Keir Dullea (Actor)

Keir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Photo: MGM)

About Keir Dullea

Raised in NYC's Greenwich Village where his parents ran a bookstore, clean-cut, sensitive-looking leading man Keir Dullea acted in stock and with various repertory companies before finally appearing Off-Broadway in "Season of Choice" (1959). He gained immediate attention for his first two film roles, as the doomed juvenile delinquent in "The Hoodlum Priest" (1961) and as the young emotionally disturbed protagonist of Frank Perry's "David and Lisa" (1962). Looking younger than his years, he continued to play intense, neurotic youths in movies like "The Thin Red Line" (1964), "Bunny Lake Is Missing" (1965) and "Madame X" (1966), finally breaking the typecasting as the man who intrudes upon a lesbian relationship in the film of D H Lawrence's novella, "The Fox" (1967). After his memorable turn as astronaut David Bowman in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), his career seemed ready to blast into a new dimension, but his misses outnumbered his hits in the 1970s and 80s, due as much to his apathy as anything.

Dullea, who now does theater almost exclusively, has enjoyed success on the stage equal to or greater than that of his film career, although no single project brought him more name recognition than "2001". He made his Broadway debut opposite Burl Ives in "Dr Cook's Garden" (1967) and garnered critical acclaim as Donny Dark, the blind boy, in The Great White Way's "Butterflies Are Free" (1969). He returned to Broadway as Brick in the revival of Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1974) and also acted in Broadway productions of "P S Your Cat Is Dead" (1975) and "Doubles" (1985). Leaving Hollywood for good in 1982, Dullea and his third wife, the late director Susan Fuller, ran the Theatre Artists Workshop of Westport (CT), a non-profit organization modeled along the lines of the Actor's Studio. He starred Off-Broadway in "the Other Side of Paradise" (1992), a one-man show about writer F Scott Fitzgerald, and also appeared in a production of "Molly Sweeney" (1997) at the Playmakers Repertory Company in North Carolina.

Notes

About working with Kubrick: "Remember that at the time most sci-fi films were really grade B movies. They were low-budget affairs with poor special effects. Stanley Kubrick was about to change all that ...

"I had never seen sets of that scale indoors. There was so much detail. It was really mindboggling ...

"Kubrick was extremely supportive. He had a real respect for the actors. You felt that. He also had a quiet sense of himself that ultimately spoke of great power ...

"I remember one day when we were ready to shoot and Stanley said he didn't like our boots. For some reason, they weren't quite right. I recall we didn't shoot that day. We simply shot the next day ...

"Kubrick knew every bit as much as the director of photography, Geoffrey Unsworth. The sequence when they followed me walking down the corridor on the way to disconnect HAL was all hand-held. Believe it or not, Kubrick did all the hand-held work himself." --Dullea to Cinefantastique, Spring 1994.

Of his love for the theater: "It is a greater challenge for the actor in me. The magical interaction between actor and audience is something you can't get with film. I always jokily say that films pay the pocket book and theatre pays the soul ... " --Keir Dullea in Empire, April 1998.