TALKING ABOUT KEVIN

April 26, 2009 (Irish Independent)

Kevin Anderson shot to fame opposite Julia Roberts in 'Sleeping with the Enemy' but then fell off the US acting radar after a horrific motorbike collision. But the humility he found as he recovered helped him to prepare for the Irish production of 'The Shawshank Redemption', writes Andrea Smith.

'People had to shower me and wipe my ass, and I had to learn to walk again, and put on my underwear," says American actor Kevin Anderson, describing the 1994 road accident that put him out of commission for a year. "It was the best thing that ever happened to me though, because I had gotten too big for my breeches."

Charming and personable, with tousled hair and a killer smile, Kevin is in Dublin to take the lead role of Andy Dufresne in the forthcoming world stage premiere of The Shawshank Redemption at the Gaiety Theatre.

He is probably best known to Irish audiences for his role as Ben Woodward, the nice guy Julia Roberts falls for after leaving her abusive husband in the 1991 film Sleeping with the Enemy.

"Julia really is how you would imagine her to be," he says. "She's talkative and very friendly and a real gal. We had really nice chemistry on Sleeping with the Enemy, and of course, we both had big hair!"

Growing up in the small farming community of Gurnee, Illinois, Kevin was the youngest of five children. His late father Joe worked in a local steel plant, while his mother Marilyn was a court reporter.

The signs that young Kevin possessed an emerging acting talent came at school. He won "best in state" at Forensics, the American school speech competitions, in which his speciality was oral interpretation -- taking a scene from a play and playing all the different characters.

"I was way more confident as a child than I am as an adult," he says. "As the youngest, I learned to be the comic to relieve family tension. I was a natural show-off then, but it was interesting that I became an actor, because actually I'm quite a shy person now."

After school, Kevin attended the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago, which he found very liberating, coming from a very conservative small town.

"It was so freeing," he says. "I was really lucky to have had amazing teachers there who really encouraged me. I wouldn't have had the cojones to do it on my own. I started working in Chicago after that, but I was very young-looking for my age, so I ended up playing a lot of ingenues, which drove me crazy. And even though I loved to sing, I was never that big on musicals."

The turning point for Kevin was being asked to join the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, which included actors of the calibre of John Malkovich and Laurie Metcalf. Its founders, Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry, became his personal mentors, taking him down an emotional path that would enhance his acting.

Landing a part in the Steppenwolf production of Orphans gave Kevin his big break, playing the frenetic, simian younger brother, Phillip. The role took him all over the world, from Broadway to the West End, and he was also in the movie version, alongside Albert Finney and Matthew Modine.

"It was a golden era of my life, where good things happened so easily," he reflects. "Most actors go to New York, share an apartment with five others, and struggle to make a living. I had never been to New York before, and I was suddenly in this incredibly successful show on Broadway, and had people dying to represent me."

With a career trajectory that was going stellar, Kevin came to London for a year to do Sunset Boulevard with Patty LuPone, after which the show was planned for Broadway. Then, much to Kevin's disappointment, producer Andrew Lloyd Webber decided to drop LuPone for the Broadway run, in favour of Glenn Close, who was playing the part in an LA production. Close would later go on to win a Tony award for the role.

Disappointed and angry, Kevin decided to work off his frustration by taking off on a solo cross-country motorbike trip. He didn't wait around to see if there was a role for him in the new arrangement, although he learned later that an interest had been expressed in him playing opposite Close.

"I was kind of hurt, and felt a loyalty to Patty so I just took off," he admits. "Also, I had all of these agents and lawyers and business people in my life at that point, and I just needed to get away."

Kevin's plan was to drive along the ocean to Vancouver and then take the One motorway all the way back down. Alas, the plan went pear-shaped on October 6, 1994, when he was in collision in Seattle with an old lady turning left.

He was knocked off his bike in what the police would later deem a "no-fault" accident. He got "crunched" but thankfully it wasn't a head-on collision.

With compound fractures of the femur, tibia and fibula, Kevin went into surgery to have a steel plate and rod inserted in his broken right arm and left leg. His injuries also caused an embolism that could have proved fatal.

After several weeks in hospital, he was flown to the family home, where his mother Marilyn was living on her own after his father's death from cancer a few years earlier. An incredibly resilient woman, she also coped with losing Kevin's older brother, Tim in a road accident around that time. (Another brother, Jeff, sadly passed away last autumn following liver problems).

"It was hard, because I was 34, and in a hospital bed in the middle of my mother's living room," he says. "I was literally like a spider caught in a web. My mom took care of me, and then Dawn (Spence), the girl I was seeing, came over from London to help."

Having been so angry and fired-up prior to the accident, something got realigned spiritually during this time, he says. Without sounding Pollyanna-ish, he felt pure and appreciative and grateful for everything that was being done for him.

"I was pretty full of myself up to then," he says. "It's not like the accident made me a saint, but it changed me because I was so grateful to be alive. Not that my old self doesn't come nipping me in the ass at times still, but it made me see what was important. I try to be patient, kind and fair, and if someone pisses me off, I do my best to take a step back to think before I react."

While Kevin was told that he wouldn't be able to walk for at least a year, he was standing, gingerly, with the help of a cane, by three months. He was walking about six months later, and running after a year.

Naturally enough, he worried about the effect being out of commission would have on his career. Having been in London for a year, and incapacitated for a further year, he was off the American radar for a long time.

"I panicked at first, but it was freeing in a weird way," he says. "I was very ambitious and driven and competitive, and had been on an incredible voyage, but I had started to lose parts of myself along the way. When the accident happened, I didn't have to worry about my career, because I had lost control of it."

"Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't had the accident though," he muses. "I was going forward at a pretty aggressive pace, and my movie career was never quite as strong again as it was then."

Once he had recovered, Kevin moved to Malibu and set up home with Dawn, an actress and singer from Middlesbrough, England. The pair had met in London while Kevin was doing Sunset, and have been together ever since.

Although, they haven't married, after 15 years together, they're pretty much married in every other way, he says.

They're both very independent spirits, and Dawn frequently returns to London for work, where she specialises in musicals. Her roles include playing Velma Kelly opposite Jennifer Ellison's Roxie Hart in Chicago in the West End.

Once he was back in circulation, the roles started coming in again for Kevin, who has had a hugely successful career in movies, TV and theatre. Most recently, he starred alongside Al Pacino in Oscar Wilde's Salome at the Wadsworth Theatre in LA.

In the US, he is best known as Father Ray from ABC's Nothing Sacred, which we didn't get here. He played a maverick Catholic priest, rebelling against church hypocrisy and authority for the greater good. Although the programme was dropped over viewing figures, Kevin was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance in 1998.

"I was proud of the fact that I was recognised for a series that didn't get the numbers," he says.

Around 15 years ago, a psychic told the actor that he'd be working in Ireland one day, and although he loved the idea of it, he never thought it was really a possibility. Growing up with family roots in Kilkenny on his mother's side, and Polish ones on his dad's side (the family name was originally Andrzejewski), he grew up feeling Irish.

So when the opportunity to star in The Shawshank Redemption alongside Reg Cathey and Keir Dullea came up, he jumped at the chance to move to Dublin. He's currently in rehearsals, and is renting an apartment in Dublin city centre.

"I'm really enjoying being here," he smiles, adding that he hopes audiences will accept that the stage version is different in parts from the movie. I'm a very proud person, so if I'm not treated with kindness and respect, you've lost me. It's hard because, in the acting profession, it's never a guarantee, but the cast here is one of the nicest I've ever been with. And what I love about the director Peter Sheridan is that everyone is contributing in rehearsals and being asked what they think. I think that's why I'm having such a good time here actually!"

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