From: Jason K. <kallen77@home.com>
Subject: Morrow article from "Us"
Date: Thursday, January 07, 1999 10:04 PM

Here’s an article from the September, 1991 issue of "Us" magazine.

Jason K.
___________________________________________________________________

"Rob Morrow: City Slicker" Like the reluctant country doctor he plays
on Northern Exposure, Rob Morrow longs for the bright lights of the big
city

by Holly Millea

Rob Morrow is on an art hunt in New York’s cavernous Metropolitan Museum
of Art. It's late in the day and the guards are casting discouraging
glances, eager to clear the place out, but the star of CBS's Northern Exposure is
on a mission to find his favorite painting. Taking a shortcut through the
Sculpture of Indonesia exhibit, Morrow passes a statue of Prajnaparamita, the
goddess of transcendental wisdom. "Try saying her name ten times fast," he says,
whisking by before stopping short in front of Bhairava, a demonic deity with four
arms, a necklace adorned with a small, severed heads, and human skulls beneath
his feet. His eyes widen. "Wow!"

Moving on, the actor takes in some of the other Hindu and Buddhist
works, many of which depict snakes. "I think most women are afraid of snakes,"
Morrow says matter-of-factly.

"Excuse me," he says suddenly, stopping a woman to prove his point, "but
I'd like to know, are you afraid of snakes? I'm sort of taking a poll
because I believe that most women are, and I don't want my friend to think I sound
like a sexist."

The woman says she is not, but having succumbed to Morrow's considerable
charm in less than ten seconds, she adds flirtatiously, "But I do think most
women are." She lingers, obviously longing for more conversation, but Morrow
is off, still in pursuit of what he came to see: El Greco's View of Toledo.

Standing so close to the painting that the guard motions him back, the
actor is charged by the brightly colored canvas. "It's so magical," he says,
manically waving his hands. "It's like the eye of the needle just before the
storm ... there's something ominous and foreboding that's really appealing ... all
this power, completely out of your hands ... and the energy!"

Sitting down on a bench and gazing up at the masterpiece, Morrow reveals
his real attraction to the work. "I remember as a kid running around and
you had to get inside before a storm. It reminds me of that feeling."

The guard announces the Met's closing, and a reluctant Morrow heads for
the door. On his way out, he scans a room filled with religious paintings
taken from Catholic churches. "They're beautiful, aren't they?" he asks in a
hushed voice, observing a wall of Virgin Marys. "They're all different. And
yet ... they all look like Meryl Streep."

Outside the museum, a Toledoesque sky threatens rain, and although
Morrow comes equipped with an umbrella, he dashes across Fifth Avenue to the posh
Stanhope hotel. "How many umbrellas have you lost?" he asks, sitting down at a
covered sidewalk table. Morrow's curiosity envelops everything from the
answerable ("Have you ever been mugged?") to the unanswerable ("Why does Robert De
Niro make so many movies every year?").

Morrow continues, "I asked this woman if anybody had done any surveys on
how many umbrellas urban-dwellers go through a year, and she didn't have a
clue. I offered that I went through ten or twelve. My point was that suburban
and rural people don't lose them because they have a car, a place, and we
don't have that."

The 29-year-old New Yorker's umbrella loss has dwindled since he landed
on Northern Exposure, which films outside of Seattle. Playing Dr. Joel
Fleischman, Morrow finds himself held hostage by the charms, earthly and
otherwise, of Cicely, Alaska (pop. 800) - a fantastical community that
paid for Fleischman's medical school in return for four years of practice. A
sort of rural Oz, Cicely’s local color includes an ex-astronaut, a zenned-out
deejay, an Indian obsessed with old movies, and Maggie, a buxom bush pilot whose
lovers meet hilarious and untimely deaths. Morrow plays the yuppie everyman
around whom these eccentric characters orbit. Try picturing Woody Allen living
life on a strange range and you've got Fleischman.

"We didn't want to make Joel a dorky, nerdy, Jewish guy," says
co-creator Joshua Brand. "Rob came in to audition, and he was charming and
handsome and urbane. But he wasn't a schmuck, so to speak." While Dr. Fleischman has
been known to get smug about his Gotham affinities, Brand quickly dispels any
rumors that Morrow shares that character's pomposity. "Rob's actually a decent
guy. His head is fairly well put on his shoulders."

Sipping a glass of red wine, Morrow contemplates the question of how
much he actually has in common with his role. Like his alter ego, he'd rather
be wandering the rooms of the Met or sitting in on the latest theater
production, yet he's not entirely comfortable with the illusion that the part is not
an acting stretch. "When I catch myself on TV and see, like, a sweet, nice
guy, I'm kind of surprised," he says slowly. "I don't feel like that's me.
Joel is really myopic about the world and amenities. I'm much more willing to
try other things. He hates nature. I love the idea of being in the middle
of nowhere. We come from the same neighborhood in terms of sensibility.
But I have this whole dark side underneath."

That darkness was cultivated early on in Morrow's life. Raised in
suburban New Rochelle, New York, where his father worked in industrial lighting and
his mother was a dental hygienist, Morrow says he had "a pretty rough time
growing up. We moved around a bit." The family, which includes an older sister,
led a somewhat nomadic existence, and, topping it off, his parents divorced
when he was 9.

While he allows that the experience was difficult, he deflects further inquiries by resorting
to self-deprecating humor. Asked what his life
would have been like had his own parents stayed together, for example, he
quips, "I used to think I'd have grown up to be an overweight, suburban, spoiled
guy with a Camaro.

"But all said and done," he adds, his tone taking on a more serious
note, "I don't really know which is better."

It's safe to say that given a different background, Morrow might not
have dropped out of high school at 17 and left home to find himself alone in
the big city. In retrospect, Morrow concedes that the act was somewhat crazy,
but it's hard to argue given the big payoff.

"Coming here young, the city's vitality got to me - it's like a drug,"
he says. "My first year, I basically hibernated. I hid. Then I got involved in
technical theater three years of all kinds of cool things."

Playing gofer to the likes of Norman Mailer and theatrical bigwig
Michael Bennett led to numerous stage roles. But Morrow became a household face
before becoming a household name by pitching products on the small screen.

His first spot for Chiquita banana ("It was a really sweet, phallic
commercial") won a Clio Award, and lucrative commercials for Miller
beer, Chevrolet, Diet Seven-Up and Pizza Hut followed. But even 1985's
Private Resort - his only film, a teen flick costarring Johnny Depp - or his
role as a bartender in the short-lived series Tattinger's, doesn't bring him the
recognition that his popular Dentyne commercial does. (In the long-running
spot, Morrow plays a lovestruck apartment dweller who pretends his
encounters with a comely dog-walker are purely coincidence.) He's stopped by fans
as often for that as for his Northern Exposure exposure.

But that should all change when the show returns with great fanfare to
its second season. Audiences have picked up on the quirky goings-on of the
series, vaulting it into the Top 20. The show, which rivals Twin Peaks for
avant-garde creativity, has some twists in the works for the good doctor: Fleischman
gets kidnapped, a la Misery, Fleischman plays Kafka living in Cicely at the
turn of the century, and Fleischman stars in a spoof of My Dinner with Andre
("only it's my dinner with Holling").

Of course, what viewers really long to see is an orgasmic uniting of
Fleischman and Maggie. "It's inevitable that they get together," says Morrow.
"But you want to tease the audience as long as they can take it, you know, like
sex.Janine Turner, who plays the enticing Maggie, allows that there is
"definitely a genuine attraction between us. Rob's very sensitive. He looks inside
a person. I'll be down and he'll walk over to me without saying a word,
give me a hug, and I'll say 'How did you know I needed that?’" But, despite
their onscreen chemistry, the two are strictly friends offscreen. "I'm very
fond of him, but we're real good at keeping it in its place."

The close-knit cast makes the grind of 15-hour days in a bone-chilling
climate easier to take, but Morrow still has reservations about life after
hiatus. "I'm a little fearful of going back for a full year," he admits. "The
schedule is pretty exhausting. We have a tough show to shoot, logistically. I
don't know if we can pull it off." He pauses. "I often wonder what someone
like De Niro, who's had the luxury of working in films his whole life, would be
like if he got on a TV show and his stature didn't get him 50 takes. How would
it affect him?"

Another factor in Morrow's reluctance to return to Cicely is, alas,
love. The actor has been sharing a Manhattan apartment with producer Leslie
Urdang, 35, for three years. When asked about her, Morrow instinctively touches the
crystals around his neck (one given to him by Urdang, the other by his
sister). "The distance is tough," he admits. But then the actor claims to
succeed at long-term relationships. "Yeah," he says, laughing, "because I'm really
good about delving into those places that suck! I know that that's the
harder thing." But the reward is big, right? "One would hope," he says,
hedging. Reconsidering, he adds, "Yeah, it is big. And it's pretty ultimate in
terms of feelings."

Having experienced a few months of urban renewal, Morrow will soon be
saying goodbye to Urdang and Manhattan, heading off to the solitary beauty of
the Pacific Northwest. But there's one thing he'll take with him when he
goes. "Oh, my umbrella!" he says, rushing back to the table. Tucking it
safely under his arm, he smiles. "I'm trying not to lose this one."