I Said Whoopie!
Mar. 16th, 2006 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lynxreignFrom Salon's movie reviews at the Austin film festival.
4) Charles Nelson Reilly is still alive, dammit, and boy does he have a story to tell. You'd have to be a Broadway devotee of a certain age to remember Reilly as anything but the queeny, captain-hatted wisecracker on "Match Game," plus just maybe a comic character actor on various '60s TV series. But as his solo show "The Life of Reilly" (documented in a film of the same name) demonstrates, Reilly is an actor of tremendous natural range with an extraordinary life story. Now in his mid-70s, Reilly cuts a commanding figure, spinning stories of his impoverished childhood in the Bronx and Hartford, Conn., his extraordinary career in New York theater, and his friendships with Steve McQueen, Burt Reynolds, Hal Holbrook, Jack Lemmon, Jerry Stiller and other classmates in the glory days of Herbert Bergdof and Uta Hagen's acting studio. He's too much a man of his generation and background to discuss his personal life, but along the way "The Life of Reilly" lets us know how much the world has changed. When Reilly first auditioned for NBC in the '50s, he tells us, he was dismissed: "They don't let queers on television." By the end of the next decade, he was one of the medium's most recognizable faces.
4) Charles Nelson Reilly is still alive, dammit, and boy does he have a story to tell. You'd have to be a Broadway devotee of a certain age to remember Reilly as anything but the queeny, captain-hatted wisecracker on "Match Game," plus just maybe a comic character actor on various '60s TV series. But as his solo show "The Life of Reilly" (documented in a film of the same name) demonstrates, Reilly is an actor of tremendous natural range with an extraordinary life story. Now in his mid-70s, Reilly cuts a commanding figure, spinning stories of his impoverished childhood in the Bronx and Hartford, Conn., his extraordinary career in New York theater, and his friendships with Steve McQueen, Burt Reynolds, Hal Holbrook, Jack Lemmon, Jerry Stiller and other classmates in the glory days of Herbert Bergdof and Uta Hagen's acting studio. He's too much a man of his generation and background to discuss his personal life, but along the way "The Life of Reilly" lets us know how much the world has changed. When Reilly first auditioned for NBC in the '50s, he tells us, he was dismissed: "They don't let queers on television." By the end of the next decade, he was one of the medium's most recognizable faces.
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