LUCKY BREAK CAN TAKE TIME
Screen stars recall their lives before basking in the Hollywood spotlight
Some actors who became “overnight” movie successes after years of multiple disappointments never forgot their struggles.
Take Harrison Ford: He’s reprising his role as Han Solo in the anticipated Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens in theatres in December. But Ford had anything but stars in his eyes when he first arrived in Hollywood.
His film debut came unceremoniously with his cameo playing a bellhop in 1966’ s forgettable Dead Heat on a Merry- Go- Round. That was 11 years before Solo and Star Wars changed everything for him.
“Yeah, I was an overnight success,” said Ford last year. “It’s surreal. The only ambition I ever had was committing to be an actor and live my life, and I have.”
Before the series Alias introduced Jennifer Garner to fans in 2001, she was scrambling. The year before the Alias introduction, Garner played one of the girlfriends in Dude, Where’s My Car? It was a job she felt fortunate to land.
“I was pretty good at not getting something and just going on with my day,” Garner recalled. “I didn’t get something almost every day, so it’s a good thing I had some practice.”
She vividly remembers missing out on a role in Aaron Sorkin’s TV series The West Wing. Despite her many accomplishments now, it continues to bother her.
“I can think of that and I still cringe,” she said. “The West Wing role came and then went, and I just couldn’t quite get over it. Actually, ( Sorkin) wrote me a letter after that, which was really sweet.”
How did she eventually overcome the disappointment?
“You lick your wounds and you get back in there,” Garner said. “What else can you do?”
On the other hand, Judi Dench was established as a British thespian on stage when she landed the film role of Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown 18 years ago.
“I was at the Old Vic from 1957,” Dench said. “I did so much Shakespeare and classical plays and that’s really what I knew.”
Mrs. Brown changed that for Dench in an incredibly positive way, but she never expected that it would.
“Mrs. Brown was filmed in 21 days to be shown on television at Easter time,” she recalled. Instead, “Harvey ( Weinstein) at Miramax saw it and said, ‘ Let’s put it on the big screen.’”
“Harvey and Mrs. Brown gave me a movie career,” said Dench, who earned her first of seven Academy Award nominations with the Mrs. Brown portrayal ( and one win for her Elizabeth I portrayal in Shakespeare in Love).
Seven Oscar nods continues to stand as a record by an actress over the age of 60.
Certainly, Hugh Jackman understood his Wolverine portrayal in X- Men could either be the glorious beginning or the abrupt end to a film career.
The pressure was on — but he had been through worse.
Much earlier in his career, the Aussie had been booked to sing the Australian national anthem in front of 100,000 Australian and New Zealand rugby fans at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
“I got introduced as star of stage and screen, and I’d been in one TV show and one musical at the time,” he said. “I got resoundingly booed by 30,000 New Zealanders before I started.
“I always felt like whatever you throw at me it was not going to be as bad as that.”
During The Godfather pre- production phase, Al Pacino had mixed feelings about his potential break playing Michael Corleone. Director Francis Ford Coppola wanted him for the part. The studio bosses didn’t. “Francis wanted me for another movie because he saw me on the New York stage and he wanted to use me in a picture but it never got made,” Pacino said.
“We connected from that point on and then he saw me in that ( Godfather) part, and nobody could shake him from it, although it turned out everybody wanted somebody else, including me at one point.”
In the end, a stubborn Coppola won out, “and it turned out to be extremely fortuitous and lucky for me.”
Sean Penn can thank his brother Chris ( who died in 2006) and his Brat Pack friends Charlie Sheen, brother Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe for getting him hooked on movies.
That burgeoning interest would eventually lead to his breakout role as surfer dude Jeff Spicoli in 1982’ s Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
“I knew those kids ( Sheen, Estevez and Lowe) were in the neighbourhood,” said Penn. “And then they started working with my younger brother on Super 8 films, and I got involved in that, and I really was fascinated by it.”
Initially, he decided on acting rather than directing. “It was not imaginable to me that there was anyone I could go to and say give me millions of dollars as the director, so that moved me into acting.”
Before Bill Nighy’s memorable portrayal of washed- up rocker Billy Mack in 2003’ s Love Actually, he was a solid performer in British theatre and TV for more than 20 years.
“I had a familiar English career which was a balance between those two,” Nighy said.
The Love Actually part led to more lucrative roles such as playing Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean films Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End.
“But I don’t think of it in that way as a big break,” Nighy said of his Love Actually part.
“It’s obviously a landmark in my life, and it did change the way I would do work and, yes, the money went up.
“I did the other suffer- for- my- art thing throughout large parts of my life without any money and so why not do it with?”