Obviously he wants her, and at the same time he's teaching her how to escape him. ![]() Really, all you had to do is play what she wrote. I thought she had real affection and even love for that character, but she never shied away from how bad he was. I felt totally different about this, and it really is Paula. "I had been asked to do a film literally just before that - Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter - where the father is a pedophile, and I didn't feel I could do it, because I had so much judgment about that character. "That was painful for me, but that's life," Morse says with a shrug.īut the actor's greatest stage success - starring opposite Mary-Louise Parker in How I Learned to Drive at Off-Broadway's Vineyard Theatre - was still to come. When it came time for a New York transfer, Morse says he expressed strong feelings about what type of venue would be most suitable, until director Michael Mayer and the playwright "got tired of me saying there has to be a right place to do it." Eventually Kevin Bacon would play the role on Broadway. That led to a solo turn as an ex-priest in Heather McDonald's An Almost Holy Picture, which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse. New producers came aboard a year later, but Morse felt that his responsibility to his family, now settled in Philadelphia, came first and declined the part.Įventually he debuted on Broadway in 1995, playing a priest in the short-lived stage adaptation of On the Waterfront. "It was a chance to come to Broadway." After he created the role of Lyman in Seattle, however, the producers changed their minds about bringing the play to Broadway. "I wanted to do this play so badly," says the actor, who accepted the role even though his wife was pregnant with twins. As it happened, Lanford Wilson had written a role specifically for him in a new play called Redwood Curtain. Elsewhere came to an end in 1988, Morse was hankering for the stage. Actors have to sign a seven-year contract and there is no good way out the only person that's going to get hurt is you." There were so many actors who were struggling to do good work." But, he adds, "when you're working like that, it really is about personalities. You really have to be grateful for that experience. It was spectacular writing, one of the best series that has ever been on television. And you could never talk publicly about that. "In fact, for a number of us it was a fairly painful experience. was not picked up - it was the role of Dr. Although he'd resolved not to do television - and thankfully, he says, a pilot he shot with Ted Danson for a Godfather rip-off set in L.A. "I was competing with John Travolta and Treat Williams, who was a big deal then, having a film which nobody saw," Morse recalls. But the distributor went bankrupt, and the film was yanked from theatres. "It's a trap - a lot of faces and voices, very external kind of stuff." After six years, he took the advice of a friend and moved to New York to study with William Esper.īy 1980, having appeared in several Off- and Off-Off-Broadway shows, Morse seemed on the brink of a career in Hollywood: He'd just completed his first film, Inside Moves, and expectations were high. "I had pretty good instincts, I guess, but doing that 10 months out of the year, you accumulate a lot of junk," he says. "We'd do at least four different shows a week." An excellent way for an actor to hone his skills, you'd think, but Morse discovered a downside: "In some ways I learned too many tricks." His heroes were the great English actors - Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud - and his goal was for no one to realize he was the same actor from one show to the next. "This truly was a rep company," he recalls. Morse began his career in 1971 at 17, straight out of high school, with the now defunct Boston Repertory Theatre. ![]() And it all comes to a head on Christmas Eve." ![]() "He's a man who has suffered a lot but has tried to do the right thing for most of his life, and the world has just not seemed to have let him do that. Here too, there's more than meets the eye: "One of the obvious things is he's an alcoholic and trying to be sober for this Christmas Eve," Morse says. He plays Sharky, an Irishman from rural north Dublin who looks after a brother who has recently gone blind. Yet there are many sides to Morse - as there frequently are to his characters, such as the pedophile Uncle Peck in Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, a subtle portrait that won him Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, and Obie awards in 1997.Īfter a 10-year absence from the New York stage, Morse is appearing on Broadway in Conor McPherson's The Seafarer. "To this day, it's almost the first thing people say," reports the actor, who played a physician who loses his wife on the popular 1980s series. Whether he likes it or not, David Morse may always be most associated with St.
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