By Harry Haun
19 Jan 2009

Obviously, he has much to tell O'Hare about the character, but the two have spoken only fleetingly. "I like to get into rehearsal before you talk too much, so you can immediately put the things you talk about into action. Otherwise, it gets awfully theoretical. Besides, everything you talk of before rehearsal, you change anyway."

Jerome Robbins saw Pendleton act at Yale and immediately imported him to Off-Broadway to play Jo Van Fleet's weirdo son in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad. Robbins also directed Pendleton's Broadway debut (as Motel the tailor in Fiddler on the Roof). "I owe him my career. How could I not love him? He was a good man. He worked so hard when he'd direct a show, and he'd get frustrated and impatient, but he would get more impatient with himself."

Of all his theatrical lives, the one that got Pendleton up for a Tony was as director of the 1981 revival of The Little Foxes, a play he had done in 1967 as an actor. This time out, he steered the Broadway-bowing Elizabeth Taylor to a Tony Award nomination, too.

Yes, she was terrified, "but she was so open about it, it was fun. She never acted out her terror in inappropriate ways. She'd do anything you asked. She was generous, played well with the other actors — they loved her. She's a wonderful lady, Elizabeth."

Excluding (if you can) Pendleton's stunning 2006 portrayal of an insistently suicidal atheist in The Sunset Limited, his greatest source of praise has come from authoring Orson's Shadow, his speculation on a factual clash-of-theatrical-titans (director Orson Welles and player Laurence Olivier trying, in vain, to lift Ionesco's Rhinoceros onto the London stage). Judith Auberjonois suggested the idea to him as a vehicle for her husband, Rene, and Alfred Molina. "It never would have occurred to me," admits Pendleton, who spent three years writing it, breathing humanity into these icons.

He observed Welles' iron-willed machinations up close when he played his military aide and son-in-law in Catch-22. "He wanted to direct all the time and, in fact, took over the direction of certain scenes we were in together. Mike Nichols handled it brilliantly. If anybody ever does that to me, I'll just remember what he did. He was very patient and gave Orson a lot of rope. Orson was always wrong, and Mike was always right, but Orson wouldn't listen to Mike and made a big point of it. I had made some pretty snide remarks about him in the press, and then I regretted that."

Austin Pendleton was very much the man in Orson's shadow back then, but he has emerged from that with a comparable complement of multitalented skills.