When Richard Farnsworth’s agent called him two years ago to tell him that David Lynch had offered him the lead role in a new movie called “The Straight Story,” the 79-year-old actor had a question and a concern. The question: Who’s David Lynch? The concern: He wouldn’t be physically able to play the part.
Farnsworth was hurting. He needed hip replacement surgery, the byproduct of a celebrated career as a stunt man that spanned more than 40 years and 300 movies. “I’ve had a hard life,” Farnsworth told his agent. “I don’t think I can do this. I’m not getting around too good.”
He softened his stance when he learned that Lynch had directed one of his favorite movies (“The Elephant Man”). Then he read “The Straight Story” script and discovered that the man he’d be playing, Alvin Straight, had two bad hips and needed two canes just to get around.
“When I saw that, I figured I was kind of meant to play Alvin,” Farnsworth says. “And I’m sure glad I did. I might never get to do another movie this good. It’s like a little miracle.”
For his moving portrayal of Straight, a frail old man who in 1994 hitched a makeshift trailer to a riding lawnmower and drove from Iowa to Wisconsin to see his estranged brother, Farnsworth recently became the oldest man ever to receive a best actor Oscar nomination. Farnsworth woke up early and watched the nominations announcement, letting out a “war whoop” when his name was called. “It feels pretty good,” Farnsworth says. “I have to tell you, I was sweating it out.”
For the gentle, sweet-natured Farnsworth, playing Straight marks the third “role of a lifetime” in his most unusual career. The Los Angeles native had made movies all his life as a stunt man, but never had a substantial speaking role until Alan Pakula cast him as a crusty old ranch hand opposite Jane Fonda in the 1978 film “Comes a Horseman.”
Farnsworth, who up until then believed he was a horrible actor, received an Oscar nomination for his work.
Five years later, Farnsworth again dazzled critics in his first starring role, playing a gentlemanly stagecoach robber in “The Grey Fox.” Farnsworth even had some love scenes in the film, which he says “shows there’s a little life and romance in the elderly.”
But good roles were few and far between, and Farnsworth turned down a lot of work because he doesn’t care for movies filled with “sex, violence and four-letter words.” (He says he’s still embarrassed that he made “The Getaway,” the profanity-filled 1994 remake of the Steve McQueen film.)
When Lynch came calling for “The Straight Story,” Farnsworth considered himself semi-retired, raising a few longhorn cattle and some horses at his ranch in Lincoln, N.M.
“Richard was the only person I could see playing Alvin,” Lynch says. “His soul comes through his words, his face and his eyes. When he says something, it comes from deep within and he makes it real as it comes out. He believes every single thing, like a great actor should, and he is a great actor and a great human being.”
While making the movie, the filmmakers retraced Straight’s 300-mile route from Laurens, Iowa, to Mt. Zion, Wis., and Farnsworth met many people who knew Straight and remembered him fondly. All the while, Farnsworth wondered how Straight made the arduous journey, seeing as it tired him out to “sit on that darned tractor for just the two or three hours a day.”
“He was a tough old cuss with a lot of guts and stubborn as can be,” Farnsworth says. “I don’t think he was a saint, but most people had some good things to say about him.”
The same could be said for Farnsworth. Mary Sweeney, Lynch’s longtime companion who co-wrote, co-produced and edited “The Straight Story,” noted the similarities between the two men. Both, she says, have a quiet dignity and honesty about them. It was the perfect marriage of actor and material.
“Richard can be sitting there, saying nothing, but you see exactly what he’s feeling and thinking,” Sweeney says. “And maybe it’s just beautiful to see someone who looks that way and then they are that way. That’s all it is. He is what he appears to be, which is a really beautiful man.”
Farnsworth flashes an embarrassed smile and casts his eyes downward when told of Sweeney’s kind words. “That’s nice,” he says finally. While he won’t draw any comparisons himself, he does express a deep connection to Straight’s determination to do things his way despite his age and infirmities.
“If anything, the older I get, the easier it is for me,” Farnsworth says. “I don’t have anything to lose. When it comes down to it, I don’t think age means a darned thing. I know people who are old at 60. They look older than I do; they look like they’re 90, and they act even older. Age is all in your head.”
Farnsworth attributes his ease in front of the camera to all the years he has spent in the movie business. Growing up in Los Angeles, Farnsworth was forced to quit school in the 9th grade during the Depression and take a job grooming horses and cleaning stalls. When he was 18, he joined the Southwest rodeo circuit and his horseman skills led to stunt work in films.
“I didn’t need any stunt training,” Farnsworth says, “since I had already hit the ground plenty of times.”
His first movie was “The Adventures of Marco Polo” in 1937 where he was one of 500 Mongolian horsemen. He drove chariots in “The Ten Commandments,” herded cattle with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in “Red River” (where he taught city slicker Clift how to roll cigarettes and crease a cowboy hat) and doubled for Kirk Douglas for 11 months during the making of “Spartacus.”
“That was a good movie, but I was a little self-conscious in that gladiator get-up,” Farnsworth says of “Spartacus.” “I had real skinny legs and knobby knees. I looked like a crane in that short skirt.”
Farnsworth stopped doing stunts about the time he made his mark in “Comes a Horseman.” (“The ground started getting pretty hard,” he says in his gentle drawl.)
He had two children with his late wife. His son, Hill, followed in his father’s footsteps and became one of Hollywood’s top stunt men.
