East Williston native Richard Tanner knew he wanted to become an actor the first time he stood in front of an audience playing George Washington as a first grader at the North Side School.
In a one-man show called “Small Parts,” Tanner offers a humorous take on his motivation for a career on stage, in movies and on television that harkens back to those days in East Williston.
“Is it the fame? Is it the money? Is it the applause? No. It’s George Washington,” he said.
Tanner said he has staged “Small Parts” briefly in Los Angeles, where he has lived for more than 20 years. And he now hopes to bring the production to other theaters as he continues the scramble for work that often characterizes the acting profession.
In a phone interview last week, he said he was currently doing voice-over work for a training film, had auditioned for something the day before and would be doing a small part in an independent film sometime in September.
“I audition constantly for jobs here and there,” Tanner said. “It’s really piecemeal work. I’m just a working-class actor.”
For a working-class actor, Tanner’s had his moments in the spotlight.
A character he played on one episode of “Golden Girls” nearly became a regular, he said, and he played a part in “The Addams Family” feature film. He also had a recurring role on the CBS series “The Agency,” and has appeared on “The West Wing”, “JAG”, “Monk” and “Star Trek: Enterprise.”
His credits also include working in sketch comedy groups on both coasts after several years of doing stand-up comedy in New York City.
Tanner also had a star-crossed moment with Woody Allen in Allen’s “Stardust Memories,” which yielded one of his least memorable big screen experiences – and a funny yarn he later wrote about for Esquire.
Tanner said his passion for the work began in the East Williston School District, where he remembers having starring roles in plays from grade school through high school – starting with that turn as George Washington.
In eighth grade at The Wheatley School, he had a leading role in “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” And in his junior year, he somehow put together his own production of “The Glass Managerie” – with a starring role as Tom – independent of the school’s drama club.
Despite his talent, Tanner said his parents were dead against him pursuing acting as a career. His older sister, Bethany, attended Tufts University as a drama major, but he earned a bachelor degree at Cornell University in English with a minor in psychology.
“As a boy, I was expected to do something much more serious,” he said. “The irony is that I’ve spent all these years working as an actor and my sister is a financial advisor.”
Ironically, Tanner said, his parents planted the seed of his interest when they took him at four years old to see “The Sound of Music” on Broadway. That, he said, was followed by “Mame” and “Cabaret” at the old Mineola Theater and “Mame” and “Cabaret” at Westbury Music Fair. He also recalls seeing “Mary Poppins” at Radio City Music Hall.
“I thought I was in heaven,” he said.
As soon as he graduated from Cornell, Turner moved to New York City to start the seemingly endless circuit of auditions, migrating to stand-up comedy for 10 years as he continued to seek his big break in the footlights. He also started writing songs and performing them in cabarets. He also took a job as a publicist at Knopf Publishing.
“I started doing everything. I wanted to stay creative. It was really traumatic being an actor and get all those rejections,” he said.
Working at Knopf was a strange experience for him, he said, as he arranged events for famous actors, including Lauren Bacall and Sidney Poitier, and famous writers such as John Cheever, John Updike.
“I found myself at a party standing between Mick Jagger and Mike Nichols,” he said. “Then I would go home to my room that I was paying $180 a month for.”
At one point, he thought he had gotten his a big break when he got a callback from an “open call” audition for Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories.”
But when he reported for his fitting, he soon learned he would be attired “like the fellow who lies at the curb outside the subway on my way to work.” The location for the scene he would be in was a garbage dump in Jersey City with similarly attired actors, and there wouldn’t be an opportunity for a soliloquy.
“My last, carefully preserved illusion about the thrill of real live movie-making, on location and everything, quietly bit the dust,” he wrote in the Esquire piece.
After spending a long, dreary day trudging around the garbage dump – and being asked to “stay hidden” because Allen found his clothes distracting – he was called back a month later for three days of waiting for another scene call that never came. So, he said, he snapped, barging into Allen’s office and delivering a tirade about what he and his fellow actors had endured as extras.
“It was so deeply traumatizing, I burst into Woody Allen’s office and I was confronting him. It was probably the first time he encountered someone who was more neurotic than he was,” Tanner said, laughing.
He recalls Allen politely listening and commenting on the unpredictable nature of the movie business.
While in New York, he said, he also did freelance pieces for The Village Voice and the New York Daily News.
Not long after that, the scene shifted to the West Coast for Tanner. He still owns the house where he grew up in East Williston, but he’s firmly planted in Los Angeles.
He appeared in the West Coast premiere of “Joined at the Head” and was co-creator and original cast member of “Grandma Sylvia’s Funeral,” a play akin to “Tony and Tina’s Wedding” that eventually had a brief run in New York without him.
Tanner founded The Drama Club, a Los Angeles play-reading salon also wrote a play called “Mysteries of the Rainforest,” which had several readings with the late Estelle Getty.
He fulfilled one of his goals this year with the start of his own theater company, Misery Love Company, around the production of his one-man show.
Tanner said reality TV has made it tougher to find those small parts he’s accustomed to playing, but he remains dedicated to his chosen field. Often, he said, people remark on how lucky he is to be an actor. And he said he always has the same response.
“Luck has nothing to do with it,” he tells them. “It’s really persistence and just stubbornness.”
