the industry we hear about actors playing a particular part and then their pitch and hold you know does that really happen yeah uh the the name of uh hollywood could also be shallow grave anytime you're successful in one thing they're going to try to run that thing into the ground and then they'll say well you're too identified with that role when i did a ned ryerson in groundhog day i got so many offers to play wacky characters and that kind of thing that was you have to look for a change of venue either by going to theater which is
where you have the greatest opportunity to play outside of your type or do something completely different and i had the opportunity to do something like memento which was completely different from groundhog day but it's very difficult in hollywood because they will pigeonhole you they are putting together packages and what would you rather do would you rather make 50 phone calls or three phone calls simple question people want to make three so if you're looking for a part of a guy who's kind of wacky who wears glasses and is bald you go like well do we want to have an open call or do we just
want to bring stephen toboloski in so peop it's inertia right i think that's the right term it's yeah now for actors being so recognizable as yourself what is that life like around people when you go out is that difficult or is or do you enjoy it when people are coming up to you and probably talking to you about groundhog's day yeah it's it happens daily uh most of the people who recognize me are generous and polite and kind and i don't have a lot of crazy people uh it's probably because of the ti i'm not a star but i could understand how it would get
kind of wacky because you do have plenty of people who come up to you while you're eating dinner and going hi i don't want to interrupt your dinner i saw you sitting over here and i just wanted to say and i'm going you're interrupting my dinner you know you just began by saying you don't and you have to deal with that uh but generally the people are extremely kind and extremely generous and they it's just something somewhere that i did that moved them or touched them and they want their picture with me or something so it's it's all good yeah yeah is there a part
that you wanted that you just didn't get there's a lot of vaporware in hollywood a lot of vaporware that happens and when i was younger that vaporware comes down like a fish hook like just this week a week ago woody allen called my manager and wanted me in his newest movie and my manager called me says who would you want to be in a movie and more than anyone else i go ah godzilla i don't know so how about woody woody allen yeah then the next day they call and say well woody allen is saying like would you mind this part is really small would
that insult you if the part is small i said are you kidding i would do it for free i would clean his apartment and and do do the film i would love to do it no matter how small it is and then two days ago i get the call woody allen says it's too insulting for you to do this part he's going to wait to use you in a part that that will show you off more so beginning middle end the hook appears it's there this time i didn't bite i just kind of went and thought oh well that's interesting and maybe i'll be in
a woody allen movie down the line maybe i won't but i'm not going to think about it but but it happens all the time um well is there a movie that we've all seen that you sit at home ago that was supposed to be my plan there there's something that you've all but i didn't go damn it should have been my part i should have gone damn if i had only known what this was i was brought in to audition as one of the policemen and the premiere of law order to play max the part that george zanza ended up playing right he was the
first cop in law and order right uh before lenny wright was was sure i'm trying to think was lenny briscoe in from the beginning i i but the part george zanza played and he only played it for like one season and then they killed him off because of the 18-hour days he wanted either more money or he wanted 15 hour days and they'd go absolutely not but when i went in on that audition i thought oh another cop show law and order oh god what haven't we seen this before and i had and i was reading the script not with a clear mind of thinking
like of really seeing what was on the page what uh and what was being created and uh i went in and i think i wasn't good on that audition but hey you know that was my one shot at it i i ended up having a guest part on law and order criminal intent and law and order svu and which were such extraordinarily delightful experiences and i went and so i do occasionally kick myself saying like oh stephen oh stephen if you had been the cop on law and order what a great part for you james gardner once said i saw him on tv he goes
you know i'm not into method acting i'm not into really he goes i go there and just read the lines let me say something about james garner you will notice that there is a long lineage of great actors who were in the military and you will also find a long lineage of great actors who were in athletics uh mark harmon uh the rock but but you have james garner you have clint eastwood you have lee marvin you have gene hackman uh all of these people were in the military and i i remember i asked on some of the shows when i was working with i
just worked with scott glenn who was i think in the marines and i asked scott i said why is it that there's so many great great actors like scott glenn from the military and he says stephen it's the discipline it's the discipline it's the same discipline an actor has to have we're used to getting up early we're used to working late we're used to making do we're used to dealing with problems and we very much like james garner would it was said we look at something and we just call it what it is this is this we don't make any fuss about it we just
say something what it is and there is a left aloneness that's brilliant in all those guys now i do think a lot of them especially like gene hackman they they all went to acting school too but they were all in the military and i think that that was a lot to do with the fact that they're all good-looking what was your favorite part that you've played well the favorite part had to be ned and groundhog day that was that was not only there's kind of a a formula in hollywood that you have to be good in a good movie that people saw if any one
of those three things is missing you chalk this one up as a disaster if good in a bad movie that everybody saw it's the end of your career if you're bad in a good movie that everybody thought it's the end of your career but in groundhog day i was good as ned it was a great movie and everybody saw it was fun to shoot harold ramos was brilliant it was wonderful working with him it was interesting working with bill murray he was one of the best actors i've ever worked with everybody thinks of him as a wild crazy guy i didn't find him wild and
crazy at all he was not fun loving but he was a fine fine actor that was certainly the most fun do you find your friends are mostly other actors have to be most most people you end up knowing or meeting are other actors but we don't have any friends we're friendless we we work too much well tell me about anna when did you meet anne there's a debate about that there is a debate about when i met my auntie uh one school of thought says that we met at awake and was in a movie the doll maker with an actress susan kingsley and i was
on broadway in the wake of jamie foster with actress susan kingsley susan was one of the most brilliant actresses brilliant spirits on earth 33 years old killed by a drunk driver mother of two i heard the news in new york when we had just closed our play and susan went back to kentucky i think where she lived on a tobacco farm we heard the news and went to a memorial service in new york and then our play was done and i flew back to los angeles and there was a memorial service in los angeles and that's where i ran into this girl that just i
thought was this cute hollywood actress not knowing that i was about to meet about the most interesting person in the world and that's one school of thought that that's where i met ann hearn the other school of thought was that i met ann hearn yelling at her at a box office uh working for uh the ensemble studio theater in los angeles that the box office person was telling me i couldn't get in without a ticket and i was saying i was the goddamn director and i get it without a ticket i don't need a ticket and i started yelling at this girl and made the
girl cry now one of them was either ann both could have been anne as it was uh ann ended up i'm gonna tell this story i'm gonna tell this story uh the audition story is that okay okay so um i was directing a play at a at a theater outside of los angeles uh south coast repertory and i just finished directing a play in new york where i worked with holly hunter and i just worked with amanda plummer and i was trying to get one of them to play the female lead in this play and they were unavailable and the people at the theater said
well you have to get this ann hearn in so ann came in and auditioned for this play and it was one of the most awful auditions i ever saw in my life i couldn't even believe it anne had a baseball cap she had over her head and she put her knees up to where i could just barely see part of her eyes and she was reading this monologue from play and she left afterwards and i said guys guys come on and they said you have to call her back that was a bad audition but she's great you have to call her back please she came
back called back terrible audition horrible audition i said i cannot cast this girl i cannot cast this girl they said you have to you you as a man and as a director you are going to want to cast this person she's a great actress i said what has she ever done and they said well she was in this play and and uh it was uh da no it was uh a life uh hugh leonard's a life and i saw that play and i said well who was she in a life and they mentioned the part i said oh well she was the best person in
the play she was brilliant i cast anne in the play not only was she a star the bedrock of the play she took moments that couldn't work and made them work she could she got every laugh in the play she broke people's heart in a second she was brilliant she was so good i was i was cast as tusenbach in three sisters for the opening of the los angeles theater center big deal and elizabeth mcgovern dropped out of the show the director and the producer of that came to see our production and they saw anne in the production and they wanted her to maybe replace
elizabeth mcgovern and ann went over and gave a terrible and i said she's fabulous and they saw her performance and they cast her as arena one of the absolute biggest parts in chekhov female she was a star she was a star she was a star she was like light on the stage the greatest actress i ever saw and and she's up there with susan kingsley and so i knew anne as an actress for a couple years after that and then one night i was at a party and it was too loud and it was too raucous and i went out to the tomato garden to
sit alone and ann walked out there too to sit alone and she said how are your tomatoes doing and a cloud moved from behind the and the moon beams came and hit her face a certain way and i'm thinking like damn she looks good i miss this i miss this and at that point i felt romantically inclined toward the lady who a couple years later would become my wife now you guys have two children together two children together your kids have a normal life no there is no such thing as normal uh unless it includes playing video games non-stop and having the same absolute doubts
and stresses about having no future that is normal so yeah in terms of normal that's normal our eldest son robert is majoring in organic chemistry he's getting his doctorate in organic chemistry and it's just saying what the hell am i doing i don't want to live in a lab and anne always one saying like if you don't like it now's the time to leave do what you need to do he's not leaving he's too good at it and our youngest son william is in molecular biology at a university of santa barbara university of california in santa barbara and he wants to be a doctor and
he's he's a lunatic he is uh he is our thrill seeker he was the kid who never could read because we think he had some kind of dyslexia and he was the kid who teacher said you're not going to make it and said you're never good enough you're always tried to hold him back he's the kid who's now making straight a's in honor's work in college i remember one of the great moments of william they told him he when he was in his middle school that he was didn't have the stuff to be an athlete he was kind of they kept him on the track
team to be kind of fodder cannon fodder and the group races where you need to have all the contestants you wanted william trained on his own and when he went to high school he broke every record they had at his school for two miles for three miles for everything except the sprints he was a long distance runner he won the award a student scholar athlete of his high school and he was applying to colleges and the counselor is like one of the grandest moments of my life where i went to pick him up at school and he applied for colleges and the counselors saying like
you you don't have the the necessary requirements to get in these schools you'll never get in these schools and as we're leaving the office william turned and said it's not your job to tell me what i can't do people have told me my whole life this is what i can't do and this is what i can't do your job is to do what i tell you to do and your job now is to apply to these colleges if i don't get in i don't get in but that's not your job and william got in to the university of california at santa barbara where and he
runs a four and a half minute mile and he has instead of going to his graduation in high school he climbed to the base camp of everest and instead of going taking winter vacation he went to honduras and built a children's hospital and worked on latrines for villages in the jungle and another vacation he went to israel with a group there with birthright israel i've never seen anyone so driven except me he is driven to achievement and my older son robert is just brilliant he just fell into it he's just brilliant your lifetime greatest invention that came along something what came along that you went
how did i ever get along without this well the greatest invention was before my life which is indoor plumbing but in my life the greatest invention probably god i have to say first of all the internet that is that's been a key for for so much when i think what it used to be doing research on something and what it is now of course now there's just all sorts of fibs and fabrications that you have to clear through on the internet but the world is so much smaller because of the internet it's made a huge difference another another thing that i'm beholden to was not
in my lifetime was i tip my hat to antibiotics been vital in my particular life i've needed antibiotics quite often open heart surgery saved my life uh that was an important uh development having uh the assembly line version of open heart surgery instead of like the medieval version of open heart surgery um that's probably the inventions that come to my life that were so vital was the happiest time in your life right now is the number one that comes up because i'm living with an amazing person uh i feel so blessed that i got to spend so much time with ann and that was a
great happy time in my life happy time with the birth of my two children it's a cliche but it's cliche because it's true when those little babies cry you do feel it's happy yeah now in your lifetime you've lived through so many momentous occasions you touched on the kennedy assassination the turbulent 60s of course the moon landing in 69 something good martin luther king assassination was there something else in your life that really stood out that you said oh my gosh i know exactly where i was the day that happened god there's so many days like that in my life historical days i was in
memphis when martin luther king was assassinated i was there for the riots when he assassinated he was assassinated it was a horrible day i remember where i was there's so many days in my life i remember where i was but they're not historical days as i've gotten older i'll mention this when i was younger when i was in my 20s i thought all those historical days mattered and the days of my life were less significant as i've gotten older in my 60s now i think the days of my life are significant and i see the passing players as the ones who are on the national
stage the stars the politicians the generals they're the nothings and and the like four days ago in los angeles a wild flower bloomed in my backyard that i had not seen since i was a child in oak cliff well i saw it one other time in dallas but it was only time i saw it was in dallas when i was a boy and i picked that flower to be a bouquet for my when i was five and it grew up in my backyard in in los angeles and i was so extraordinarily happy that it tied together that moment when i was five when i first
saw it when i was 40 when i saw that flower for the second time and now when i saw it for the third time those moments have grown in importance whereas what the people in washington do i could care less what advice do you have for the next generation right now my mantra and it's impossible but my mantra for the next generation is twofold be less afraid because the things you're afraid of will work themselves out the things that you think are failures are where you're going to find your greatest gifts like me going to illinois i thought that a huge failure me losing my
hair i thought it was the end of my life turned out to be the greatest blessing we we are very poor uh indicators of where blessing and curse are so don't be so afraid the things that are that feel like bad times could actually be your good times and the other mantra is have manners have good manners uh a quotation that my wife found just recently from george eliot and adam bead when death the great reconciler comes we don't regret our moments of kindness we regret our moments of harshness and be kind when you can because uh there is no half-life on regret it goes
on and on and on so be as kind as you can behave have manners if you can those two things thanks for doing this today my pleasure you