A must-read
profile of Alec Baldwin in this week's
New Yorker. To quote Addison DeWitt from
All About Eve, he's maudlin and full of self-pity, but
magnificent. Baldwin comes off as an actor of above average intelligence, a healthy sex drive, and silver tongue, the sanest person in a batshit family, and capable of several Evelyn Waugh-style novels about Hollywood:
On a cool rainy day in June, the parking lot in the center of East Hampton was no more than half full, but Baldwin drove around it slowly, as if not seeing the many available spaces, and then drove around again, and stopped only when he saw someone he vaguely knew—a youngish woman with a large umbrella. “You’re a vision with your umbrella,” he called out through the window, in a neighborly way. (In public places, Baldwin’s broody gaze seems to be drawn about equally to women and to young children.)
"In East Hampton, I’m a nudist and I eat meat,” Baldwin—a vegetarian—had said before my visit, expanding on the idea that he lived a quite different life on Long Island than he did in New York. “I shoot deer with a bow and arrow. I smoke the deer meat and eat it every morning with my eggs and toast. I am a homosexual. I listen to rock music, loud.”
The article doesn't talk enough about his vinegary triumphs in a host of supporting roles:
The Departed, Running With Scissors,The Cooler, The Good Shepherd, though.
Don't forget that he made the dull wordplay of The Royal Tenenbaums narration bearable, merely by enunciation and delivery.
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