Kevin Kline, photographed during the Toronto International Film Festival in September, first encountered playwright Israel Horovitz’s work while he was studying at Juilliard in New York.Christopher Wahl/The Globe and Mail
Surely a casting notion qualifies as divinely inspired when the actor you're considering appears out of thin air – Parisian thin air, no less – the moment you say his name.
That is just what happened a few years ago in the second-floor dining room of Café de Flore when a French producer asked Israel Horovitz who he was thinking of casting as the male lead in his self-directed film adaptation of his three-character play, My Old Lady.
"'Kevin Kline,' I said. And suddenly there, at the top of the stairs, he was – Kevin Kline," the 75-year-old playwright said.
At Horovitz's recollection of the encounter during the Toronto International Film Festival last month, the actor shrugged as though such feats of magic were merely to be expected. "Yep. There I was. In the flesh," Kline said.
For Horovitz, the sudden appearance of his first choice to portray Mathias – a fiftysomething American alcoholic who has no idea that the Paris flat he has inherited includes a ninetysomething expat British grand dame (Maggie Smith) and her single, fortysomething daughter (Kristin Scott Thomas) – was another sign that his decision to adapt his 2002 play for film was the right move.
"I wanted to do something to kind of scare me. To shake me," Horovitz explained. "I've had more than 70 plays that have been produced, most of them in New York. So moving from No. 74 to No. 75 isn't as exciting as moving from, let's say, two to three. I wanted to do something that wasn't familiar. So it was in the back of my mind that I might direct a movie or climb Kilimanjaro.
"And then I was watching the play in Moscow, in a language that I don't speak and the actress was not what I had in my imagination at all … I just started to daydream. So I'm watching the play and I thought, gosh it would be really wonderful to do this movie." As he pondered the miscasting of the Russian production, Horovitz imagined the ideal cast for his movie. Kline sprang to mind immediately.
The two go way back. When Kline was studying at the Juilliard School in New York, a student production of Horovitz's The Indian Wants the Bronx was being launched, and Horovitz gave his time generously to the school and students.
Although Kline wasn't in the play, he was transfixed by Horovitz's presence. "I was a drama student," the actor recalled. "And I remember being very impressed that the playwright, this playwright, took such interest in young actors doing his work."
Or, in Kline's case, not doing his work. Over the years, the actor's extensive stage and screen experiences somehow failed to include any Horovitz plays or screenplays, but the playwright kept a close eye on the former Juilliard student. Kline had a skill for navigating the razor's edge between comedy and tragedy, and when it came to imagining who might best incarnate the deeply conflicted Mathias – who wraps a core of self-loathing beneath a veneer of breezy wisecracks – Kline was it.
"There's a naturalism to Israel's work. He writes real people," Kline said. "There's a complexity to … the very idea of taking Mathias and putting him in this strange place where he has to find his footing and the people don't speak his language. Mathias is working out a lot of stuff and, in pure actor-speak, I would say the greatest thing is I get to do a lot of different things. And that's true of a lot of Israel's writing and why actors want to do it: because you get to do tonal turns here and there, and that's very challenging, scary and attractive."
"But if I can interject," Horovitz said, "it isn't every actor who can play both ends of the scale. But Kevin really can do both comedy and tragedy equally well. And sing and dance and play the piano."
"I can juggle, too," Kline added.
Not to mention appear out of nowhere.