Steve Guttenberg was having dinner with a group of actors when a woman asked one of them for an autograph and was refused. Guttenberg, now appearing in “Tales from the Guttenberg Bible” at the George Street Playhouse, recalls that one of the group, Sean Connery, got up and asked the woman if she would like his autograph. The woman asked him to address it to Mary and sign it “James Bond,” and he did.
Guttenberg described that incident while discussing the play, running through Sunday, which recounts his expansive career in movies and television, beginning with his bold arrival in Burbank as a teenager from Queens. In that play, Guttenberg refers to the “humility” and “class” with which Ted Danson and Tom Selleck handled their celebrity status, and mention of that evoked the anecdote about Connery.
“It’s a privilege to be an actor,” Guttenberg said, “and as a famous actor, when people want your autograph or a moment with you, you have to give them the time you can. It’s a public business. If you choose to be an ob/gyn and you’re out to dinner with your family and someone starts to have a baby in the restaurant, you have to deliver that baby.”
“Tales from the Guttenberg Bible” employs Guttenberg and four other actors in a humorous account of his successful if nervy arrival on the Hollywood scene. The story is told both in terms of his encounters with scores of characters, including agents, casting directors, and other actors and in terms of his grounding in his family back in New York.
Since he literally crashed Paramount studios when he was only a few weeks out of high school, Guttenberg has appeared in dozens of films and television shows, including the “Police Academy” series, “Three Men and a Baby,” “Cocoon: The Return,” “Saturday Night Live,” “The Goldbergs,” “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” and multiple other late-night and interview shows.
In the play, the young Steven asks rhetorically, “Do you have to love the lights to be an actor?” And the mature Steven’s answer to that is, “Yes.”
“You need to love to perform,” Guttenberg said in a recent conversation. “You have to love to be in the spotlight, be the center of attention when you are working. To be a carpenter, you have to love working with wood. To be a doctor, you have to love making someone healthy again—and that may mean cutting them open, looking at situations that are untenable to the average person. If you don’t love sitting at a desk and being inside, it’s difficult to be a master banker or hedge fund manager. It doesn’t happen outside in a park. To be an actor, you must be able to stand on stage in front of thousands of people and do a monologue, be on a television set where the is one eye on you, and it’s a lens.”
However, Guttenberg doesn’t think that loving the limelight is enough of a basis for a solid career. If he were advising contemporary versions of his younger self, he said, he would point out that “the lords, the knights in the acting world” are intelligent and well read. He cited Laurence Olivier, Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino as examples.
“Read,” he would tell aspiring actors. “R-E-A-D, read! Become familiar with the classics; learn a language; be as smart as you can be. Educate yourself. That’s the only way you’re going to get ahead.”
There is a funny passage in the play in which a functionary for the Screen Actors Guild repeatedly mispronounces Guttenberg’s name but tells him he can keep it because there is no other Guttenberg in the union’s files. Later, however, an agent advises him to adopt a new name that is both “macho” and “non-Jewish.” And, Guttenberg said, he heard comments during his career that he “looked too Semitic.”
He kept his name and his look.
“You can only play with the equipment you’re given,” he said. “I don’t pretend to be anyone else.”
The George Street Playhouse has co-produced “Tales from the Guttenberg Bible” with the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, where it will play next. “Then, we’ll figure out where we’ll go from there,” Guttenberg said. “I’d like to bring it to New York.”
“Tales from the Guttenberg Bible” runs at George Street Playhouse until May 21, 2023. For ticket information, click here.
PHOTOS © T. Charles Erickson Photography
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