Daniel J. Travanti, who is currently making his Off-Broadway debut in The Last Word…, is a complex man with many conflicting emotions. He is loaded with personal charm. Yet his anger is palpable. It enrages him, for example, that he has been unable to break out of the TV mold in which he's been typecast and into other media. He has never performed on Broadway or been tapped for feature films of consequence. "I've never been asked," he says. "And I don't know why."
In light of his stellar television career—and his impressive roster of regional theatre credits—it is odd. But then again, maybe not. As he says, "Careers are rough. I'm still asked to audition, and not too long ago a casting director asked me for a reel of my work." In his dressing room between performances, he shakes his head in astonishment.
After all, from 1981 to 1987, the 66-year-old native of Kenosha, Wis., was Capt. Frank Furillo on NBC's groundbreaking Hill Street Blues, garnering critical and popular acclaim for his efforts and walking off with two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe. He received five Emmy nominations for his work on the show and another for the TV movie Adam. And there was no shortage of praise for his performances in the TV flicks Murrow and A Case of Libel.
Consider his range: Travanti's Furillo was the burdened captain trying to keep a chaotic precinct in order. In Adam he played John Walsh, the tormented father of a kidnapped and murdered son. Murrow saw him as the crusading newsman Edward R. Murrow nearly two decades before George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. In A Case of Libel, he was a sanctimonious, Red-baiting columnist sued for libel. Talk about contrasting roles: Murrow fought against the blacklist, while Boyd Bendix, Travanti's alter ego in A Case of Libel, was a gung-ho advocate.
Travanti's stage credits also reveal an impressive acting spectrum—from the grandiose and buffoonish Con Melody in A Touch of the Poet (at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., and Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.) to the morally twisted Joe Keller in All My Sons (at the Old Globe in San Diego) to the 18th-century French libertine Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (at London's Ambassadors Theatre).
Travanti does not regret the career choices he has made, but he wonders if he might be further ahead had he conducted himself differently. He admits he's a smart aleck and difficult, maybe even self-sabotaging. Personal actions play their role in a career and a life, he says, though he argues that the concept of free will is overrated. "I'm a man of strong opinions and intellect, and I scare people," he says. "And I'm not going to pretend I want to be in a project if it doesn't showcase my abilities." The script must also meet certain standards: "It has to have resonance, celebrate life, and be highly entertaining."
The Last Word… satisfies all his needs. This comic drama by Oren Safdie is about two playwrights, one at the end of his career and one at the beginning. Henry Grunwald (Travanti), a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Vienna, is a failed playwright going blind. Len Artz (Adam Green) is a young dramatist who hopes to be Grunwald's assistant. While Henry is conservative in his aesthetics and politics, Len is just the opposite, and the two writers clash over virtually everything.
"I don't think I'd want to appear in either playwright's work," Travanti says. "Neither is very good. But I'd probably enjoy working more with Len because he's young and impressionable…. Yes, he is dogmatic, but he can be altered. The old guy is rigid, not unlike a Eugene O'Neill character—a man who's able to live on because of his delusions. I don't think he's a loser. He's not turning over and playing dead. He's never stopped writing. Quitters are losers."
Travanti is no quitter either. From the beginning he's had large ambitions, and that hasn't changed. "When I was growing up, I wanted three things: to make Phi Beta Kappa, to be an all-American athlete, and win an Academy Award. Well, I've done two of those, but I haven't won an Academy Award. Two Emmys don't count. I've always wanted to be a sought-after actor. I get sterling reviews; still nothing. It's easy to implode."
His frustrated ambitions have taken their toll. A recovering alcoholic (though long sober, not unlike Furillo), Travanti describes himself as "an egomaniac with an inferiority complex…. I'm afraid of everything but want it all…. My biggest fear is not having a chance. Once I have a chance, I'll deliver." But "wanting is fever and tyranny," he adds.
When Travanti read the pilot for Hill Street Blues, he turned it down precisely because "it was brilliant and complex": He wanted it too much. Those emotional contradictions have put him in a bind on more than one occasion, resulting in his striding into auditions with the attitude that "I don't have to prove anything or even get the part," he says. "I'm there to entertain the people who are auditioning me and make them wonder who that masked man is."
Travanti has always been a bit of an anomaly, especially to his supportive but conventional blue-collar family. Both parents were Italian immigrants, his father a factory worker. Among five kids, Travanti was the only terrific student, as well as an athlete and gifted actor.
He earned full scholarships to Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth, but because his father was so "tightfisted, convinced he'd still have to spend a lot of money," Travanti says, "I ended up at the University of Wisconsin in Madison," to which he earned a General Motors Scholarship. He graduated in three years with several majors and also found time to act in theatres around town, attending open auditions and repeatedly landing the leads.
Experience, not classrooms, shaped Travanti's acting. "I don't believe in acting or playwriting majors," he says. "I say go to college to furnish your hungry and thirsty mind. Learn and explore, above all. Study language, language, and language; if you're going to be an actor, that's your tool and your toy." At 33 and a working actor, he returned to school, to Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, to earn a master's degree in English literature.
Immediately after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Travanti attended the Yale School of Drama, but dropped out after one year. "It was moribund," he says. "Later, when Robert Brustein took over, it changed. But when I was there, if you finished Yale School of Drama, you were finished as an actor."
By the early '60s, Travanti was pounding the pavement in New York, but within short order he relocated to Los Angeles "for personal reasons," he says without elaborating. "I got guest shots here and there. But I resisted being in L.A. I resisted accepting shallow material. I always felt I was destined for other things. I watched the actors around me. Some resisted and left. Others became very comfortable and very sad. I was there for 29 years."
Travanti's stint on Hill Street Blues was clearly a career high point. Not that he's chomping at the bit to do another series. "It really depends," he says. "I don't need the money, and I'm no longer willing to audition for a series."
Over the years, Travanti has become less obsessed with stardom. Acting will always be his top priority, but he has other interests now. Today he is a committed environmentalist and vegetarian—"I call myself a planetarian"—and lives far from the hurly-burly of Hollywood in Lake Forest, Ill., with three cats and two dogs. All of them were abandoned or injured, and he misses them.
But The Last Word… comes first. "When I'm in a play, my life is all about the play. Everything gets slotted in around it," he says. "I need total concentration and extra rest. Just like an athlete, I'll stay in bed for 12 hours."
Roles he would love to tackle include Shylock, Lear, and Willy Loman—preferably on Broadway. "I don't think that'll happen, unless they had the good sense and taste to hire me," he says. "And then they'd be lucky to get me."
"The Last Word…" runs through March 11 at the Theatre at St. Clement's, 423 W. 46th St., New York. (212) 279-4200.