Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 26, 1993 TAG: 9303260352
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HILLEL ITALIE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
THIS MOVIE ACTOR IS SILVER-TONGUED
Ron Silver leans forward, flashes a friendly smile and offers music to an interviewer's ear."I like to talk. I like to provoke discussion. I like to make myself think and make people think. I like to give and take. I like to have challenges. I do everything to excess sometimes. I like eating. I like drinking. I like to read. I love history. I like conversation."
And he can talk about anything, from Western spirituality to Alfred Hitchcock to his son's Bar Mitzvah. You hear references to ancient Egypt, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Silver starts with a little politics.
"In the '60s, you had people who believed in government being represented by the people, and so I think maybe that's coming to some sort of fruition right now. I don't mind paying more taxes. I'm just trying to be helpful. I'm very happy to have a president thinking like that."
Next, acting and politics.
"We do have a lot of time and when you have a lot of time you either get into trouble or you do things other people might like to do, but they simply don't have the time. If I were worried about working 5 or 6 days a week, like my parents were, I wouldn't have the luxury of reading so many journals and taking trips to Washington or reading so many books about what's going on."
Then, there's his latest movie.
When Silver looks to the ceiling and says with a sigh, "Those were the days," he's not talking about being a kid on Manhattan's Lower East Side or traveling around the world during the 1960s. He's talking about "Married to It," which opens today.
Completed three years ago, the film was held back from theaters because of financial problems at Orion Pictures. Since then, Michael Milken has gone to jail, a war has been fought in the Persian Gulf and a man younger than Silver has been elected president.
"Now that I'm about to retire, you want me to reminisce about some of my earlier work?" the 46-year-old actor, whose beard is a little grayer than it was in the film, said with a laugh.
"Coming out of the Reagan-Bush years and coming into the Clinton '90s, I wonder if this film is timebound to a certain era. You come into certain films and say, `God, '70s.' And I wonder if this is a Bush-era film. I just wonder if it's in touch with the Zeitgeist as we feel today."
"Married to It" tells the story of marriage between aging hippies (Beau Bridges and Stockard Channing), youthful yuppies (Mary Stuart Masterson and Robert Sean Leonard) and an interfaith couple (Silver and Cybill Shepherd).
Each relationship is troubled. The passion seems to have died between Bridges and Channing. Silver and Shepherd face class and religious differences, as well as tension with Silver's teen-age daughter from a previous marriage. Accusations against Leonard of financial wrongdoing threaten his bond with Masterson.
Silver's character, Leo Rothenberg, admittedly isn't much of a stretch for the actor. Like Silver, he's a Jewish native New Yorker from a working-class background. Leo's also an idealist, a little too emotional at times, but always hoping for the best.
The son of a garment-industry worker, Silver has a master's degree in Chinese history, was recruited as a CIA apprentice and later spent a few days in a Leningrad jail for bringing Chinese material into the Soviet Union.
That just brings him to 1969. He has since been on the TV programs "Rhoda" and "The Mac Davis Show," won a Tony Award in 1988 for his performance in David Mamet's "Speed-the-Plow" and is president of both the Actor's Equity Association and of the Creative Coalition, a political organization.
"Tomorrow is always going to be better than yesterday" is his motto, and he's not just saying that because a Democrat finally made it to the White House. Faith - political, professional and spiritual - links the activist to the actor to the suburbanite with a wife and two kids in Scarsdale, N.Y. He seems to draw on a lay historian's sense of roots, but also a baby boomer's sense of possibility.
"What was nice about the '60s and '70s was that the road was endlessly reinventable," he said. "You extended that lack of commitment as long as you possibly could. You just hung out for 2, 3 years, went to India for a year and a half. You'd smoke a little dope, I don't know, play guitar. There were some very good byproducts of that kind of leisure and that kind of idealism."