Uncommon Apprentice

Henry Wiggen is a winner--a blond-and-blue-eyed All-America baseball hero, golden, graceful and uncomplicated. Julian Weston is a maggot-pale homosexual prostitute, strung out like a taut wire between self-inflicted denigration and a yearning for clean, well-lighted love. What these totally disparate characters--the one in John Hancock's film Bang the Drum Slowly, the other in English Playwright John Hopkins' Broadway drama Find Your Way Home --have in common is the very uncommon talent of Actor Michael Moriarty, who plays them both. With the release of the film in August and the opening of the play last month, Moriarty has emerged as one of the top young actors in the U.S.

Moriarty is among a handful of young stars who dominate the recent spate of "masculine mystique" movies -- Al Pacino (Serpico, Scarecrow), Robert De Niro (Bang the Drum, Mean Streets), Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets), Martin Sheen (Badlands). They are nei ther heroic nor antiheroic leading men but character actors. The star quality is there, but deliberately subject to the stage-oriented discipline of craftsman ship and technique. Moriarty is not really a "natural talent," observes Donald Schoenbaum, managing director of Minneapolis' Tyrone Guthrie Theater, where Moriarty spent four seasons in repertory. "His talent is as much intellectual as it is natural."

Unlike stardom, craftsmanship and technique do not happen overnight. Al though his watercolor-washed good looks belie it ("You look ten!" said Katharine Hepburn, his co-star in the recent television version of The Glass Menagerie), the 32-year-old Moriarty has been working hard in the profession for 15 years. "For a long while," he says wryly, "I felt like a barren tree. I knew there were a lot of creative juices inside of me and yet nothing was happening. Then in 1973 I finally bore fruit. Boy, did I ever! It was hanging all over me!"

A shy, withdrawn Detroit teenager, Moriarty was hooked by a high school production of Arsenic and Old Lace. "My whole identity became 'an actor,' "he says."It was a 24-hour obsession."

His career got off to a breezy start.

After graduating from Dartmouth, he won a Fulbright scholarship to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Moreover, Joseph Papp, one of the Fulbright judges, immediately cast him in his first professional role--as Octavius in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Antony and Cleopatra. "I was a bonus baby," recalls Moriarty, "just like in baseball. I was a raw young talent with little technique and a lot of gall based on very weak foundations--which started to crumble when I got to England."

He returned from his year in London with his confidence and his ambition in tatters. But after six months of selling tires back in Detroit, Moriarty auditioned successfully at the Guthrie Theater. At first he was discomfited by the Guthrie's classically English style of acting. "I didn't see the value in being able to say nine lines on one breath," he says. "What was missing is what American actors are known for: interior work, subtext work." But with the advent of Director Mel Shapiro, Moriarty found a mentor whose approach to acting meshed with his own, and he soon was playing increasingly important roles in everything from Mourning Becomes Electra to Merton of the Movies.

Shapiro, who has worked with him in seven plays, describes his performances as "very physical." Nowhere is that physical vocabulary more apparent than in his portrayal of Julian Weston. Neither obtrusively limp-wristed nor so-straight-you'd-never-know-he-was-one, Moriarty captures Julian with a slightly fluttering finger, a momentarily stuttering step, the almost imperceptible lift of his chin. It was not easy to accept the role of a homosexual, he confesses, "because it deals with an area of yourself you don't normally have to deal with." But, he reasoned, if he let his reluctance stop him, "I might as well phone in my resignation as an actor." Eventually he based Julian's character on his mother, an "undisciplined romantic," who died when he was 25.

Moriarty lives now in Greenwich Village with his wife Franchise, a former dancer with the Jeffrey Ballet, and their one-year-old son. A self-taught jazz pianist, he spends his free time filling in at small jazz spots in his neighborhood. He will not become really good as an actor, he says, until he is 40. "All the best work onstage comes from men of 40 and up. That is when the heart begins to creep into the technique in England, and when actors in America learn not to indulge themselves." Meanwhile, audiences can look forward to the next eight years of apprenticeship.

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