"Trying to get me to confess to something?" Frank Langella asks, mischief in his piercing brown eyes. The septuagenarian actor sounds just like the shrewd 37th president of the United States he portrayed in London and on Broadway in Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan's dramatization of Tricky Dick's Watergate admission on the David Frost Show. But Langella, impervious to questions about his personal life, doesn't cave that easily.
Thus the three-time Tony winner maintains his rakish reputation. His penchant for playing "complicated, singular, hedonistic loners," as he puts it, also helps. The long list includes a lascivious Dracula; CBS News's Bill Paley in Good Night, and Good Luck; and Nixon again in Ron Howard's film adaptation of Frost/Nixon, out this October.
This fall, Langella is returning to the stage to play the devout Sir Thomas More in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of A Man For All Seasons. "I hope he will awaken in me whatever dormant spiritual longings there might be," Langella says. Not that he's ready to relinquish earthly delights. "I don't understand the notion of retirement," he says. "Getting older is the beginning of a whole different delirious pleasure."
