“Fears of a Clown,” by Bruce Weber, was originally published in the March 1996 issue of Vogue.
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With the lead in a Sondheim musical and a big-deal movie about to open, Nathan Lane, the sad-faced comic actor who turned 40 in February, is finally becoming a star. It’s interesting that he’s doing it more or less without his pants on. You might say the whole Nathan Lane thing started four years ago, when, as Nathan Detroit, he led the cast in the celebrated Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls. And last year, Lane, who may be best known at this point as the voice of the wisecracking meerkat in The Lion King, brought down the house in Terrence McNally’s Tony-winning drama Love! Valour! Compassion! Playing an HIV-positive gay man, a devotee of stage musicals, he made one of the most remarkable and memorable stage entrances ever, dressed only in an apron and high-heeled pumps. It was a moment Lane brazenly repeated for a national television audience last spring during the Tony Awards ceremony, just before he launched into a medley of Broadway show tunes ordinarily sung by women.
“I feel pretty, oh so pretty,” Lane sang, his appearance notwithstanding.
“Terrence originally wrote the part for me to come out onstage stark naked,” Lane says, fully dressed, over a recent dinner in Manhattan’s theater district. “But I said, ‘This naked thing, you can forget about that.’ I said, ‘You gotta give me something. An apron. High heels. Something.’ And I wasn’t really naked underneath. I was wearing a G-string.”
It’s characteristic of Lane, who is a bold, large presence onstage, to be a little apologetic and a little anxious off it. It shows in his wit, which is as quick as it is self-deprecating. Told that Laurence Fishburne, an actor he admires, likes to be called Fish, Lane says instantly, “I like to be called veal.” Then he adds, “Or shithead. I also look up when people say that.”
He’s been compared to Jackie Gleason and Zero Mostel for his theatrical pyrotechnics, physical swagger, elastic features, and rotund dimensions—his weight has been known to fluctuate by 30 or 40 pounds between roles. At dinner, he looks surprisingly svelte, but insists that “I’m really a big, fat guy at heart.”
“As a comic craftsman, he can do anything,” says Jerry Zaks, who directed Lane in Guys and Dolls and in his Gleason-like performance in Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Most recently, the director cast Lane as Pseudolus, the freedom-seeking (and pantsless) slave in the New York revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum opening April 18. It’s the role that Zero Mostel originated 34 years ago. “Nathan is possessed of that thing the great comic actors have—fearlessness, no qualms about playing a situation full out,” says Zaks.
Still, Lane says that “every time I start something new I think, I don’t know how to act. I’m just a desperate, needy little man. I want everyone to laugh. And I’m not sure I can do anything.”
Maybe so. But it’s not unusual to hear him referred to as the funniest man in the theater, the toast of Broadway. “Not the toast,” he insists. “Maybe the cruller.”
This month, Lane—and his legs—will be very much in evidence when he stars with Robin Williams, Gene Hackman, and Dianne Wiest in The Birdcage, a remake of the 1978 French farce La Cage aux Folks. Directed by Mike Nichols with a screenplay by Elaine May, the movie provides Lane with his first substantial film role. Up until now, it’s been bit parts in movies like He Said, She Said and Frankie and Johnny. When he recently saw a trailer for the film, with his name in big letters, right after Robin Williams and Gene Hackman, “I went, ‘Noooooooo… What’s wrong with this picture?’”
