Charles In Charge
by John Harney
Emmy-nominated soaps veteran is king on the Brooklyn set of 'Another World'
It's a little after 10 in the morning, and "Another World" star Charles Keating is about to "get the frock on" in the wardrobe department. In front of wardrobe supervisor Liz Spagnola and three visitors, he strips down to black briefs. For a man who will be 55 in October, Keating is surprisingly trim. His character, the charmingly wicked Carl Hutchins, has plenty of oohs and ahs left in him. Quickly slipping on a shirt and trousers, Keating says he once undressed on the floor of Simpson's of Piccadilly men's store in London while shopping for costumes - to the dismay of the proper English salesman. His suit is olive green. "I'm in Sherwood Forest today," he exclaims, then goes back upstairs to wait for a call to the set.
Keating opens the single window in his narrow, monkish dressing room and lights a cigaret. He's been up for hours already. The NBC studios in Midwood, Brooklyn, are a long drive from his Connecticut home. "Up at 3:30 and on the road at 4 and you're ready to go at 7," he says matter-of-factly. Keating is up for best actor in the Daytime Emmys, which will be presented
at Radio City this Wednesday. He's lost three times before, but hey, with the Emmys, losing is sometimes better than winning. "I think there's a career in this," he grins. "There's a definite career in it...following Susan Lucci. I hope it keeps up." "I haven't had a chance yet to lose the Oscar. I hope one day that'll be up there too. I lost the Tony once, for 'Loot,' so I'm well prepared."
Carl Hutchins first brought his villainous schemes to Bay City in 1983. Over the next eight years he made several appearances and disappearances. In 1993, the producers needed him to work his evil magic again - the ratings had slipped dangerously close to cancellation.
Keating helped pull the show back from the brink. Whatever happens at Radio City this week is okay, he says. "You can't get your knickers in a twist over any of this." Like a lot of soap villains, Carl has mellowed a bit. In his case, it's thanks to the love of Rachel (Victoria Wyndham)- who once upon a time was pretty rotten herself. "When I was a bastard playing the 'bad guy,'"
Keating says, "I got the occasional letter saying, 'I hope you read your Bible,' or 'You should change your ways." Then there was the time a fan spotted him at a hotel. "I was all dressed up in my Armani. And she comes running over and grabs me by the lapels and says, "You're so evil!" I said 'Get your f------ hands off me!' And then she was delightful, and it was all fine." He's played some of Shakespeare's most demanding roles and been a star on Broadway and in the West End, but loves doing a show in which you never know what's going to happen next. "Look, I came in one day, after my last return and they said, 'Charles, this is your son, you've never met him.' And here's this great lug of a bloke, Paul Michael Valley, towering over me. "But then they give you a wonderful scene,-like I'm dropping off the edge of a scaffolding. And he grabs my collar and he's a policeman and I'm the villian, and he says, 'Give me one good reason why I shouldn't let you fall." And I say, "Because I'm your
father.'"
The dressing room has barely enough room for the sink, desk and daybed. On the desk is a history of the English longbow-he often spends the long waits reading or taking catnaps on the bed. And when some workdays drag into the early morning, the dressing room becomes a crash pad. There are very few short days in soaps. He leans forward and points out,"Still, not as hard as the third shift on a factory floor." Though he was born in London to working class Irish parents, Keating clearly wasn't cut out for the factory floor. After emigrating to Canada as a teenager, he got a job as a hairdresser in Buffalo. Shortly after he started, someone suggested he audition for a play, "Tiger at the Gates," in Niagara Falls, NY. He got a part. "I was dreadful. It was rubbish. So much for virginity," he says. He became a full-time actor two years later at the Cleveland Playhouse, where he met his future wife, Mary. Married 30 years, they recently became grandparents.
Ready for his first scene of the day, Keating prowls a corridor of the hospital set, a crossroads for several of "Another World's" storylines. Kale Browne and David Forsythe, who play brothers Michael and John Hudson, rehearse a tense scene, but Browne keeps forgetting a line and cracking up. During a break, they joke around. Forsythe does a quick soft-shoe. In a darkened emergency room, an actor playing a seriously injured patient prepares for his scene - by staying perfectly still on a gurney. Taping begins, and director Gary Donatelli quiets the set. Forsythe and Browne go back before the cameras, and Browne cracks up again. Keating keeps to himself, holding a notepad with his lines meticulously written out in longhand. He learned acting "just through doing. That's the way I've learned to do everything." He worked with Laurence Olivier in the mid-1970s, and one night in a pub asked Olivier, one of the century's most celebrated Macbeth's, if he could write him for advice when he played the murderous Scot back in Cleveland. "I wrote a letter saying, 'The dagger scene, where do you see the dagger?' And I got a lovely note back from Olivier saying 'Oh dear boy, see the dagger wherever you want to.'" He met Olivier again while playing social climber Rex Mottram in the TV series "Brideshead Revisited."
His fellow players on "Another World" have learned a great deal from Keating. Tom Eplin was a young actor when he began playing Jake McKinnon in 1986. "Charles has taught me more about daytime than any other actor," Eplin says. Keating, who has been standing nearby, dismisses this tribute with a wave. "He's kissed the Blarney Stone and never been to Ireland!" he shouts and stomps off. Up in the control room, Sonatelli, who directs up to 75 scenes a day, says he admires Keating for his creativity. He'll come up with ideas at the first rehearsal. Then "he takes all his own script things and reworks them and writes them. So that he'll go away and he'll come back with more ideas. When we come back to block, dress and tape...He'll say 'What do you think about this, what do you think about this?'" When he was a young man, Keating recalls, he worked for the famous Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis. "He had this little pet phrase that he would say probably to thousands of actors over the years: 'Astonish me in the morning, dear boy.'" Keating laughs at this, until he's asked if he still tries to astonish. "Every morning , whenever possible. You feel alive when you work. You feel peculiarly adrift when you don't."
New York Daily News
May 9-15, 1996