‘Mean’ mentor led Denis O’Hare to acting career
BEVERLY HILLS, California — Our best-laid plans often go awry. And for actor Denis O’Hare, it was a good thing. The man who has played everyone from a presiding judge to a vampire will be shining a light on one of America’s darkest heroes when he stars as Edgar Allen Poe on PBS’s American Masters on Monday.
In Edgar Allen Poe: Buried Alive, O’Hare reveals the conflicted life of the literary icon who wrote more than 100 stories and poems and was best known for his Gothic horror tales.
O’Hare himself was conflicted when at 17, he decided to become a priest. “I was very serious about it,” he says. “I went to a Catholic high school and [there were] two brothers, one, Brother Smith and one, Brother Haas. And I remember Brother Smith was a great champion of mine, and we would talk. Brother Haas I didn’t like, and he didn’t like me.
“But I was going to apply to be a brother with the Christian Brothers of Ireland, and Brother Haas said: ‘If you apply, I will block you,’ ” recalls O’Hare.
“I thought it was the meanest thing I’d ever heard in my life. He said: ‘You don’t have a vocation.’ He didn’t explain himself. But he was right. I didn’t have a vocation. I wanted to be a brother or a priest because I wanted to be left alone. I wanted to be able to be left alone to sit quietly, play the organ, think about things. That’s not why you become a priest or a brother. You do it to serve other people.”
He has been serving other people ever since, but in a way he hadn’t planned.
“Oddly enough, my motivation now would be correct, because what I look for in life is to serve other people, to be part of a community,” he says.
“But then, that’s not where my head was at. It doesn’t help that I’m an atheist; I’m also gay. That could help or hurt, depending on how you look at it. But in so many ways, he did me a favour.
“Because he didn’t like me, he told me the truth and steered me correctly.”
While still a teenager, O’Hare attended summer school at an arts high school in his native Michigan. There, he was exposed to drama guru Stanislavski’s teachings. “The idea of the Russian method … I fell in love with that,” he says.
The following year, he applied to only two colleges: the University of Michigan to train as an opera singer and Northwestern to become an actor.
“I was accepted to both, but chose Northwestern because it was six hours away as opposed to a half-hour away. When you’re 18, you feel you need to get away from your parents.”
The fourth of five kids, O’Hare was doing OK until 2008, when tragedy struck on several fronts. His boyfriend died of AIDS. “My mother died in 2008. My sister killed herself in 2010. My favourite uncle died in 2008. My husband’s father died in 2008. So 2008 was a lot of death,” he says.
“You never get over it — you just move on. Life is for the living. so you have to stay alive. My sister killed herself, and when you know somebody who killed themselves, you realize that they didn’t want to be alive.
“I want to be alive till I’m 95 or something. I have a lot to do.”
One of the things he has to do is be a parent for the first time.
He and husband Hugo Redwood, with whom he’s been together 17 years, have a six-yearold son, Declan.
“It took us three years to adopt him. We had another child in our care before Declan, who was five weeks premature and was five pounds. We took that boy to nine pounds in a month. We really got him healthy, but weren’t able to keep him,” he says.