RAY WALSTON has enjoyed a successful career spanning over half a century and leading him from Broadway to Hollywood. This past year, he was honored with an Emmy Award for his role of Judge Bone in the series "Picket Fences."In life, Ray Walston is every bit as interesting as the characters he has made so famous in his work as an actor. He has a little bit of the devil in him, part rogue, strong minded, warm hearted, uncommonly common, street-wise, enormously humorous, tough as nails and passionate in everything he does in life, giving generously of himself to all he meets.
If he doesn't like you, he will tell you, man-to-man. If he does like you, he will tell you, man-to-man.
Still in his seventies when I met him, he would get out of bed every morning at six and punch a heavy bag hanging from a door frame in his Beverly Hills residence.
Ray Walston is a compact bundle of kinetic energy, who lives life from moment-to-moment.
Interview With Ray H: What is "talent"?
R: (long pause) Ahhh hah. Generally, it's a gift from God. Whether it be in acting, composing music, writing books, painting. The great painters, all of them...certainly studied, and so forth. That's all necessary, to study. But if you don't have something in the way of talent to begin with...and that's very hard to describe. I can only describe it, and I don't know how anyone else would describe it, but go to a museum and spend a day walking around and looking at all kinds of paintings, and the good ones come from a talent that is not only indefineable, but it defies any kind of attempt to pin it down and say what it is. What is that old thing about "talent will out"?
H: Talent will out?
R: Yeah. Talent will come out.
H: Speaking of studying, do you have any memorable teachers or directors you studied with?
R: Well, I never really studied acting. I didn't study acting. I suppose when I was a kid, and I went to movies, and later went to some plays on my own when I got a little older, in New Orleans, where I was living then, I zeroed in on the actor. Not the actress. I was very conscious of the actor; watched what he did. So I have not studied. I have worked with some very great directors.
I've worked with Josh Logan, who was the only director in New York City who went to Moscow, and for nine months worked and studied with Stanislavski. No one else can say that.
Stella Adler, in 1934, went over there when she went to Paris, when Stanislavski was in Paris recuperating from illness, and she spent a couple of hours a day with him for a couple of weeks, and came back and was considered an authority on Stanislavski, whose real name, by the way, was not Constantine Stanislavksi. It was something else. Constantine Stanislavski was a stage name he adopted.
But Josh Logan is the only director, and it's very interesting that one of the things that Stanislavski was doing when Josh got there...he was doing a play with music and songs, and so forth. It was not called a musical comedy, because I don't think they had them in those days. It was called a play with music. And it's interesting that the greatest success in the New York Theatre that Josh Logan made happened to be a musical.
But his approach to acting, in a roundabout way, uh...you had to arrive at what Stanislavski did, and what he later wrote about, and what everyone has credited him with, uh...changing the style and so forth of acting in the theatre.
H: What advice would you give to those starting out in acting?
R: It's according to what locale their in. If they're in New York, they of course are there because they know that's where it is, and they're going to be working at Shraft's or wherever in order to keep themselves going until they find a part in a play. and it has to be part after part after part. If it's not in New York, let's say it's in St. Louis, then they've got to find a place or get with someone who knows about the work... they've got to find a place like that and do scenes, and then try to get in plays. Try to get in plays in front of an audience.
If they're working in a workshop somewhere, where there is, let's say, uh...only twenty people, or something like that, that's still, when they work and do a scene, that's still working in front of somebody.
They've gotta learn something. Something's gotta be learned, when you get out on the stage in front of people and start talkin' and tryin' to be a character.
H: Do you think Broadway and Hollywood are doing enough to heighten public awareness of important social issues of the day?
R: I can't talk too much about Broadway, because I haven't seen a play on Broadway lately, and I don't keep up with it anymore. I don't know what they're doing, and I have no idea. The only thing I know about Broadway at the moment is that the box-office prices are absolutely unbelievable in terms of high they are.
As far as films are concerned? Again, I'm, uh...I don't feel qualified to answer that question. I don't go to very many movies. I don't see all the movies that come out.
H: How about television?
R: I don't watch television. (we both laugh together)
H: What about Of Mice And Men? Does it heighten public awareness of social problems, or the human condition?
R: Well, I would think that, uh... yeah, I would think that Of Mice And Men would heighten people's awareness of other people's problems. But with what's happening today, in 1992, no matter who tries to make the audiences aware, whether it be a writer or what? A playwright, a director, a particular production company who has that in mind rather than money... uh, in 1992, people don't seem to... if you go back and use Of Mice And Men, they don't seem to care about what happened in 1930.
They hear phrases like, "The Great Depression", but they don't know, really, what America went through, from 1929 to almost 1936-37-38. In that period, it's very interesting. Very, very interesting, that the movie companies made more money than anyone in America. And the prices were twenty-five cents, twenty-five cents, thirty-five cents tops. People were looking for, uh, nothing so, uh...nothing like, uh, too moral, or anything like that, they were looking for escape. They were tryin' to get away from their problems.
H: So when they go see Of Mice And Men, the audience might not make the connection that we're [America] going through this same thing today. They might not think that.
R: I don't think they'll think that. I don't think they will. I think they will look at it like a piece of Americana that, in their minds at this moment, it would be impossible for this to happen in America again.
Copyright 1997 TheatrGROUP, Inc. Interview done by Harry Governick, Artistic Director, TheatrGROUP
Actor Filmography
He began acting in 1938, doing regional theatre before going to New York and landing a job in Maurice Evans' GI production of "Hamlet." In 1948 he received the Clarence Dervent Award and was selected the Most Promising Young Actor by the Variety Drama Critics Poll.In 1949, Walston began a 20-year association with the legendary director George Abbott, performing in five of his productions. That year saw him step into a role that has become forever identified with him, the hustling Luther Billis in "South Pacific." His creation of another great part, the Devil in "Damn Yankees," was later honored with a Tony Award. Walston's other Broadway credits include Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Me and Juliet" and Truman Capote's "House of Flowers."
He went on to reprise the roles of Luther Billis and the Devil in the film versions of South Pacific and Damn Yankees respectively. His many other film credits include The Player, Gary Sinise's Of Mice and Men, Johnny Dangerously, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Popeye, Paint Your Wagon, Silver Streak, The Sting and the Billy Wilder films Kiss Me Stupid and The Apartment.
Walston is perhaps best known to a generation of television fans as Bill Bixby's extraterrestrial Uncle Martin in the classic series "My Favorite Martian." His more recent television credits include the projects "Red River," "The Stand," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "I Know My First Name is Steven" and "Semester at Sea."