The nine lives of Christopher Walken, movie star and feline fan
I’ve never been one for making opportunities. Maybe I don’t have the imagination, or maybe I’m a little lazy. I usually wait to see something happening, and then I’m pretty good at going after it.
Christopher Walken likes to watch.
If that gives you the willies, you’re probably thinking of the Oscar-winning actor’s more
unsettling roles—he’s played sadists, murderers, madmen, mobsters, mercenaries, psychopaths, evil masterminds and extremely messedup Vietnam vets in the course of a career that began in the early 1950s.
“I have played a lot of villains,” he admits.
But what Walken likes to watch is just outside the windows of his home in rural Connecticut, on the cusp of a nature preserve, where he’s lived with his wife, Georgianne, a Hollywood casting director, for nearly 40 years.
“There were four deer in the driveway this morning,” he says. “There were turkeys here yesterday. My wife saw a snake in the driveway the other day. Hummingbirds come every day almost to the minute. They come right up the window and stare at me. It’s almost as though they know I’m there.
“I was born in the city and grew up in Manhattan. But when I got the chance, I moved out to a nice, quiet, green place.”
Now, that doesn’t sound so chilling and creepy, does it?
His Nine Lives
“My background is really in musical theater,” Walken says. “I did a lot of musicals when I was young. I got a job in a play, and then I got a movie, kind of accidentally, and my first parts where I got noticed were things like The Deer Hunter and
Annie Hall, where I played troubled people, suicidal sometimes. I think
I kind of got something going on there.”
Hollywood kept calling on Walken to do his “crazy” thing, his psycho, troubled, scary, creepy bit. And it kind of stuck throughout his career, which started off with TV roles as a child extra and later gueststarring parts on Hawaii Five-O and Kojak, but now includes roles in nearly 110 movies, including Heaven’s Gate, The Dead Zone, At Close Range, King of New York, Batman Returns, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Suicide Kings, Sleepy Hollow, Catch Me If You Can, Hairspray, Eddie the
Eagle—and playing Captain Hook on live TV. And if you’re a Saturday
Night Live fan, you know he’s a member of the “Five-Timers Club,” an elite group of performers who’ve hosted five times or more.
Walken gets to keep things light in his latest film, the family-friendly comedy Nine Lives, opening Aug. 5. He plays Felix, the quirky owner of a magical pet shop where Tom, a
workaholic, cat-hating jerk of a dad (Kevin Spacey), comes to buy his daughter a kitty as a birthday present. Felix decides Tom needs a valuable lesson about priorities—so he hocuspocuses him to spend most of the movie “inside” the body of Mr. Fuzzypants, the birthday cat, until Tom can convince his wife ( Jennifer Garner) and kids he’s learned how to be the husband and dad they deserve. Cat Fancier
Nine Lives wasn’t Walken’s first foray with acting cats. Another feline—a really big one named Sheba—had that honor. Walken, now 73, was just 16 when he answered an ad to be a teenage lion trainer for a one-ring circus in upstate New York.
Sheba the lioness was very sweet, he says. “She’d walk around and bump against your leg, just like a nice old cat,” he says. “I spent the summer doing that, every day for probably about four months. The ringmaster had other cats that he used in his act, but he’d send them all out, then I’d come in with this old girl and wave my whip and she’d sit up on her back legs and roll over and do stuff. When we weren’t performing, I used to hang out with her and pet her.”
He didn’t think much about it then, but now his views have changed about circuses, animal acts and zoos. “As I get older, I’m very much against zoos and, frankly, animals in captivity,” he says. “Especially big, wild animals. I wish there wasn’t any such thing as ‘animal acts.’ I wish there wasn’t any such thing as zoos.”
He’s also a proponent of pet adoption. He recently took part in the Best Friends Animal Society’s celebrity photo campaign. “It’s for animal protection and helping animals, which is always a good cause,” he says.
Walken adopted his own feral black-and-white “tuxedo cat” after she showed up on his porch one day—with her babies. “Now I have this basically wild cat that likes to be outside, but she’s friendly. When it gets cold, she comes in.”
He calls her simply “the Cat.” And he and Georgianne, who have no children, have always considered their cats as their kids. “I think a lot of people are like that with their pets,” he says. A Wonderful Life “I had a wonderful childhood,” Walken says. “Everything: food, house. But my parents didn’t.” His
father, Paul, emigrated from Germany and opened up a bakery in Queens. Rosalie, his mother, came from Scotland. “My parents really did have a hard time where they came from, and they came here and they made this great life. That’s what America is, always and still,” he says.
“I believe people should be able to go and make their lives as they wish,” he says. “America certainly has always been that for a lot of people. As a kid, I grew up with all sorts of people, different kinds of people. To me, that’s the way it ought to be. Of course, we live in a time of dangerous things. There’s got to be a way around that without making it difficult for everybody.”
His father died in 2001, and his mother, who lived to be 103, died in 2010. If it’s in his genes to live another three decades, he says he’ll keep working, and—like a cat—be waiting to see what’s coming his way. “I’ve never been one for making opportunities. Maybe I don’t have the imagination, or maybe I’m a little lazy. I usually wait to see something happening, and then I’m pretty good at going after it.” And he’s pretty good—no,
very good—with cats. “My cats are extremely well taken care of,” he says. “Frankly, if there’s such a thing as reincarnation, it would be wonderful to come back as my cat: Living where it lives, being taken care of by me and my wife—I’m not sure you could do better than that.”