Ellen's Mandy Patinkin Page |
TV Guide Nov 27 - Dec 3, 1999 |
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OH MANDY! |
FOLLOWING HIS OWN Rx FOR HAPPINESS, MANDY PATINKIN RETURNS TO CHICAGO HOPE AND BREATHES NEW LIFE INTO HIS OLD SHOW BY MARION HART IN 1995, AT the end of Chicago Hope's first season, Mandy Patinkin quit his starring role as Dr. Jeffrey Geiger because he had a problem doing' two things at once. Although he would win an Emmy that same year, Patinkin felt he had sacrificed his relationship with his sons, Isaac 'and Gideon, then 13 and 9, and his wife, playwright-actress Kathryn Grody, in the process. "I couldn't do work and family together," says the 47-year-old actor, seated in the study of his rambling apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "There weren't enough hours in the day for the amount of time and effort I needed to do the [show] and the amount of time and effort I need to do home." But over the last several years Patinkin has perfected his work-and-family juggling act so skillfully that when Chicago Hope creator David E. Kelley asked him to return to the role of Dr. Geiger, he said yes. Kelley also upped the stakes by firing much of the existing cast (Geiger, as the hospital's new CEO, did the dirty work onscreen) and redirecting the show's focus. And so far the shake-up has paid off: Chicago Hope cracked Nielsen's Top 20 for the first time in late October.
Watching Patinkin "do home" on this bright fall day, it's clear he has become a multitasking whiz. While exchanging preliminary niceties, he bustles to make his interviewer comfortable, pouring a tall glass of ice water and moving furniture around to create a suitable perch for the tape recorder. Then, just as he hunkers into his swivel chair to start chatting, the doorbell rings. "Sorry," he says sheepishly, with a shrug and a smile. "I'm the only one here." A handyman has arrived to fix a leaky faucet. Before returning with more apologies, Patinkin answers the door again for some neighbor kids looking for his sons and checks in on his sick Labrador retriever, Nando. Seeing the domesticated Patinkin in action - happily shifting gears between the public and private sectors of his life-tells you a lot about his new priorities. It's clear he has come a long way from the overextended wreck he became during his first tour of duty at Chicago Hope (CBS, Thursdays, 9 P.M./ET), portraying the brilliant heart surgeon whose life unraveled after his emotionally unstable wife (Kim Greist) drowned their infant son. "It was like playing Hamlet," Patinkin says. "Only Hamlet you do once a night for four, six or seven weeks - six months tops. I was doing this thing for nine months, 16 hours a day, and I was playing a guy who was having a breakdown. Keeping that level of intensity wiped me out. I needed a break." He also needed a lot more quality time with his family, who had stayed behind in New York while he went off to the West Coast to shoot the show. Loath to uproot their sons, the Patinkins hatched plans for six family reunions in Los Angeles over the course of the season-but five had to be canceled because of the show's demanding schedule. When they did see each other, Patinkin was totally consumed with learning his next script. Once the season ended, the beleaguered actor asked to be released from his five-year contract and headed back to New York and a much saner life.
Saner by Patinkin's standards, anyway. Though he says, "Everything else I do is family friendly," even a single guy might have had trouble keeping the pace he has maintained during his four-year hiatus. Patinkin performed 40 national concert gigs a year, singing material from his 1995 Broadway musical tribute album, Oscar & Steve, and his 1998 CD, Mamaloshen, a collection of Yiddish songs. He cropped up in such diverse bigscreen vehicles as John Sayles's "Men With Guns" (1998) and this fall's "The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland." He appeared last August in the Showtime movie Strange Justice, a drama about the 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings. And he found his political voice, raising $150,000 at some recent concerts for the gun control-advocacy group PAX and the medical-relief group Doctors Without Borders, in reaction to the Littleton, Colorado, shootings and the carnage in Kosovo. His latest assist occurred in his own kitchen, where he made potato latkes with his mother, cookbook author Doralee Patinkin Rubin, for TV GUIDE'S Celebrity Dish (the series premieres on the Food Network on November 28). Patinkin's mom-who has written two cookbooks, Grandma Doralee Patinkin's Jewish Family Cookbook and Grandma Doralee Patinkin's Holiday Cookbook: A Jewish Family's Celebrations (St. Martins Press) - passed on to her son a love for the old family recipes. "I never thought I could be touched by a cookbook," Patinkin recalls. "I realized my mother took great pride in cooking. This was her life's work." As for his own life's work, Chicago Hope is back in the running, thanks to a lighter schedule. In keeping with the show's new mandate to highlight the practice of program medicine-not any one character-Geiger will be featured in around a dozen episodes this year. Still, his presence-and Patinkin's---makes a difference. "Mandy has an amazing capacity to be both arrogant and heartfelt at the same time," says Michael Pressman, one of Hope's original directors, whom Kelley brought back to share executive producing duties with the show's new head writer, Henry Bromell. “[His performance is] a brilliant piece of acting. He delights in it; we all delight in it.” And he shows no signs of slowing down. As Patinkin prepares to record a new album and to take on a starring role in the Broadway musical "The Wild Party" early next year, his delight shows. "I’ve been doing it all," he crows. And his costars have noticed he's a new man. "I think Mandy's accepted the fact that being in front of the camera and onstage balances out his talent," says Hope costar Hector Elizondo. "He's got the best of both worlds, and God bless him. It's good to have him back." The feeling is mutual. "It's been a glorious reunion," Patinkin says. "It's rare in life that you get to go back to where you grew up and fix some of the things that needed to get fixed." For now, it seems, hope springs eternal. |
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