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Short Early Biography of Lance Henriksen.
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I believe that the biography below is a reasonably accurate representation of the early years of a man who has led an extraordinarily remarkable and diverse life. Please contact me if you find otherwise.
“I came into this business, not because they
invited me but because they couldn’t stop me.“ Lance Henriksen told me,
determination smouldering in his steel blue eyes. “And also I
see it from a different angle. I'm not … “ he paused, watched over by an
anxious waitress as he dragged deeply from a cigarette in an up-market Prague
cafe, “... sophisticated. I'm more practical.
If I’d gone to college I would’ve been an engineer. I love to
build. I build all kinds of things. Everybody has their own thing.“
Such candidness is rare in a Hollywood actor, especially one
whose 30-year career spans more than 180 films and TV shows, and includes
collaborations with some of the industry’s most respected directors and actors.
But Lance Henriksen is different. His down to earth, blue–collar attitude to
his art and life has elevated him to cult status; described in
Quinlan's Film Character Actors as “Spare, lean-faced, rather
fraught-looking American actor with lined jaw and light, somewhat unruly hair,
who often plays characters of sweaty menace”, Lance’s performance in a film
will make it worth the watch, however weak the direction or script. He has
played the good, frequently the bad and certainly the ugly but always with the
same steely passion and conviction. “My first job was designing sets. I didn’t
know what I was doing, but I had a talent for making dramatic sets; I had been
a painter for years. The first play I did, I got the job because I had
built the set! And I didn’t even know I got the lead part. The key thing
to remember in this business is that they don’t invite you in, but once you’re
in they won’t kick you out.“ Aside
from passionate dedication to his art, the thing that strikes you about Lance
Henriksen is his humility. Fame and celebrity
never went to his head. "I appreciate the idea
that anybody would think of me as a star. But I'm really not career oriented in
the sense that I want to be a star. It's not in me. It's not what I do. In
fact, I'm amazed that I've even gotten this far." Back home in California,
Lance keeps his feet firmly on the ground.
He has a love of nature, of building things, including his own home,
which he completed in 1995. And for over 40 years he has made pottery.
"Everybody needs labour. There's rest in labour, there's
pride in labour. You've gotta be able to do something even if its just
digging a garden, but you gotta do it everyday when you're not doing the thing
that makes you a living. Now acting is certainly an art form, but pottery
for me is spiritual."
Despite the success of his later years, Lance had a tough
start in life. He was born in Manhattan, New York, May 5th 1940, into a poor
family. His Norwegian father was a merchant seaman who spent most of his life
at sea; he simply wasn’t around as Lance was growing up. Nicknamed "Icewater" because of
his frosty personality, Lance’s father was neither accessible nor available, so
the boy never got to know him. Lance’s mother worked variously between dance
instructor, a waitress and model; more often than not she struggled to get
work.
His parents split when the boy was two years old, leaving
his mother to cope alone with the upbringing of their only son. He was, by all
accounts, a difficult child, in trouble at various schools and even spending time
in a children's home. As a result of all this disruption he performed very
poorly academically: in fact, he was illiterate when he left school, only
finally learning to read properly when he was thirty. Even today he is acutely aware of his lack of education. “See I really don't have an education, I
didn't go to school. I went to about three years of grammar school and
that was it. So I didn't go to high school or college or anything, so my
reliance on words, you know, books… Those intellectual themes weren't
available. So I learned to paint. I was a painter and nobody asks
you if you're an idiot when you're a painter, they just figure you're a
painter. It's like a woman being pregnant, no-one says 'What do you do?’”
His interest with the cinema began at an early
age, when he would escape from the daily grind of life and go to the matinees;
whilst his mother searched for work - and he was supposed to be at school.
From when he was very small Lance
always wanted to be an actor, however he didn’t truly succeed in his chosen
career until he was forty-five, with his role as Bishop in Aliens. He
recollects, "I always wanted to be [an actor],
even when I was a little kid. When I used to run away from home, I'd go to
movies and sit all night watching Kirk Douglas." Yet when he got his big cinematic break in 1975’s Dog
Day Afternoon, Charles Durning warned him rather prophetically, “You’ll
never work ‘till you’re older ‘cause you look kind of goofy.” It would be another ten years before his
role as Bishop in Aliens was to put him on the Hollywood map for good.
Lance
eventually left his mother when he was twelve, skipping
the rest of what little schooling he had experienced.
Instead, Lance got his
education on the streets of New York: "There's a lot of reality in New
York, and the only nature is people. I was shining shoes and out in the street,
so I got to meet people in a different way than a kid who was running through
Central Park playing softball. A lot of
things I experienced as a child certainly made me stronger, that's for certain:
I was self-sufficient. I had a great bullshit detector, and that's still
working. Knowing what it was like to own nothing, I had a real desire for
owning something larger than a shoebox to live in, along with a desire for
nature and for trees. So now I live in California, where everything
grows." After leaving home he hitchhiked and rode freight trains across
the United States, doing odd jobs to pay his way.
"Back in those days, it wasn't dangerous -- it was
after the second World War, America was a safe, idealistic place," he
said. "There's no way you could do that now." At various times he worked, amongst other things, as shrimp
fisherman and fruit picker. He occasionally got into trouble for vagrancy, and
even spent time in jail. In fact, a spell in jail in Tucson, Arizona, led to
his first paid acting job. A film starring Lee Marvin about the life of
American Iwo Jima hero, Ira Hayes,
who helped raise the flag on Mt.
Suribuchi with 5 other Marines during the battle of Iwo Jima, Feb. 23, 1945,
was
being shot in the area. Lance became an extra on the film, earning 5 dollars a
day for his efforts. “I was in jail in Tucson, Arizona, right before I went in the
Navy. I was 15. They’d pick you up and give you 30 days
because you had no money in your pockets.
And I was trying get out of New York City and head west, like that book
said, ‘Go west young man.’ That kind of
thing. And they picked me up and threw
me in jail, and Lee Marvin came to that jail to do the Life of Ira Hayes. So he came in with a nose glued on and all
that, because Ira Hayes was an Indian.
And I saw all this crew and everything and I kept saying to the guys
‘Will you let me out of here? ‘Cos I’m
only in for vagrancy.” And they always
went ‘oh yeah, oh yeah!’ and then they
left. But they gave me five bucks to
march in the courtyard. That’s my first
movie! And I’ve loved Lee Marvin ever since.”
However Lance wasn’t let out of jail until his 30 days were up – even
though he was no longer a vagrant because he had some money. Sadly he never got chance to tell Lee Marvin
this story, feeling that he couldn’t go up to someone of Marvin’s stature until
he was a respected actor himself, by which time it was too late, “I never got to meet him unfortunately. He died.”
Lance was fifteen when he got his true calling
to become an actor. It came after he
saw the 1956 production of The Lark in Colorado,
"Julie Harris was doing The
Lark in Central City, Colorado, and I was 15 and everybody had come out at
intermission and when they went back in I went back in with them. And I
stood at the back. I'd never seen the play. And this guy came out
with an onion - a big one. It was mediaeval times and he was eating the
onion. And he went 'this is my fucking breakfast!'. And when I heard him
say 'fucking breakfast' I waited for the recoil. I thought the audience
was gonna stone him. And everybody laughed! And I went 'God! this
is for me!' I was thrilled. I thought, Jesus! I
watched the rest of the play. It was like a light! My heart
was pounding! It was the place to be anything you wanna be! It was very
exciting." Feeling like he had been partially adopted by show business, Lance
went to train with Hollywood’s renowned stunt double and trick rider Rex Rossi,
in California. Rossi became a lifelong
friend and mentor to Lance; working with him on his riding skills in his later
westerns. From Rossi he learnt various
skills that would serve him well in his stunt work. It was Rossi who suggested
that Lance take up acting professionally.
That same year he auditioned for the Actors’ Studio but got turned away.
His youthful naivety coupled with a painfully shy persona, never got him past
the secretary. " When I was 16, I
tried getting into the Actors Studio and they told me to get lost. I said,
‘I'll come back when I'm a man,’ and I came back when I was 30. I went to sea,
I traveled the world ... I was waiting."
It would be twelve years before he tried again. At this stage in his life Lance was a restless and unsettled
spirit. This was not born out of a deep-rooted unhappiness, but rather a sense
of curiosity and adventure. He wanted
to find out what kind of life his father had lived, so he went to sea. "Since (my father) was at sea his whole
life and not around when I was growing up, I really didn't know him, so I went
to sea to see what his life had been. Also I had this tremendous desire as a
young man that over the horizon had to be an incredible world. Everything was
exciting to me. The thought of other countries and other people just fascinated
me, and was probably bred into me through my father." Nevertheless, he spent about three years in the Navy rising to
Petty Officer Third Class.
Interestingly, it was here that he got his infamous tattoo – in a fit of
drunken idiocy he had the US Navy symbol along with his ID number tattooed on
his right forearm. Lance later grew to
regret this because, half showing under his sleeve, he thought the tattoo made
him look like an ex-convict. So, over
forty years later, whilst in Hawaii recovering from 3 years of filming Millennium,
he had it redone as a beautiful image of two arching dolphins. During the time he spent at sea, he also
worked on a Swedish freighter sailing the Atlantic and the Caribbean; ending up
in Europe, he made a living as best he could, creating murals in restaurants in
Italy and Portugal. He later sailed on
another tanker to the Middle East; it was during this time that he claims to
have lived with relatives in Borneo, Fiji and Malaysia. With a Nordic father, Lance was first generation Norwegian, but
despite his many travels he never got to Norway; the closest he got was
Sweden. He doesn’t seem to have any
regret at this. He knows that he has
family in a small town in northern Norway, some cousins perhaps; despite not knowing
this side of his family, he feels he has at least one thing to thank his Nordic
blood for: his robust health. When Lance finally returned to the States, in the late 1950s, he
found work designing theatre sets. His
artistic ability was something that came naturally to him, something he was
born with; an innate talent, "I had that talent, it was in my
family. My family were all artists. But I first started in order to
get near theatre. I used to do sets. They'd do Antigone and
I'd say 'What's it about?' They'd tell me and I would do a set." Lance ended up in Boston, where he found work at the Boston Opera
Company as a mime as well as designing sets.
At this time he auditioned for a part in Eugene O'Neil’s 'Three Plays of
the Sea'. However, he so impressed the casting people with tales of his
itinerant lifestyle that he got the lead. Lance told me, “I started in theatre,
my first job was designing sets. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had a
talent for making dramatic sets; I had been a painter for years. The
first play I did, I got the job because I had built the set! And I didn’t
even know I got the lead part. I was so naïve.” Following this he returned to his home city, New York, where he
put more of his artistic talents to use: once again he made a living painting
murals, some of which still grace various hotels and New York's World Fair
site. However, the majority of his
twenties he spent in off-off-off Broadway theatre. "I did about 9 years of theatre - New York, I did it up in
Boston, I was in the Guthrie Theatre, Minnesota. I did a lot of
little plays everywhere."
In 1969 Lance was working in a small theatre in
Boston, on a play called Saved, when he decided to try for the Actors’
Studio again. “I was so nervous! A
playwright named Bond wrote a play called Saved, the premise was that
this guy has baby with a girl, it’s illegitimate, and some toughs in
London stone the baby. It was a strong play. I was doing it in
Boston at the time of the Actors Studio audition. I went to the audition for
the Studio with that play, and I went with the actress I was with in
Boston. At first they wouldn’t even let me into the Studio because
thought I was British. I was playing a Cockney in the play. But me and
the other actress both won a place - out of 300 people!”
In fact, he followed on this by enrolling at
three other acting schools, using a different identity with each. He explained, “I didn’t want any of them to
own me.” At this point in his life he
had an unrelenting desire to follow his destiny and become a professional
actor. So, in a fit of frustration he
threw his then-girlfriend into a river, fished her out, and drove his truck
straight to New York to take up acting full time! Now, at 30, he had a significant handicap. Whilst being well-schooled
in life, his academic schooling was virtually non-existent and he was pretty
much illiterate. He couldn't read so "I got a friend to read my script on
tape and I memorised everyone's parts". In fact, he taught himself to read
by closely studying and analysing his scripts.
"It's not guts it's just survival. Because I
wanted to be an actor and what are you gonna do? You just gotta do what
you've gotta do." His
first movie outing came in a low budget 1972 film called It Ain’t Easy. It wasn’t a particularly stretching role, or
a memorable big screen debut come to that: Lance recalls, "The review came out. It only
showed in one theatre in Minnesota, where it was made. And the review
went, 'It ain't easy, it's awful!'. But the problem with that movie is
that the director was having a nervous breakdown as he was making the
movie. So he would come in and say, 'Why do I write this?'. And he
would cry and everything and I would have to go and do the scene. I was
terrible in the movie, I really was. I was a Vietnam vet that came back
to race snow mobiles in Minnesota!" In 1977 Lance appeared alongside Al Pacino in an off-Broadway
production of David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel at the
Longacre Theatre. Pacino won a Tony for
his performance: Best Actor in a Play.
On the opening night, Lance is credited as playing a character called
Pierce, who was part of the squad. Whilst Clive Barnes’ review in the New York
Times of 1977 (see box below) describes Pacino’s Hummel as “a
jauntily
luminous and pathetic performance”, it makes no mention of Lance’s performance
as Pierce. His friendship with Pacino would later lead to
small roles in a couple of Pacino's films, including Lance’s first break into
film in Dog Day Afternoon. Lance describes Al Pacino as a "great
influence on my life". In fact, he
and Pacino have a lot in common. Their
early lives are virtually mirror images: Pacino was born only a few days before
Lance in the same city; he was similarly abandoned by his father at an early age
and brought up by his struggling mother. A tough childhood and years of grinding poverty have led to somewhat
difficult private lives
for both men. However it is perhaps
because of this rather than despite it that Lance has developed his own
uniquely interesting philosophy and approach to life, that are reflected in the
characters he plays:
"To
me rites of passage through life, that's a wonderful, beautiful thing. [Joseph]
Campbell didn't sit there and say, 'You're bad, you're good, you're bad.'
What he was doing was saying that all men go through this and then we die. And
he finally died. But he lived it the way he saw it and his philosophy was so
much to me like what Frank Black [his character in Millennium] was.
'Cause I had scenes to do with guys that were slime. And I would look at
them and say, 'Is there anything redeeming about this guy? Maybe it's in
his philosophy, maybe hidden in the abuse.' Even though I don't go along with
the idea 'cause the guy had a bad childhood, you let him off. I had a bad
childhood and I'm not killing anybody." Sources used to compile this biography:
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