Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 1, 1994 TAG: 9401010211
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: JACKIE HYMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. LENGTH: Medium
"I don't think that there can be a more fascinating way to spend your life and I don't think there can be a more humiliating way to spend your days," said the former star of the action series "Matrix."
"Most people don't make a living off selling their emotional wares, but that's what an artist does."
In addition to the humiliations and disappointments that are the usual actor's lot, Mancuso suffered an unexpected shock in 1989, just when he appeared to be on the fast track to stardom after making his own series, "Stingray," for NBC.
He learned that his very own network was airing a new series called "Mancuso, FBI." The hero's name was Nick Mancuso, but the character was played by Robert Loggia.
"That was very upsetting to me. It was the bizarrest damn thing," Mancuso said. "NBC decided to use my name. There was nothing I could do about it.
"The only way I could have done it was to take them to court and it would have been so expensive and such a hassle that I decided not to do it."
Fortunately for Mancuso, the series was short-lived, but that didn't soften the blow.
"To this day, people still think I'm that guy," he said. "People still get confused. After 26 years of work, people still think I'm that guy."
Audiences can see the real Nick Mancuso playing a father seeking custody of his son because of his ex-wife's mental illness in "Aaron," which is based on a true story. The movie features Joanna Gleason and Keegan MacIntosh.
Coincidentally, Mancuso and Baxter made a previous television movie, "Burning Bridges," in which they played a couple who are divorcing. In that film, the wife became distraught and had to be hospitalized.
"Now it's three years later and she's gone completely off the deep end," Mancuso joked over coffee at The Colloquy, a Beverly Hills cafe where he often participates in poetry readings.
Mancuso is a well-traveled, multilingual man who paints and writes poetry. His conversation is peppered with references to Henry Miller, Bertolt Brecht and even the letters of Michelangelo, which dealt with the day-to-day problems of farming and making sculptures.
"He was concerned with calluses. He was concerned with his feet hurting," Mancuso said. "That's always the case, isn't it?"
The actor and his family moved from southern Italy to Toronto after World War II, when Mancuso was 6.
"We came in steerage with my mother, my sister and myself," he said. "Coming to Canada in those years was like going to a Martian colony.
"I think in some ways that untimely ripping from the womb was pretty instrumental in leading me to the kind of work I'm doing, writing and acting and painting. . . . I think the desire to express became a survival tactic on my part".
"Plus you're always getting chased around and beaten up by other kids. You have to create an interior landscape to live in."
After acting at Canada's Stratford Festival and the Toronto Free Theater, Mancuso starred in a number of films and won a Genie Award (Canada's Academy Award) for "Ticket to Heaven."
He has strong feelings about the purpose of being an actor.
"The original function of the theater was very clear," he said. "It was set up to basically purge the community, the people of their feelings of terror. It was to . . . give them deeper compassion for their fellow human being. It was a religious act."
"Acting is a spiritual pursuit because it uses the entire human being," he added. "You're not a canvas. You're not a robotic system that your mind is going to control. Most people think of acting as an act of the will but that's a very small part of it."
When handed a mediocre script, he said, "The challenge becomes one of seeing if you can infuse it with something."
"To me, the ideal role is always the next one. Whatever comes up next."
by CNB