Kevin Kline

Kevin Kline took his diploma from Juilliard's drama division in 1972 and joined John Houseman's Acting Company, which is where a good many American classical actors of his generation were made. Broadway followed. He won the Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for On the Twentieth Century in 1978, and Best Actor in a Musical for the Pirates of Penzance revival in 1981, playing the Pirate King opposite Linda Ronstadt. He was thirty-three, held two Tony Awards, and had not yet appeared in a film.

The film debut was Sophie's Choice in 1982, as Nathan Landau, opposite Meryl Streep - not a gentle introduction. The Big Chill followed in 1983 and Silverado in 1985. Through all of it he kept returning to the Delacorte for the New York Shakespeare Festival: Richard III in 1983, Henry V in 1984, Hamlet in 1986, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing in 1988. Very few actors were running a Shakespeare career and a Hollywood one at once, and fewer still were any good at both.

Then A Fish Called Wanda, in which he plays Otto West, an American thug who reads Nietzsche without understanding a word of it and is deeply insulted by any suggestion that he is stupid. It is a farce, and farce almost never wins anything, which makes the Best Supporting Actor award at the ceremony in March 1989 a genuine anomaly. He repeated the trick in Dave in 1993, playing a presidential impersonator and the president himself, and again in In & Out in 1997.

The then-and-now question for Kline has a straightforward answer, which is that he went back to the theatre and stayed there. He played Falstaff in Henry IV in 2003 and was nominated for a Tony, played Cole Porter in De-Lovely in 2004 for a Golden Globe nomination, and in 2017, at sixty-nine, won his third Tony for a revival of Noël Coward's Present Laughter. Thirty-nine years separate the first Tony from the third. On that evidence the film work was the interruption, not the career.