Last week we lost two familiar character actors, and the lion’s share of the media attention focused on the Sept. 11 death of 96-year-old Kevin McCarthy, who ran screaming straight out of the 1956 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and kept running (and working) straight into the 1978 remake, and well after that. His rich voice and imposing presence served him well for decades, in mediocre and and good and sometimes great material.
Harold Gould died the same day, at age 86, succumbing to prostate cancer. Smaller of stature than McCarthy, he too brought a distinctive voice and demeanor to a wealth of work. He kept his stage chops in fine working condition long after the sizable roles faded for him on screen and TV.
In 1996, when I was at the San Diego Union-Tribune, Gould starred in a regional premiere of Jon Robin Baitz’s play “The Substance of Fire” at the Old Globe Theatre, playing the role of Isaac Geldhart, originated by Ron Rifkin. The role effectively revitalized Rifkin’s career. Gould was wonderful in it as well, and he brought fierce concentration and a flinty pride to Geldhart, the Holocaust survivor whose publishing firm is being torn apart by family squabbles.
“Something has happened,” the character says, when asked why the printed word has become economically challenged. “There used to be some silence to life. There is now none. Just static, white noise, fireworks, and boredom all around you.” The lines, written well before the BlackBerry and iPhone era, sound eerily prescient, and Gould brought a memorable tenderness to them.
In that ’96 interview, Gould told me: “I think Baitz is very understanding of Isaac. He knows what his kind of rigidity can lead to, the rejection of love and close connections…there’s a worldview being examined here, really — one’s position toward life itself, which in this case includes the Holocaust and its aftereffects, one’s relation with one’s children, one’s ethical standards, one’s engagement with the world … it’s fascinating.”
Gould grew up in Albany and Schenectady, N.Y., the son of a “very gentle, compassionate” father and a “stern, very strong mother,” he told me. His father worked in the movie distribution business and, later, when the Depression hit, as a postal clerk.
Gould wanted to act — his father had dabbled a bit — but at his parents’ urging, he attended the New York state college for teachers in Albany (now part of the State University of New York system). He attended graduate school at Cornell where he met his wife, and got his master’s degree and Ph.D. in theater.
He taught here and there, and in 1956 moved his family west for a job at University of California, Riverside. Then came his first television work (“about four seconds” on the 1961-62 Rod Taylor one-season wonder “Hong Kong”) and his first film role (“The Couch,” in 1962). Teaching eventually took a back seat to performing. He was all over TV and big screens for decades, especially prominently in the ’70s, when he went from Kid Twist in “The Sting” to Woody Allen’s droll straight man in “Love and Death” in style. And he’ll always be Rhoda’s father for a certain generation.
“I’m out of the great loop of TV and film, I suppose,” he told me in that interview, “but I don’t really want to go up for a TV pilot at this point. Not that they’re going after my age group, anyway. It’s all young people — ‘Friends,’ friends of ‘Friends.’ I’d much rather spend my time doing theater now.”
Whether rehearsing Shakespeare or Baitz, he told me, Gould loved the feeling of embarking on “a wonderful period of discovery. There’s always a new way to respond to an actor, to cant the line, to deal with the practical, technical aspects of the language — and to come across a feeling or meaning that deepens or widens suddenly. Those are great discoveries to me.”
Our interview concluded with him saying: “There’s still enough of the teacher in me that says: This is a wonderful text. I’d like to share with you. Listen to this.”
