By Christopher Wallenberg
25 Jan 2011

	DeMunn in Death of a Salesman
	photo by Henry DiRocco

Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, DeMunn's career as an actor got off to a bumpy start. In high school, he had only one line in a production of a play called The Egg and I. He was supposed to enter stage left, cross the stage, say the line, then exit right. Instead, he just crossed the stage — never uttering a word. He laughs now at the memory. "It was not an auspicious beginning," he says.

During his freshman year at Union College in upstate New York, DeMunn began to feel disappointed with the college experience, that it wasn't what he'd hoped it would be. He had planned to major in engineering, then get a law degree, but the appeal of that began to fade. He remembers one night running over to the college theatre at eight or nine o'clock in the evening, bursting in on the professor who ran the joint, and just spouting, "I want to be an actor!" to a bemused-looking man. "That's when it started," DeMunn recalls. "I honestly don't remember any specifics of what inspired that mid-evening dash — but it was a dash."

After college, DeMunn got an audition in New York City with the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in England. They only accepted two Americans a year, and scores of people auditioned. DeMunn didn't think he had a chance.

"On the afternoon I auditioned, for some reason I just leapt into the material and forgot utterly that I was auditioning," he recalls. "I forgot that I was doing anything except being the person that I was playing. I had never done that before. I had never been able to transcend the barrier of trying to do good so that they'll like me, trying to do what will please this person, trying to do a great audition, all those horrible barriers that get between an actor and their joy."

As luck would have it, DeMunn got accepted into the two-year program, which was just what he needed as an aspiring actor. "It took off a lot of my rough edges. I had a pretty high level of anger, and it helped me to cope with some of that," he says. "Plus, it was six days a week of a classical approach to acting. So I didn't have people teaching me how to feel, which I was not interested in. I wanted to know how to sit and stand and walk. And what do you do with your hands? Where do you look? How do you stay on a line of iambic pentameter? How do you say it? How do you say those words? How do you wear a Restoration costume? How do you do any of this? It was about craft. And I needed that."

After graduating from the Bristol Old Vic, DeMunn returned to the states and began touring with the non-union National Shakespeare Company, "which we called the National Paper Bag Company," he jokes. The company toured by bus to every state in the continental U.S., performing two Shakespeare plays and one other classical play every year. The actors did the sets, costumes, and everything. He was paid $148 a week, so it was a hardscrabble existence. But it was a formative and eye-opening experience. "I considered that to be the second half of my education. After two years of pretty superb six-day-a-week training in England, I then had to perform to high school kids in New Jersey," DeMunn explains. "And that's a really good oven to bake what you've learned in acting school. Because the stuff that doesn't work, you had to take it apart right away and come up with something new — and fast. It was trial by fire."

Eventually, DeMunn moved to New York to see if he could make it in the theatre there. At that time, he says, it was a hell of a lot easier for a young actor just starting out than it is now.

"There were plenty of auditions that you could go to, and you didn't have to have an agent submit you for a showcase, which is usually the case now. You could just go and audition for showcases and get a part and do the part. I just started doing every bit of theatre that I could get my hands on. And then eventually I got a job doing a television movie with Lee Strasberg and Tony Lo Bianco."

While he certainly experienced moments of self-doubt during his early years in New York and often struggled, DeMunn gave himself plenty of leeway to succeed or fail on his own terms — to really give himself a shot to make it as a working stage or screen actor. The road manager with the National Shakespeare Company had given DeMunn some wise, matter-of-fact advice before he made his way to the Big Apple: "'You've got to give it ten years. And if after ten years you don't have something going [on], then you can get out and do something else."

"That took a lot of weight off my shoulders," DeMunn says. "So that way, I wasn't three years out, going, 'well, jeez, nothing's happening...I have no momentum. I don't know when I'll ever work again.' I didn't have to struggle with it because I'd been given a window of ten years."

DeMunn remembers in one week getting offers to do two plays — both on Broadway — after not being able to land anything for a long time. "I couldn't get in the offices of these people. They'd have a big slot outside their doors that looked kind of like a trash bin, and you'd slide your photo and resume in there. And you'd be checking the answering service every two hours. Did anybody call? There was a lot of that."

After that first Broadway show (the short-lived Comedians in 1976 starring John Lithgow and Jonathan Pryce), doors started to creak open. Of course, it helped that Mike Nichols had directed the play. "People who literally would not see me the week before were saying, 'Hey, Jeff! Come on in!' Like we were old friends? And I'd think, wait a minute...But I understand now that's the way the business works, and their job is to approach people and work with people who can do the job. And they had no idea if I could do anything. But having the endorsement of Mike Nichols, who cast me in that first Broadway show, then it was like, 'Oh well, if Mike Nichols thinks he can do it, then maybe he's OK.' So yeah, from there, a sense of momentum started to build."

By the early 1980s, DeMunn was well on his way. He earned a 1983 Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play for his costarring role in K2, a drama by Patrick Meyers "about friendship and fidelity between two very different men stuck on the side of a 27,000-foot mountain in an impossible survival situation," says DeMunn. Two years before that, he had graced the big screen as Harry Houdini in Milos Forman's film adaptation of the novel "Ragtime."

The lessons that DeMunn learned in his early years still remain with him, especially as he brings to life one of the most iconic and monumental characters in American drama. In playing Willy in Salesman, DeMunn says that he's keeping it simple: "I'm just trying to look at the other people in the eye and tell the truth and see what we end up with. The script is so strong, the story is so strong, the desires are so enormous, and the failures and the weaknesses are so endemic, that the play just takes care of itself. So I just have to try to stay out of my own way."