Arthur Roberts '62 (Actor)
By Couper Samuelson '02
A few days ago, the veteran actor Arthur Roberts '62 was in his Marina Del Rey apartment talking about the beginning of his career. “It was Harvard in the sixties and I didn’t do drugs but I did do sex and acting, well, acting felt better than sex.” So Roberts decided to do a lot of acting. “Now,” he thought to himself, “if only I could get them to pay me to do this…” (The acting, not the sex).
Roberts has been paid to act for 43 years and has left behind a wide body of work. He will look familiar to you, possibly because he’s had roles in everything from soaps to series, from Arthur Miller plays to Superbowl commercials to "Masseuse: The Sequel" (he wasn’t in the first one). He also simply looks familiar—salt-and-pepper-hair, oarblade cheekbones, like someone in the photograph that comes with a picture frame (Roberts has done print ads, too).
After graduating from Harvard, Roberts was told acting was a hard road. So he went to NYU Business School, where he developed a plan to break into acting from the business side: “I thought I would work at a film company and then one day I would raise my hand and say, ‘Hey, I did a little acting in college,’ and I would get the part.” But Roberts was bored by business school: “A businessperson is a suit and an actor is an animal.” Roberts promptly decided to make acting his fulltime goal and apply himself with the same seriousness of his classmates entering the business world.
During his first season of Summer stock, Roberts earned $27 per week—enough to cover his room and board. He would go on to play the lead roles opposite future movie stars Faye Dunaway and Jane Alexander in Summer stock productions like “Boeing Boeing,” “Poor Richard” and “Mr. Roberts” (no relation). Whereas at Harvard, actors had weeks to rehearse a play, “In Summer stock, you show up on Monday and five days later the curtain goes up in front of 300 people and you’re either wonderful or you’re idiotic.” Roberts must have been wonderful more than he was idiotic because he won the prestigious Barter Theatre Award. This success led to roles in celebrated Off-Broadway productions like “The Boys in the Band” and the Tony-winning “Borstal Boy.”
Roberts’ big break came in 1972 from a well-reviewed turn as the cuckold Karenin in the off-Broadway adaptation, “Anna K.” He decided to use this momentum to make a break for Hollywood, where his agent had lined up a meeting with the casting director of the most popular show on television, “General Hospital.” At the meeting, Roberts proffered a stack of rave “Anna K.” reviews from every critic in New York. To which the casting director replied, “I don’t watch reviews.”
Still, the casting director gave him a part as a guest star and Roberts gradually worked his way up to series regular. This break kicked off a television career that has included guest stints on “Starsky & Hutch,” a series regular role on the Lorenzo Lamas show “Air America,” and, more recently, “Scrubs.”
Roberts has also carved out a niche playing the “CEO” roles in B-movies shot in Eastern Europe from exploitation moguls like Avi Lerner. Roberts looks bemusedly upon his forays into these late-night cable movies—"Ways of the Flesh", "The Erotic Misadventures of the Invisible Man", and "Countess Dracula’s Orgy of Blood", among others. “The 20somethings get to fight and fuck. Me? I just show up and do the exposition.” Roberts rarely sees the final product: “I don’t even have those channels but friends see me all the time.” The interviewer is skeptical that his friends would admit to have seen these films, to which Roberts exclaims, “You admitted it!” (Point taken). Roberts considers his work in these lower-brow movies just as important to the tuning of his acting instrument as playing in Pinter. “Film captures feelings. If you’re feeling something, they will feel it. You can burn a hole in the screen even if you’re just saying,” Roberts pitches his voice low: “Welcome to the island, I’m sure you’ll enjoy the club.”
Now in his 60s, Roberts says he wouldn’t have managed his career any other way. His film work gained him admission to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and he’s even returned occasionally to the theater, in productions at the Mark Taper Forum and the Los Angeles Theatre Centre. “My only regret is that I haven’t hit a higher level of stardom. But I’m still working at it—it can still happen.” He’s even taught a popular class at UCLA called “Actors’ Survival: How to Earn Your Living Acting.”
In the 70s, Roberts was referred to the psychologist/philosopher Willard Beecher, author of the bestselling book "Beyond Success & Failure". Beecher told Roberts, “Never work. Work is when they pay you to be there even though you don’t like what you’re doing. We should play to live, not work to live.” To which Roberts adds, conspiratorially, “You know what the big secret is? Figure out what you like to do and see if you can get them to pay you to do it. In that sense, I’ve lived a life of great integrity.”
Most recently, Roberts went to an audition for a Tylenol commercial where a casting director asked him to strip down to his shorts (Roberts is in good shape). At the subsequent callback, Roberts was on his way to a swim, “So I had my speedos on under my gym shorts. And they ask me to strip down again and so this time I take off my gym shorts too and I’m standing there in nothing but my Speedos. And I say, ‘This is as far as I’ll go!’”
The casting director laughed. Roberts got the part.