It’s about actor Richard Dreyfuss. And good on him, for his work in education.
Smithsonian magazine for January-February interviews the 68-year-old Dreyfuss about his upcoming role as financial fraudster and uber-thief Bernie Madoff. Dreyfuss’s career has come a long way since his “I’ll get the cops” line in The Graduate back in 1968.
Looks like Dreyfuss is a great fit to play Madoff. They both are natives of Bayside, a section of Queens in New York City. Dreyfuss tells of his youth as a streetwise, smartass kid who grappled with the big questions of good and evil with the specters of communism, socialism, and fascism lurking in the background. His big breakthrough as an actor was a wise guy in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.
(Aside – that book was by Mordecai Richler, a Canadian who also wrote some superb stuff about professional hockey and the six-team NHL. Read his Dispatches from the Sporting Life, and you’ll agree.)
In the interview, Dreyfuss compares the amoral Madoff to Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. The evil that Iago wrought goes beyond the merely personal to the cosmic. He wants to destroy everything in his path.
Dreyfuss also talks about his work in Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and about how his career spun out of control – literally – back in 1982 and nearly got him killed. He’d made it big, gone Hollywood, and was sleeping around and indulging heavily in recreational chemicals. One night he threw a tantrum, stormed out of a tryst, and flipped his Mercedes convertible off the road into a canyon.
Miraculously, he survived that accident and “turned his life around,” as the trite line goes. That’s why I say “Good on him.” He’s a former “red diaper baby,” a child of socialist/communist-leaning parents, and still serious about big-picture political discussions like those he heard growing up.
It’s not that all such discussions were about weighty issues. Once, when he asked his mother why she was a socialist instead of a communist, she replied “Better doughnuts.”
But that seriousness propelled him to study political philosophy at Oxford and, ultimately, to take the lead in the Dreyfuss Civics Initiative.
He also cites the important influence of his wife Svetlana, a most impressive lady whom I once had the pleasure of meeting. Svetlana is a Russian émigré and daughter of a KGB heavyweight. She let Richard know what it was like, even for those in the power elite, to live in a country where civics is non-existent.
The Smithsonian interview states that Dreyfuss believes “deeply in the brilliance of the Constitution, and that what’s really wrong with America, and the world for that matter, is that no one any longer teaches or studies the values of the Constitution.”
The article goes on to say that Dreyfuss seeks to “encourage civics education and Enlightenment values at a time when Enlightenment values – tolerance, free speech and the like – are under attack by sectarian values in the world.”
Sound familiar, boys and girls?
Let’s let Dreyfuss himself have the last word on the subject.
“You’ve got to protect the system of secular faith in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and Enlightenment values. That way you can protect all religions.”
And I’ll repeat my last word on Richard Dreyfuss: Good on him!
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