CLOSET HAMLET

By DAVID BLUM

I gotta say, this is really a terrific skull," Kevin Kline informs me as he holds Yorick's skull in his hand. We are at the Players club in New York City, standing in the private bedroom of Edwin Booth, the legendary 19th century actor whose Hamlet once defined the role. Kline strokes the skull slowly, lovingly. "Smooth. Very smooth."

Kline has contemplated his fair share of Yoricks. Inside the green canvas bag slung over his shoulder--along with a pack of Marlboro Lights and two recently bought pairs of wire-rim reading glasses--is a copy of Hamlet, a play he has carried with him almost constantly since he moved to New York a quarter-century ago. It is hardly as though he needs to read Hamlet again; he can recite the role from memory and has no current plans to perform the lead, having already done so twice in the past 12 years to warm reviews. Yet, for reasons even Kline cannot quite explain, he chooses to keep Hamlet handy at all times. Ever the dutiful student, the star of the forthcoming movies In & Out and The Ice Storm approaches his 50th birthday on Oct. 24 with the tenacity of a young actor still in search of answers. "It changes every time you read it," he says. "Just when you think you have Hamlet figured out, he does something so unexpected, you have to reconsider him completely."

Could it be that the actor has formed a permanent mind meld with the melancholy Danish prince? In a career that has spanned 15 years of movies, Kline, like the Shakespearean character he most adores, has defied all attempts at easy explanation. He routinely follows up a mainstream Hollywood star turn (like 1993's Dave) with an eccentric role in a smaller film (like last year's Fierce Creatures). He switches--almost as though compelled to do so--from dark dramas like The Ice Storm to broad comedy like In & Out, movies he made back to back. He can play the fool or the hero, but typically prefers to morph them into something new. In an industry in which casting generally reflects a movie star's ability to sell tickets, Kline is that rare exception--an actor whose unique talent has kept his name above the title regardless of his ability to affect the bottom line.

"He really is like Cary Grant, who did the most outrageous comedy and also the most sophisticated line readings," says director Lawrence Kasdan, who has worked with Kline in five movies, including The Big Chill and Silverado. "Here's a guy who's made a lot of money for a long time doing exactly what he wants. I think it's a charmed life."

Charmed indeed. Shuttling constantly between plays and movies, Kline has earned two Tonys and an Oscar by finding and playing variations of Hamlet in other men who suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He first confounded moviegoers in 1982 as Nathan Landau, Meryl Streep's psychotic lover in Sophie's Choice. A year later, he backflipped effortlessly into the running shoes of Harold Cooper in The Big Chill, a successful entrepreneur at odds with his counterculture roots. Even his dual character in Dave--the story of an ordinary man pretending to be President--reflected a Hamlet-like internal struggle between heart and mind.

"In a way, Kevin is exactly like Hamlet," says acting coach Harold Guskin, his first drama teacher at Indiana University in the late 1960s and still a close friend. "Both as an actor and a person. He always makes the illogical choice. He loves doing exactly what you least expect him to do and making it work. Right from the very beginning, when he quit a good job on [the TV soap opera] Search for Tomorrow and didn't have a job for months, he has trusted his instincts. And for good reason."

With his performance as Howard Brackett in In & Out--the Frank Oz comedy about an Indiana schoolteacher who is outed as a homosexual during a former student's televised acceptance speech at the Oscars--Kline brings his Shakespearean inner torment to a comic apex. "I always assumed he'd always known he was gay since adolescence," Kline says of the character. "But like most of us, he has found a way to accommodate that denial." His portrayal of Ben Hood, a father torn between responsibility and lust in The Ice Storm, a 1970s period drama set in suburban Connecticut, also shows a debt to the Bard in its exploration of adultery and family upheaval.

There is even a Shakespearean theme to the commemorative album of photos from the set of The Ice Storm in Kline's Manhattan East Side apartment. The album was a gift from Sigourney Weaver, who plays his mistress in the film. It seems that Kline was rehearsing a benefit Shakespeare performance during shooting and spent every spare moment reciting speeches to the cast and crew. Weaver got director Ang Lee, co-stars Joan Allen, Christina Ricci and others to pose while yawning, sleeping or looking otherwise bored during Kline's endless classical recitations. "I always wait till the yawns are audible before stopping," Kline says.

There have been very few of those since Kline landed in New York in 1970, a drama student at the Juilliard School under John Houseman. As a member of the drama department's first class, which also included William Hurt and Patti LuPone, he played the lead in classics of Shakespeare, Chekhov and Ibsen. Good parts came easily after school too. One of the last roles he remembers not getting is the marine biologist in Jaws. "I remember I told Spielberg at my audition that I knew a marine biologist and he could really help," Kline recalls. "Spielberg said, 'You know, I think I'm more interested in finding a good actor than finding a good marine biologist.'" More than 20 years later, Kline still seems slightly annoyed that he didn't get the part.

For most of his career, however, Kline has got nearly every job he wanted. The roll began with a Tony-winning supporting part as Bruce Granit, an egomaniacal actor in the 1978 musical On the Twentieth Century; that led sitcom producer Norman Lear to beg unsuccessfully for his services. Another Tony followed for his performance as the Pirate King opposite Linda Ronstadt in The Pirates of Penzance in 1981. Movie roles came just as quickly after he landed the highly coveted male lead in Sophie's Choice, opposite eventual Oscar winner Meryl Streep; in 1988 Kline won his own Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in A Fish Called Wanda.

A hiatus from moviemaking led him to actress Phoebe Cates, who was working on a play at New York's Public Theater when Kline was rehearsing Henry V there in 1984. The two had met briefly before at an early reading of The Big Chill, where Cates performed the Meg Tilly role. But it wasn't until Kline hired Cates' former personal assistant as his own--and gave her the job of securing a date with Cates as her first official task--that their relationship began. The couple married three weeks before Kline won his Oscar. Now, eight years later, Kline and Cates have a five-year-old son Owen and a three-year-old daughter Greta. The personal assistant has become an agent.

This fall Kline will return to the theater. He will take the title role in David Hare's adaptation of Chekhov's Ivanov at Lincoln Center, a 10-minute cab ride from his apartment. As we made our way through Manhattan traffic one recent afternoon, I asked Kline if there had ever been a movie role he wished he'd been offered, foolishly imagining that he might occasionally fantasize a more Harrison Ford-like career trajectory. "When I saw John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons," Kline says, "I have to admit I felt some envy about that part. I went right home and called John and told him." Kline professes to have no objection to doing a big-budget action movie but can think of only one action character--a charming hero racked with inner emotional torment--he'd like to play. "I think a gay James Bond would be fun," he says.