As a boy he read classic Russian and French novelists when he was not skillfully and earnestly playing the piano. These days he plays the harpsichord practically every day. He has studied at the National Theatre School of Canada, acted with the finest repertory companies in the United States and is quick to discuss ”Timon of Athens.”
So what is Max Wright doing in a TV sitcom that features a furry, pointy- earred alien from the planet Melmac who looks like ”a cross between a kangaroo and an aardvark,” knows the lyrics to ”Proud Mary,” drinks Coors beer and chases housecats, has a crush on Connie Chung and, according to his official biography, is 229 years old, was captain of his high-school bouillabaisseball team and, at one point, owned and operated his own phlegm dealership?
”Well, if it comes down to that,” Wright points out with a grin, ”you might remember that last season I was in `Misfits of Science.`
”Actually, maybe I am a little defensive about it all. One time this actress who worked with me on another series, `Buffalo Bill,` mentioned that she must have heard me say a hundred times to the staff and extras, `I`m a classical actor.` ”
On ”ALF” (7 p.m. Mondays on NBC-Ch. 5), he plays the tremulous-voiced Willie Tanner, the rather dorkish head of a suburban household who finds his quiet middle-class family life usurped by the literally smashing appearance on the garage roof of an extraterrestrial invader who quickly becomes known as ALF (for Alien Life Force). A porcine, caustic creature (operated by its creator, comedian-puppeteer Paul Fusco) that has been compared to a Muppet but seems spiritually closer to a Mencken, ALF–in the words of Wright–”sort of crashed through as if he were Gabriel preparing the way, but then out came Jackie Presser.”
(Despite his classy credentials, the 43-year-old actor is not above a
”rimshot” remark. Asked whether he ever played opposite a puppet before, he answers, ”No, but I`ve worked with some very wooden actors.”)
Wright envisions his own character as ”an amateur scientist–`amateur`
in the best sense of doing it for love–as well as a romantic. There`s a kind of idealistic innocence to him that balances against ALF`s earthbound cynicism. They`re a kind of a team in a way, although certainly not Abbott and Costello.
”Although ALF`s character is extremely sophisticated and complex, I like to think of the show as basically being for kids–mainly, because I don`t like what I see for youngsters on television. I don`t think `kid show` is a pejorative term, although some people think it`s positively slanderous to say that.”
As he talks and nurses a beer in a hotel lobby, Max Wright seems as gentle and unassuming as Willie Tanner. At the moment, he is saying, his wife is back in New York (where she is studying nursing after a long career as a librarian), along with their 17-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son, an adopted Korean. ”They`ll all move out here in June, but I`d still like to keep our apartment on the Upper West Side so we can go back and forth. Not that it`s great. I mean, it`s possibly the most graceless place we`ve ever lived. Not a trace of charm.”
The son of a man who was ”in the auto industry peripherally,” he grew up in–speaking of charm–Detroit. (”We used to go to Chicago a lot–the Lyric Opera, Second City. It was like Paris to us.”) As a child, instead of reading the Hardy Boys and Alfred Payson Terhune`s collie stories, he busied himself with the works of Stendhal and Tolstoy and beginning at age 4 studying the piano. ”I was talented in music, but I wasn`t a prodigy. I went real far real fast with the piano and then sort of dropped it for a while. But I never was going to make it a career. During high school, I was a student of the sciences and I started out as a pre-med in college.”
The place was Indiana`s Wabash College, where he met a ”brilliant”
teacher who was a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and who got Wright involved in the theater. After a year, he transferred to Wayne State University back in Detroit. ”It had a great theater department. It was the time of Vietnam, and everybody was staying out of the draft, piling up graduate degrees on their doorstep like old newspapers.”
However, he again decided to switch, this time to the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal. (”I was a real classicist by then. Anything that took place after the Renaissance was nothing.”) Finally, he said goodbye to all that, ending his formal education altogether in 1966 and joining the Arena Stage Repertory Company in Washington, D.C. After making his Broadway debut two years later in ”The Great White Hope,” he began what he calls ”dancing the repertory rag”–cramming his trunks into a big old Ford and for the next decade acting with companies in such places as Louisville, Minneapolis, Seattle, New Haven and Boston.
”I don`t know why,” he suddenly inserts, ”but I`m always reminded of a remark made by a director whom I despised. He used to say, with great glee,
`Producers are often failed directors, and directors are often failed actors, but actors are failed human beings.` ”
In 1979 he began working in films and television, eventually landing the role as the fidgety station manager in the short-lived (1983-`84) NBC series, ”Buffalo Bill,” which starred Dabney Coleman as the obnoxious local TV talk-show host and which became a cult, if not a popular, hit. One of its creators was Tom Patchett, the producer/director/writer of ”ALF.”
”I`m really not sure it (”Buffalo Bill”) was ahead of its time,”
Wright reflects. ”It seemed to me the perfect time–you know, the Me Generation taken to an extreme. Anyway, I travel a lot, and people always speak very highly of the series. Unfortunately, the cult wasn`tbig enough. We couldn`t have had a better spot–after `Cheers` and before `Hill Street Blues`–but people switched off when we came on. We worked on the same MTM lot with the other shows, and there was a feeling that we brought down the tone of Thursday evenings–like some unpleasant relative who`s spoiling your dinner party.”
In addition to his series work, he has other television credits, including his portrayal of Joseph Mengele in the Vanessea Redgrave movie,
”Playing for Time”–a role that came about as a fluke. ”Originally I was supposed to play the commandant of the concentration camp, who was sort of the epitome of the `banal evil` that Hannah Arendt writes about. But it turned out that the uniform didn`t fit, so I had to play Mengele. I often ask people who know me if they burst with laughter when they saw me in that role. They usually say, `No, not at first.` ”
Besides doing more film and TV work, Wright eventually would also like to return to the theater. ”Absolutely,” he says with a sly smile. ”I may have told you this before, but I`ll say it again: I`m a classical actor.”
