PASADENA, Calif. — Although Michael O’Neill has been acting for 30 years, he feels he’s really a farmer at heart.
“I think my DNA is a farming DNA, so I believe you till the soil and you get the best seeds you can afford, and you put them in, and you cover it, and you give it the best environment you can. And then you pray for rain ‘cause you just don’t know,” he says. “And that’s the part that helped me get through.”
Getting through — not farming but acting — took O’Neill a very long time. Although he’s costarred in “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Seabiscuit,” “The West Wing” and scores of other projects, he figures he’s always been a late bloomer.
He grew up in Montgomery, Ala., the oldest child. “I was never naughty as a kid — I got naughtier as I got older. I got younger as I got older,” he says.
“I was kind of old as a kid. I had to look after my mom a lot.” His mother was often incapacitated. “I had a lot of responsibility. I felt like a loner a lot because you hide. I think for about 30 years I’ve been looking for a role that made me feel like I fit in,” he says.
That role has finally arrived with NBC’s new drama, “Council of Dads,” which returns Thursday with the pilot at 9 p.m. and Episode 2 at 10. O’Neill plays the AA sponsor to a young man who’s stricken with cancer. Realizing his life is in jeopardy, the young man enlists a group of friends to act as surrogate dads.
“It’s close to my experience,” continues O’Neill. “I’m flawed, but trying to do the right thing. I’m older. I’m a Southerner. I didn’t serve in Vietnam, but that was my war … And I’m an old parent. I had my children late,” he nods.
An address that O’Neill wrote and presented his last year of college found its way to veteran actor Will Geer. Out of the blue Geer phoned him one night.
“And he said, ‘Son, I think you ought to try acting before the corporate structure snaps you up.’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything about it.’ And he said, ‘Come to California and we’ll work with you.’”
Armed with $130 his dad had given him, O’Neill packed up his ’71 Volkswagen bug and headed for Los Angeles. He’d loaded all the plants that he’d grown in the back, squeezing past California’s plant-restrictive border by covering them up. “And I got there and I had $60 and I spent $58 on a guitar,” he laughs.
“And I got a job as the garage attendant at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, my first job. Ten at night till 6 in the morning. It was a rough place then. It’s tony now, but it was not then.”
He stayed in L.A. for about four years when he realized he needed training to be an actor. “So I went back to New York and studied with Bill Esper, who trained a lot of good actors,” recalls O’Neill.
“He really saved me. He turned to me about 10 o’clock one morning and said, ‘Son, you’re going to have to watch your drinking.’ It took a while, but I did eventually. He presented it in a way — it was hard — he said, ‘It’s gonna be hard. It’s gonna take you maybe 10 or 12 years. Or maybe more — maybe 20.’ And I still discover things and realize that’s was he meant almost 40 years ago now.”
It was six years before O’Neill finally copped a paycheck as an actor. “I was working construction, garages, whatever I could do to keep body and soul together. A bicycle messenger in New York — that was one of the craziest jobs I ever worked. Used to unload box cars on the Penn line, did carpentry work, taught fifth grade for a little while in a parochial school,” he says.
“I waited tables to pay for acting school, worked doubles on the weekends. I got fired from every waiting job I had. I think I might’ve had a little bit of an ‘attitude.’ I wasn’t always gracious about it. The last job I got fired at, I got fired for throwing spoons at the owner.”
O’Neill was 45 when he finally married attorney Mary O’Keefe. “She moved to California, married a violinist, and that didn’t last too long,” he muses. “And I was living with an actress in New York, and that didn’t last very long.
“And I kept running into her. I was shooting a film in California, and I would bump into her in the foyer of a theater.
“Or I was walking down Broadway in New York and bumped into her at 64th and Broadway. We finally bumped into each other at the root beer section of Gelson’s market in Marina del Rey. It was about the ninth time we’d done that. So I said, ‘You want to go out? We should figure out what this is.’ So we did.”
But the late bloomer didn’t waste any time becoming a father. Their first daughter was born two years after they married, and twin girls arrived the following year. All three are college-trained and have no interest in show business.
Looking back O’Neill ponders, “For every public moment I’ve ever enjoyed, my family’s paid the private price for it. I think I’m a decent dad, I’m a fair husband — she’s still trying to train me; she’s working on it. Because of the uncertainty, and because I was so self-absorbed. I think I missed a lot with my family. In that regard, there was a price that was paid.”
TV OFFERS HISTORY LESSONS FOR THE UNSUSPECTING
The History Channel is dishing a spoonful of sugar with an exculpatory history lesson. Three times a week the channel will offer tidy trips to the past wrapped in interesting and unusual packages for kids and parents who are bored out of their skulls.
Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 11 a.m. viewers can cozy up to hosts like Laurence Fishburne (“Blackish”), sports icon Billie Jean King, TV host Padma Lakshmi and bestselling authors like Dan Abrams and Brad Meltzer (who’s hilarious) and many more.
Some of the lessons will relate to objects of today like hospital ships, the nursing field and that ever-precious commodity, toilet paper. Other sessions will cover a variety of subjects like some of our obscure U.S. presidents — Millard Fillmore, anyone? How can we imagine the genius of Leonardo da Vinci? And what were the daring exploits of aviator Bessie Coleman?
PBS is also unpacking its trunk of history gems with a few of Ken Burns’ documentaries for “American History Night with Ken Burns,” airing Thursdays. “National Parks: America’s Best Idea” and “War,” will be featured. PBS Learning Media — a site for students and educators — will also air what they call “Ken Burns in the Classroom” displaying his films “The Dust Bowl,” “The Civil War,” “The War” and “National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”
Crackle is introducing what it calls its “Homeschool Channel” for the small kiddies up to 8 with programming that can help educate (or at least keep them occupied for a while). The shows include “Animal Tales,” “Baby Einstein” and “Elf Learning for Kids.”
ORMOND STARS IN NOIRISH DRAMA
Turnabout is fair play in this new drama coming to Acorn TV next Monday. Julia Ormand portrays an older divorcee who falls in love with a man 25 years her junior in the series, “Gold Digger.” While she feels rejuvenated by the experience, her family is not so thrilled.
The show, which airs in two-hour segments every Monday through May 18, is classified as a “domestic noir” and proves to be more than a May-December romp.
Ormond tells me why she’s interested in performing. “I’ve always been fascinated by what it is to be a human being and what I have found about acting is that everybody has a great story,” she says.
“Every individual that you come across has a great story to tell. What I love about it is, the longer I’ve been an actor, the more that stuff seems a shortcut. I will have amazing conversations with cab drivers or with people I’ve spent five minutes with — they open up and their story comes out. I love the exploration of storytelling.
“A friend of mine is a researcher at USC and she defined it much more eloquently that I have: that we are, as human beings, fundamentally storytellers. If you took away our ability to tell stories, it’s a fundamental thing that keeps us alive. And for me, it’s not so much being an actor; it’s being part of that creative world of telling stories. Film or television or radio or theater is an elevated way for us to tell.”
SEINFELD’S BACK ON THE TUBE
For the first time in 22 years Jerry Seinfeld is risking stand-up again. Netflix will begin streaming “Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill” on May 5, a one-hour session from the jolly genius who starred in his own supercharged show for nine seasons.
Seinfeld tells me that he never thought of himself as funny. “I thought EVERYBODY was funny when I was a kid. I just remember laughing and other kids making me laugh, and just thinking, ‘Let’s just laugh our fool heads off,”‘ he says.
“But then somehow during the college years people started to get very serious about life and say, ‘Well, I think I should become a doctor.’ And I thought, ‘Gee, you never had any interest in that. Why would you want to be a doctor?’ That’s when I felt myself leaving the pack.”
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(Luaine Lee is a California-based correspondent who covers entertainment for Tribune News Service.)
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©2020 Luaine Lee
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.