Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 20, 1993 TAG: 9311220265
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LYNN ELBER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
But even a warning from Sean Connery didn't deter him as Loggia prepared to head to Catemaco, in the Mexican rain forest, to film the CBS movie ``Nurses on the Line: The Crash of Flight 7.''
``Before I started the film I was in Monte Carlo for a tennis and golf tournament, and Connery was there and I mentioned Catemaco. Slowly, he turned, with this fearsome face, and said, `Catemaco?'
``He shot `Medicine Man' down there. He said, `For openers, don't bring your wife.'''
There were, in fact, spiders, lizards and ``a strange sort of kamikaze beelike kind of thing,'' Loggia said.
There also was an armed guard posted outside his bungalow each night, presumably because of the threat of crime, he says.
Despite that, Loggia says, ``it was a wonderful experience, because very often these punishing locations make you grow.''
Besides, he adds, smiling: ``When you're from the Lower East Side of New York, you know how to side step trouble.''
In ``Nurses on the Line,'' airing at 9 p.m. EST Tuesday (on WDBJ-Channel 7), a white-bearded Loggia - ``I look like Schweitzer himself'' - plays a veteran physician who heads a medical outreach effort in a jungle village.
When one of the group's three planes crashes en route, team members are thrust into a life-and-death medical nightmare.
Lindsay Wagner, playing a recently divorced woman searching for a new life, co-stars in the fact-based movie, along with David Clennon.
Loggia heeded Connery's advice not to take along his wife, Audrey, to Mexico last July, and he paid for it.
``I'm taking a lot of flak,'' he says, laughing. ``There's a bevy of beautiful nurses in the film, and I came home with all these pictures of us, arms around each other, embracing. ... It looks like Club Med.''
Audrey, his wife of more than 20 years, did accompany him to Brisbane, Australia, where he filmed an NBC movie last spring that also is fact-based and with an aviation angle: ``Mercy Mission: The Flight of 771.''
Loggia plays a commercial airline captain who diverts his plane to search for the pilot of a small aircraft (Scott Bakula) lost near Pago Pago in American Samoa at Christmastime.
Most recently, Loggia took a detour to Del Rio, Texas, to play the role of an ``old codger bandit'' in a western movie, ``Bad Girls,'' starring Madeline Stowe, Andie McDowell and Mary Stuart Masterson.
His next project, the movie ``I Love Trouble'' with Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts, will allow him some at home time in Los Angeles.
Loggia's career seems to have gone smoothly since he landed the first acting job he tried for, a role in a 1953 TV play starring Hume Cronyn. Cronyn, Loggia recalls, suggested he develop his talent with famed acting coach Stella Adler.
``She took a shine to me,'' Loggia recalls.
He went on to appear in plays, including such classics as ``The Three Sisters'' in London, in films and on television. After his TV series ``T.H.E. Cat'' ended in 1967, Loggia says he ``kind of went on hiatus.''
A 1973 appearance in a New York stage production of ``In the Boom Boom Room'' helped get him back on track, but he found himself paying his acting dues again in Los Angeles with a series of TV guest roles.
``I played every episodic heavy you could imagine. . . .
I was overexposed and underpaid,'' Loggia says.
Then came the film ``An Officer and a Gentleman'' in 1980 ``and I crossed the line into being a character actor,'' he says.
The 1980s turned out to be ``an incredible decade,'' Loggia says, capped by his Oscar nomination as best supporting actor for the 1985 film ``Jagged Edge.''
``That kicked the income way up, and it just put me on a roll,'' he says.
He feels secure enough to believe he's past the rough spots in his acting career.
``I've been at this now for over 40 years, and somebody has to play grandpa.''
by CNB