He's one of Hollywood's sexiest new stars. So why is Andy Garcia so angry?
From Redbook, January, 1993
by Jennet Conant
It is a bright, cool morning in Los Angeles, and even in this seasonless city, it feels like fall is in the air. On the famous Paramount lot, where "Sunset Blvd" was shot, there is the usual scramble of activity, with producers, directors, and agents all hurrying to meetings and hustling deals. Gazing out at the hubbub from his studio office, Andy Garcia shakes his head and turns away. When he looks up, all the warmth is gone from his handsome face, and the golden-brown eyes, so friendly a moment ago, glitter darkly.
"Do I feel lucky?" he asks, his heart-stopping stare belying the light tone of his voice. "No, I don't feel lucky. Luck would have been a limo picking me up when I arrived in L.A. in 1978, or sitting next to a casting agent on the plane, who would have put me in his next movie." He pauses, letting some of the pressure escape from the moment. "No, I don't feel lucky," he repeats softly. "I have too many war wounds."
The highly charged response is Garcia's answer to an innocent query about his recent stardom. It's also a taste of the intensity-----a searing, soul-baring passion----he can pack into just a few seconds. After a string of combustible performances in such movies as "The Untouchables," "Internal Affairs," and " The Godfather, Part III," the latter netting him an Oscar nomination, and two new movies----"Hero," costarring Dustin Hoffman and Geena Davis, and "Jennifer Eight" with Uma Thurman and John Malkovich----36 year-old Garcia is one of the hottest actors in Hollywood today. Just don't try telling him that.
"Do I like being...?" A movie star? A sex symbol? Garcia can't even bring himself to say the words. He stares furiously at the floor, his voice trailing off, cheek muscles working as he clenches and unclenches his jaw. But he is too gentlemanly (he actually stands up when a woman enters the room) to be uncooperative. "No, I find it uncomfortable," he responds at last, running a hand through his thicket of silky brown hair. Garcia, married for ten years and the father of three daughters, thinks sex appeal is just a shallow show-biz label.
His wife, Marivi, is a beautiful Cuban photographer he met in Miami. Garcia credits her with keeping him "sane" in an insane business. "She's a strong lady," he says. "She's very helpful to me. Acting is very stressful. Celebrity can be very stressful. It's not a normal life."
By Hollywood standards, Garcia leads about as normal a life as possible, devoting his time offscreen to his children, ages nine, four and a half, and one. He does not frequent glitzy restaurants or nightclubs and rarely grants interviews. Garcia doesn't even have a publicist----almost unheard of for a Hollywood star.
"One of the fundamentals about Andy is the lack of show biz," says "Jennifer Eight" director and screenwriter Bruce Robinson. "In another circumstance, he could be your accountant. He is a regular family guy."
Undeniable, though, it is Garcia's remarkable sexuality that shines through in his films. Geena Davis, breathless about her "Hero" costar, has gushed, "He's the most gorgeous man alive." And there was no shortage of chemistry in that movie's love scenes. As one producer candidly observed, "We couldn't pry them apart."
"He's got this appeal," confirms Gary Lucchesi, executive producer of "Jennifer Eight." "He's a man that both men and women like to watch. He's going to be a megastar." Lucchesi recalls the Garcia magic in "The Godfather, Part III," when Garcia playfully shows Sofia Coppola, his love interest in the movie, how to make gnocchi, small Italian potato dumplings, In his hands, the pasta becomes as provocative as the wet clay in "Ghost." Without a single caress, she is completely seduced. When Garcia finally lifts her onto the counter for her first real kiss, she seems miraculously transformed from an innocent girl into a passionate woman.
"It was a very romantic scene," recalls Sofia Coppola, giggling. "It was weird because I was only eighteen at the time, and my dad [director Francis Ford Coppola] was watching. It could have been a nightmare. Andy made it much easier." It didn't hurt that he was cute either, she admits.
Among his fellow actors, Garcia is infamous for giving his roles everything he's got----and then some. During the filming of a jail scene in "Jennifer 8," Garcia, whose character is distraught over the death of a friend he's suspected of killing, charged the gate of his cell with such force that he burst through the movie set and plunged through a plate glass door. Actor Kevin Conway, who plays Garcia's antagonist in the movie, literally ran for cover. "Andy just kept going and finally ended up in an office with the door closed, and no one dared go in," recalls Robinson. "It was phenomenal."
Yet for an explosive actor who can bust noses and break hearts with the best of them, and a man who guards his family's privacy with the skittish ferocity of a Doberman pinscher, Garcia also has an unusually sweet and sensitive side. He readily admits that if he has been lucky in life, it was in having his parents as role models. The youngest of three children, he was born to a conservative Catholic family in Bejucal, Cuba, where his mother, Amelie, taught English, and his father, Rene, was a successful lawyer. But when Fidel Castro came to power, the Garcias lost everything as the country's banks were nationalized and private property confiscated. When Garcia was five years old, his family fled to Miami, taking only what they could carry.
Garcia, who speaks a shy, lightly accented English, talks about his experience as an immigrant----or more precisely, as he points out, "a political exile"----with a mixture of pride and pain. The Garcias had little money, and his father had to work as a jobber in a hosiery company, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. The first few years in Miami were hard. Small for his age, Garcia was constantly in schoolyard scraps, defending himself against slights he may have imagined more than actually understood. "I hit them just to be safe," he says, looking down at his hands with a small smile. "I was having adjustment problems."
By high school, Garcia was fitting right in, and his athletic ability and irresistible looks made him popular. Despite his height----5 feet 11 inches----he was a promising basketball player until a bout with mononucleosis and hepatitis kept him bedridden part of his senior year. "It was a very introspective time, and it was then that acting started to take hold," recalls Garcia, who had performed in school plays for years but until then had never considered it as a profession. After graduation, he enrolled in Florida International University and majored in theater. "From then on, acting was like hunger in the pit of my stomach, and if I didn't cater to it, it got worse."
His parents, who wanted their children to succeed, were understandably apprehensive. "It was the question of how do you make a living for an immigrant family," says Garcia. "Acting was for Bob Hope or Cary Grant. My parents were supportive, but they were concerned that I would lose myself in it and be so dogmatic about it that thirty years later I would still be struggling."
They had no reason to worry. That dogged determination served Garcia well. "All actors have to be stubborn or they'd never find work," he says with a shrug. "Stubbornness and persistence is what got me where I am today." It was a long haul. Florida offered few opportunities, and after making a low-budget film in Spanish, Garcia headed for Los Angeles in 1978. But it would be at least seven years before he would appear in another movie, a small part as a Hispanic detective in "The Mean Season," starring Kurt Russell and Mariel Hemingway.
Like most struggling actors, Garcia did a variety of odd jobs that included a steady gig as a banquet waiter at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. One night he found himself serving Hollywood stars at The Annual Golden Globe Awards ceremony. He waited on actor Jon Voight, who won for his performance in "Coming Home." Voight has since become a friend. "You're always just a salad plate away," says Garcia good-naturedly.
But some of the memories are bitter. In one incident that still rankles, a casting agent kept him waiting hours in the hall, and when he finally got to read for the part, she answered the phone before he got two words out. "She took the call and asked my to proceed," he says in a grave voice. "I said, 'No, I'll go back outside and give you a few minutes.'"
She hung up immediately. Then, impressed with Garcia's performance, she told him to take off his shirt because they wanted someone in good shape. Garcia said no and left. He didn't get the job. "It can be a cruel industry," he says. "It takes no prisoners. You develop a very hard shell or you're out."
Even after receiving critical raves for his performance as a charming, brutal drug dealer in "8 Million Ways to Die" in 1986, Garcia found himself walking away from many roles. He turned down dozens of opportunities to play Hispanic drug dealers. The typecasting became tiresome. "There is a subtle racist thing that happens," says Garcia. "You hear people say so-and-so is 'one of.......(?????????)
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unfortunately, this is the end of what I got from Elizabeth, who typed and sent me this article. It does not finish. If anyone has or can find the rest of the article, please contact me at erielake@geocities.com. Thanks.
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