Actor Rikki Klieman is absolutely terrified. Sure, she's a recognizable, attractive 50-something actor who appears regularly on a handful of prime-time dramas. But behind the friendly familiarity, she's a powerhouse attorney who has spent three decades prosecuting high-profile homicides and defending clients accused of atrocities. Named one of the five most outstanding female trial lawyers in the country by Time magazine, she regularly opines on aspects of criminal and civil law on news programs such as 60 Minutes, The McLaughlin Group, 20/20, and Nightline. She is also on the faculty of Columbia University and Boston University School of Law, the author of a New York Times best-selling book, and the wife of Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton. She has appeared as a correspondent on Court TV, a legal analyst on The Today Show, and an expert panelist on The Michael Jackson Trial daily re-enactments on E! Entertainment Television. There isn't much that can rattle this accomplished, tough-as-nails woman. That is, until she has to memorize her lines.
Speaking from her dressing room at E!, Klieman readily admits to her little-known Achilles' heel. "I become traumatized about learning lines," she says, laughing somewhat nervously. "I spend untold hours agonizing that I'm going to forget a line." She never thinks twice about improvising lightning-quick comments as a legal correspondent or guest expert, but learning scripted lines for her fictional roles on NBC's Las Vegas and CBS's Dr. Vegas is a new challenge she hasn't quite hurdled. She notes, "When I was practicing law, I used to say, 'How much weight will I lose from the anxiety? Is this a 5-pound trial or a 10-pound trial?' Now if I have four scenes instead of one, it could be a 7- or 8-pound week."
Klieman is part of a growing population of actors who carved out brilliant legal careers before becoming full-time performers. Howard Cosell, Ben Stein, and character actor G.D. Spradlin excelled as lawyers prior to entering entertainment. Phantom of the Opera star Gerard Butler and even freewheeling Matthew McConaughey pursued law as undergraduates, long before they romanced actors such as Emmy Rossum and Jennifer Lopez on film. But the phenomenon of lawyers-turned-actors is most prevalent on television, where the roles are more diversified and plentiful. Appropriately, the cast list for that granddaddy of modern courtroom dramas, Law & Order, boasts two former high-profile lawyers. Fred Dalton Thompson, who plays District Attorney Arthur Branch, is a former U.S. Senator who served as minority counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee during the Nixon scandal. And Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder doesn't quite have time to reprise her role as Judge Rebecca Logan on L&O: She's currently campaigning to become Manhattan's next D.A.
Klieman isn't surprised that many of her fellow actors were once fellow counselors. It makes perfect sense to her, because the skills needed to practice law translate naturally to acting. "Lawyering makes you very disciplined. You have deadlines, speeches you have to give. All of your focus has to be on the case at hand," she says. "I think being a lawyer was a great, great training ground for me."
An Offer She Couldn't Refuse
Klieman was a former child actor, and her first ambitions led her to the theatre rather than the courtroom. After graduating Northwestern University with a theatre degree, she headed to New York filled with dreams of performing with Shakespeare in the Park or working in Joe Papp's Public Theater. Her rude awakening came during an audition for The Godfather. The petite daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, 22-year-old Klieman thought she was a shoo-in for the role of Michael Corleone's doomed first wife, Apollonia, until she showed up at the cattle call. "There were 200 of me: all 5-foot-2 to 5-foot-10 Mediterranean types," she recalls. "That was when I saw how hard an actor's life is." (The role ultimately went to Italian actor Simonetta Stefanelli.) The experience solidified her decision to "do theatre in the courtroom" as a trial lawyer.
More than 30 years after that eye-opening audition, Klieman now frequently acts opposite Sonny Corleone himself. She landed her recurring role as Kathy Berson, legal counsel to James Caan's casino owner, Ed Deline, on Las Vegas, in a far more personable way. Executive producer Gardner Stern called and asked her to read for the role after seeing her Court TV coverage of the O.J. Simpson case. Unfazed, she simply replied, "I'm married to the police chief. Do I get to keep my clothes on?"
Klieman's fully clothed role has led to other jobs; most notably as Rob Lowe's office manager on Dr. Vegas and an appearance as another fictional lawyer on NYPD Blue earlier this year. She refrains from analyzing her characters' legal choices or offering suggestions from a lawyer's point of view. "Kathy Berson does things that I would never do as a lawyer," she says, adding that she will often clarify legal terminology for a show's writers and producers, but on-set she prefers to be an actor first and foremost.
Although she is still an adviser to her Boston law firm--Klieman, Lyons, Schindler & Gross--the actor is focusing her attention on a new life as a performer and broadcaster. She says acting is a much more comfortable pursuit at this stage in her life. "I don't have to live or die by a job. If I get the job, I'm thrilled," she says. "But if I don't get the job, it's not like I'm not doing other things, which I think keeps me much saner." She isn't even worried about typecasting. "I'd like to do more acting work, but if I'm pigeonholed in the legal genre, well, God bless my legal career!"
Driven To Act
Like Klieman, actor Robert Gant's road to success on the small screen drove him from acting to law, then back to acting. The chiseled, blond-haired, blue-eyed actor was best-known as a litigator for one of the most powerful law firms in the world before he scored his role as Ben Bruckner on Showtime's nighttime soap Queer As Folk.
Although acting was his lifelong passion--he turned pro in the fifth grade, appeared in commercials for breakfast cereals, and garnered a SAG card by age 10--he felt forced to give it up for a more financially secure future after college graduation. "I was trying to find a way to marry my desire for performing with what I considered to be a more legitimate career," he explains. "I was terrified at the prospect of waiting tables all of my life." He decided that life as a lawyer would come with the promise of economic certainty as well as the chance to occasionally "act" in a courtroom.
His first job as an attorney ironically led him straight into the heart of the acting beast: Hollywood. Armed with a newly minted Juris Doctorate from Georgetown, he took a position in L.A. with Baker & Mackenzie, one of the oldest and most prestigious firms in the country. But Gant couldn't quiet his desire to act. One afternoon, he snuck out of the office to audition for a Miller Lite commercial, which he easily booked. Soon after, the firm closed its L.A. branch, which left him alone in L.A. with several months' severance pay. He immediately took it as a sign to devote himself to acting full time.
Pursuing an acting career is always daunting, but when you've just spent $80,000 on law school it can be downright traumatic. Fortunately, Gant recognizes that his time and money spent studying law, which emphasizes the Socratic Method, was the perfect preparation for the acting process. "The ability to see a scenario from any angle and defend it rigorously was enormously helpful, because I was able to rip apart a character and not just judge him," he says. "If you're going to defend a case, it really is about stepping into the shoes of the plaintiff or the defendant and determining why he did what he did, and that's absolutely what we do with a character."
He also used his lawyerly skills to approach his career as a businessman and an artist. As a businessman, he sought out and signed with a good agent, while his artistic side led him to classes with renowned acting instructor Howard Fine. The dual approach paid off: He began booking more commercials and under-fives on shows such as Ellen and Melrose Place, which ultimately led to his being cast on Queer As Folk. He admits to also dipping into his law school experience while developing his Queer character, an HIV-positive college professor. Gant says he freely incorporated the teaching styles and personalities of two of his favorite law professors at Georgetown into Ben Bruckner.
In the end, Gant credits fear--not unlike Klieman's fear of flubbing her lines--as the best motivator. "Fortunately I think I was more afraid of missing out on my dream than my fear of not making money or having wasted time in law school," he says thoughtfully. "The best thing about it all was learning that following your truth is actually the right thing to do." BSW