Dapperly Droll Charles Keating
Does Everything With A Happy Heart
By Doug Harper
Charles Keating's (Carl Hutchins on Another World) cultivated English accent and his distinguished appearance suggest more than a British Member of Parliament who spent his youth in the cricket fields of Eton than a soap star who was "...kicked out of school at the age of sixteen."
But Keating, 42, in his slightly sardonic tone, claims that the Canadian school officials in the country he adopted after leaving his native London in 1957, "were not interested in ideas that I had for their system, so they asked me to leave."
The son of a woman who was a fashion designer and a man who was a chemical engineer, Keating found himself living in the States by the time he was 17 and working in amateur theatrical groups in Niagara Falls and Buffalo, New York.
His first paying job was with the Cleveland Playhouse, which thanks to the largess of a Ford Foundation grant, toured the U.S. As perverse luck would have it, the newcomer to America was welcomed by a "Greetings from your friends and neighbors..." and found himself in the embrace of the U.S. Army in 1964. He was sent, as he puts it, "to a rather unfortunate place called
basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky," he recalls nostalgically. "Because I didn't get on very well with that organization either, I slaved a PFC: that's the lowest."
After serving his two-year sentence, Keating became very busy working with the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, the Charles Playhouse in Boston and the Provincetown Playhouse in Cape Cod.
The next decade saw Keating commuting back and forth across the Atlantic. In rapid succession he opened a new theatre-- The Crucible-- in Sheffield, England; performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company; accepted roles in several television dramatic series on both Thames TV and the BBC; and accepted a part in the acclaimed Brideshead Revisited TV series. Keating then came back to the U.S. with the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing college campuses throughout the U.S. and later returned to England to tape a Showtime Production, A Talent for Murder with Laurence Olivier and Angela Lansbury. At the end of last year, he finished a run of The Tempest in a Cleveland theater and two days later was in Brooklyn on the set of Another World taping his first episode.
Of his character, Hutchins, Keating says with gratitude: "He's an intriguing old bugger and they've kept him rather interesting and I'll be forever grateful to the writers for that because it's very easy to make some of these characters a bit wimpish. I don't think they've done that with Hutchins, which is rather nice and I do my best not to play him in that stereotypical manner . "In addition," he says, warming to the subject, "they have given me bits of Shakespeare and poetry here and there and you never quite know what he is up to next, the viewers don't and I don't so we're all in the same boat."
Can Charles identify with the character? "Well," he replies slowly, "I think an actor has only himself to draw on. Am I a multi-millionaire, wheeling-dealing person who is unsuccessful in his relationships?" he asks rhetorically. "No, I am none of the above."
How does Keating feel about the medium? "Well, I don't know how I feel about it," he says in consternation. "You make a bloody good living off soaps, don't you? And I think their inordinate popularity and the fact that so many of the nightime shows are really soaps has given them respectability. Look at a thing like Brideshead or Edward and Mrs Simpson, which are both soaps.
"But if I have a quarrel with it, it's why not make it an art form. If the talent is there and all the ingredients are there floating around, let it have a little inspiration. At times there are scenes that obviously everybody cared about that suddenly take fire. But it must be an incredible burden to have to keep being creative like that sixty minutes a day and therefore, I don't know if it's possible to make it an art form."
But it is on the subject of the comparison between film, theater and TV that Keating becomes most eloquent and most opinionated. "In the theater, you feel your own muscles and the actor calls the shots and excercises control, except in some of those {expletive deleted} productions where the director wants to do it all. Somebody should shoot those {expletive deleted} and get them out of the theater. And film, of course, is now the director's and designer's medium and it's wonderful to be handled and used tellingly in their medium. And then television is kind of hodge-podge of it all, in a way."
What about his personal life? "I've got one wife and one only," he notes wryly. "I tried to take in others but she objected. Her name is Mary and her people come from Hungary, but she was born here. I heard it's always better to cross-breed stock if you want the offspring to be sturdy." And the offspring? They are Sean, 19, and Jamie, 18.
Married for 20 years, Keating claims he was a "child bride." Adding that his wife "...was a very aggressive lady."
Discussing his future on Another World, Keating reveals the kind of positiveness that has stood him in such good stead during his career. "I don't know whether it's a perverse kind of head set that I carry around with me but any job I've committed to, I've seen through with a happy heart. I've never said part-way through, 'Oh God, I've got to get out of this.' I just enjoy the course and the direction it's going."
He adds with good humor: "My contract is up at the end of the year but who knows, they may want me out of there next month. They may say, 'Oh, Jesus, get rid of him--we've had enough of him.' " But even as he says this, the twinkle in his eye betrays the words and you know that whether he is on a soap, in a film or in the theater next year, Charles Keating will be doing it with a happy heart.
Soap Opera World
October 1984
Reprinted without Permission