INTERVIEW Michael Gross, actor from 'Family Ties'

By Eva Lane
Yale Daily News
Yale U.

(U-WIRE) NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- Michael Gross DRA '73, well known for
his seven-year role as Stephen Keaton in the popular TV sitcom "Family
Ties," returns to the Yale theater scene after nearly 20 years. Gross will
appear in Preston Sturges' play "A Cup of Coffee" at the Yale Repertory Theater
from Nov. 26 to Dec. 18. Gross sat down with YDN Staff Reporter Eva Lane to
discuss the Drama School, mentoring, and playing father to a nation. <p>

Q. How did you get started in acting? 

A. Well, I actually got started in acting in undergraduate school. It
was one of those happy coincidences; I wandered into a production of "A Midsummer
Night's Dream" one day, and I was transformed. I had some time between
classes and it was a free production. I remember I walked into the show
and I thought, "I got a couple hours to kill." I went in and I absolutely
loved it.  Shakespeare for the first time made more sense than it ever made for me
in high school. All I can say was, it was transforming. That was in
undergraduate school and I think it was my freshman year. The man who directed that
production became my undergrad acting teacher, one of my best friends
and 15 years ago, the best man at my wedding. 

Q. Is it important to have mentors along the way? 

A. I haven't done anything significant in my life without them. I never
quite trust anybody who says they're a self-made man. I don't think there's
any such thing. I think we're taught how to do things; yes, some people are more
tenacious than others, some people have certain qualities which lend
themselves to things. But I think mentors teach us how to put all those things
together for ourselves to make some sort of a structure, to make this thing called
life work for us. I was blessed here at Yale with some wonderful mentors. I have
a hard time letting go of people who're important like that to me in my life. 

Q. How did you end up at Yale? 

A. I came to the Drama School chiefly as a result of this good friend
of mine, who helped me prepare my auditions. I actually stayed in undergraduate
school for five years -- among other things, to stay out of the Vietnam War. I
was at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Yale was a real blessing to me because I came from a lower middle-class
background and a real working-class neighborhood. I didn't go away to
the campus of the University of Illinois because I could not afford room
and board. I went to school on the subway everyday and lived at home to save
money, so the fact that I could come to Yale was an incredible blessing. It was
not the sort of thing that people from my neighborhood ended up doing. I managed to
patch together some loan money, some scholarship money, some grant money; I
sold some of my bedroom furniture to come to Yale. 

Q. Do you feel that Yale has changed a lot? 

A. Yes and no. A lot of the faces have changed. When I came here in
1970, there were not as many minorities [and] it was only about the second or
third year that women had been here. It had been a male bastion at that time.
It was already a profound change to see females on campus. Now I see far more
minority faces, I see people who are more like I was in those days,
maybe coming from different backgrounds as opposed to people who had grown up
with a lot of luxury, and I think that's wonderful. 

I walk through the campus almost every morning ... every little place I
walk through has got a wonderful anecdote; that's what's fun on this corner
I was drunk, on this corner I had a fight with a girlfriend, I was about
ready to slit my wrists here, I was ready to drop out of the Drama School there. We used
to call it the Yale School of Trauma, t-r-a-u-m-a. 

Q. TV has changed a lot; do you think that the sort of sitcom which you
were in has been replaced or changed? 

A. In some ways I'm not really qualified to answer, because I don't
watch enough television. I do notice in general a sort of what I would call a
coarsening of the culture, with what I would call formerly adult themes geared
more towards younger people. I'd never heard the word "penis," which you can
now hear between -- I don't know -- eight and nine or after nine o'clock,
but that was something that I was not accustomed to hearing. Somehow in seven
years of "Family Ties," somehow we managed to do funny and significant shows
without ever using that word. We knew what we were talking about and we
would use code to almost make it funnier. 

Q. Do you think that people used to consider watching TV more of a
family activity? 

A. Well, this is the thing that people used to tell me. They'd say,
"that was one of the few shows we could all sit together and watch and we loved it
for that reason, because even then in the 1980s it was hard for people to find
that sort of thing and sit and watch together as a family." I am also surprised; I
was in a computer store, one of these big sort of warehouse stores months ago in
southern California and a salesman, a young -- he was Eurasian, or
Asian, or something like that -- he came up to me and I saw tears in his eyes and
Ithought, "this is unusual for a guy who's trying to sell me a
computer." 

But he said to me, "Excuse me, I just have to tell you something." He
said, "You don't know this, but you were my father," and he was really sort
of emotional. He said, "I didn't have a very good father and I didn't have
a very good family and I always wanted somebody like you. I just wanted you to
know how important you were in my life and it's made me a better
husband.  I'm married now and I have a child of my own and I keep thinking, 'How
would Stephen Keaton do it?'" I said, "I just want you to know that's
not I, that was also good writing." 

Q. What's it like being back at the Rep? 

A. It's wonderful being at the Rep. it recharges my batteries, seeing
the next generation of students and rubbing elbows with them. 

["A Cup of Coffee" is] subtitled, "a comedy about business," and it was
written in 1931, right smack dab in the middle of depression America, and
there's a lot to do with people wanting money, wanting success, the vicissitudes of
fortune and, at the core of it, a man who's in love but afraid to commit to
marriage without his fortune. He doesn't trust himself in those uncertain times.
I think even in these times, with the stock market over 10,000, a certain
obsession with money and fortune and day trading and that sort of thing, I think the
play can even speak to us today. The play ultimately says whether you've got it
or not, there are some things that are more important than that pile of cash. 

Sometimes I think that America could do with a good catastrophe, in a
way, so that we could re-discover that again. 

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