On the most recent documentary produced by Ken Burns, the
mellifluous voice of Edward Herrmann is very much in evidence. He serves as
narrator of Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, a six-hour PBS special based on Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book. This
was hardly Herrmann’s first gig for Ken Burns: he had previously voiced the
words of FDR on Burns’ The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.
Sadly, Cancer: The Emperor of All
Maladies was Edward Herrmann’s last opportunity to speak into a microphone.
He recorded his narration while suffering from brain cancer, to which he
succumbed, at the age of 71, on the last day of 2014.
Edward Herrmann will always be linked to FDR in my mind. I
first became aware of him back in 1976, when he starred with Jane Alexander on
a much-admired TV miniseries, Eleanor and
Franklin. Since that time, he’s played such historic figures as Lou Gehrig,
George Bernard Shaw, Max Eastman (in Reds),
Andrew Carnegie, Nelson Rockefeller (in Nixon)
and William Randolph Hearst (The Cat’s
Meow). There’s something about Herrmann’s patrician style that seems to
link him to the history books. But he’s also appeared on TV as Herman Munster,
and from 2000 to 2007 won fans as Lorelai’s amusingly pompous dad on Gilmore Girls.
Yet there was a time
when Edward Herrmann, future portrayer of presidents and potentates, was a
struggling actor trying to make inroads in Hollywood. While he was performing
with the Dallas Theater Center, he submitted his credentials and headshot to an
L.A. production company in hopes of being considered for the young male lead in
an upcoming film. Its title? The
Graduate. Needless to say, he didn’t get the part. Nor did Harvey Keitel,
nor John Glover, nor Richard Egan, nor
Frederic Forrest, all of whom were nobodies in 1967, but went on to have
substantial Hollywood careers. Nor did lots of eager young amateurs who
responded to newspaper items about a nationwide talent search.
A casting maven like The
Graduate’s Lynn Stalmaster has one of the world’s most heartbreaking jobs. He
or she must see many, many actors—all desperate for work—and choose only one.
Of course, the producer and director weigh in too, and (in television)
sometimes the writer as well. Richard Hatem captures the agony of the casting
process from a writer’s perspective. To start with, “There is nothing—nothing—like the first day of auditions.
It’s a day you will remember for the rest of your life. Real live actors,
several of whom you recognize from other shows you love and hate, are walking
into this small, poorly lit room. And they nervously introduce themselves to
you, and they compliment you and tell you how much they love your script, and
they begin speaking the lines that you wrote. It is infatuating and
intoxicating. You have never felt more honored. Or important.”
Then “by the third day, the fun is over. You have heard your
lines read one hundred times, and by now, they all sound terrible and dull and
unfunny. . . . You thought sitting in
judgment of others would finally allow you the opportunity to assess others
fairly and generously, in the way you always wished others would assess you and
your work. And now, you realize what a fool you were, because there is no way to judge these actors
fairly. It is physically impossible for you to hear your lines with the
same degree of enthusiasm and bigheartedness on day three as you did on day
one.”
Somehow Edward Herrmann made it through this onerous process.
May he rest in peace.
