Jason Robards: The Iceman Cometh

The Place: Harry Hope's bar, a cheap gin-mill of the five-cent whiskey, last-resort variety situated downtown on the West Side of New York.

The Time: Salesman Hickey's birthday celebration, two days during the summer of 1912 - a time when all tomorrows are forced abruptly to become today; when the delineation between hopes, dreams, and pipe dreams disintegrates; when "self-knowledge" destroys self-respect, compassion - and life.

Jason Robards portrayed Hickey on Broadway in 1985. The production was at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. He had a long history of working with O'Neill plays and for many years he was considered *the* Hickey. Until Kevin Spacey came along. last year, Mr. Robards was one of the honorees of the Kennedy Center Honors and Kevin was one of the people there to honor him.

There was an article about Jason Robards in the Arts section of theWashington Post last year on the day of the honors. He talked about Eugene O'Neill and how the O'Neill plays he was in paralleled the things that were happening in his own life. It's very moving to hear him speak about his own mother and the role of the mother in LDJIN and Jamie Tyrone's feeling for his mother in The Moon For The Misbegotten and how that affected him. He also talks about the life of an actor and how his father reacted to his wanting to be an actor and his own kids going into the business.


Kevin had very nice things to say about Jason Robards and I'll try to find my clippings from the paper last year to share them with you.

Kevin also received a note from Mr. Robards on the opening night of Kevin's Broadway run of The Iceman Cometh, passing the Hickey torch to Kevin.

Kevin and Mr. Robards appeared together to hand out a Tony award during the telecast of that year's ceremony.

~

Appreciation
Actor Jason Robards, A Life Between the Lines

By Lloyd Rose
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 28, 2000

Playing Ben Bradlee in the 1976 movie "All the President's Men," Jason Robards Jr. (who died Tuesday at the age of 78) was a poster boy for Journalism as the Good Life. Everyone remembers his swagger through the newsroom when The Post scored a point against the Nixon White House: The scene made some of his obituaries. There was a gleam in his eye that said, "Got the bastards!"

Who knows how many luckless young souls saw the movie and went into journalism, having watched that triumphant one-man procession and thought, "I want to be like that." Fuhgeddabout it. They hadn't a prayer of being Ben Bradlee. Or, for that matter, Jason Robards Jr., a mega-swaggerer in his own field, in whose dust many a lesser talent panted.

Robards won an Oscar for "President's Men" and another for "Julia" (he played Dashiell Hammett), and was nominated for his crafty, comic performance as Howard Hughes in "Melvin and Howard." He was always sound and often inspired. But his greatness was on the stage.

The Irish American Robards performed in Eugene O'Neill's plays like a blood brother to that moody genius: quixotic, haunted, drink- and guilt-ridden, with a hint of self-destructive violence and a swift and changeable charm. To the good fortune of lovers of acting, his starmaking 1956 performance as Hickey in "The Iceman Cometh" is preserved on videotape (though only in archives at present) and he re-created his Jamie Tyrone (based on O'Neill's elder brother) in the film version of "Long Day's Journey Into Night" (others in the amazing cast: Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn, Dean Stockwell).

An actor with a complex presence is blessed, and Robards had this blessing. It was, as the saying goes, a day's work to look into his eyes. They were untrustworthy, those eyes. At their most limpid, they were shadowed with a coming deceit. At their most lost, they held a gleam of possible redemption.

Robards indulged his paradoxes. The artist sometimes became the slob. Elia Kazan, who directed him in Arthur Miller's "After the Fall," considered him out-and-out lazy. Certainly, three of the four times I saw him onstage -- a New York revival of "Long Day's Journey Into Night," rotating in repertory with "Ah, Wilderness!," and a pre-Broadway Baltimore production of the slight "Park the Car in Harvard Yard," all in the '80s -- he defined that old cliche "phoning in his performance."

But I also saw his Hickey in the 1984 revival of "The Iceman Cometh" (which played at the Kennedy Center). Robards's shifty camaraderie in the role, the aristocratic disdain under his hail-fellow-well-met mask, the abominable and pathetic neediness, were lacerating. When the briefly reformed Hickey preaches to his former pals about the straight and narrow, you could sense the actor's ironic use of his own very public bouts with alcoholism and recovery. He strip-mined his own humiliation and misery. That's the kind of thing people are talking about when they make those sometimes improbable-sounding claims about the courage of artists.

© 2000 The Washington Post Company

*Jason Robards won an Oscar for his 1976 performance as Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee in "All The President's Men."

http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56832-2000Dec27.html

Much-Honored Actor Jason Robards Dies By Martin Weil

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54024-2000Dec27.html

Oscar-Winning Actor Jason Robards Dies 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53004-2000Dec26.html

Kevin's tribute to Jason Robards

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/14/arts/14SPAC.html?pagewanted=1

Fellow Actors Honor Jason Robards  February 26, 2001

Driving Mr. Spacey!: The positively untrue life and times of Kevin Spacey,
with a few real facts thrown in for fun.

All collages and photo enhancements were done by me using Microsoft® Picture It!® 99