Tell that to the judges at next spring's Oscars. In melding his judicial and thespian experiences to portray Innocent's Larren Lyttle, a rascally, attorney-baiting pooh-bah, Winfield steals scenes and provides big laughs in an otherwise sober movie smash ($28 million in its first two weeks). For Winfield, 49, it was a plum part he had coveted since reading the book three years ago. "I called my agent and said, 'Pay attention,' " he says. "I wanted to be first at bat."
Director Alan J. Pakula says his choice of Winfield was vindicated early on. "After the first preview," he recalls, "I said, 'Well, Paul went in as an actor playing the judge, and he came out a folk hero.' "
The genial, low-key Winfield has had similar highs as he has maneuvered between film, television and stage. True, he has dropped out of sight for years at a time, as he did in 1975 when he abandoned Hollywood for San Francisco just two years after he was nominated for a best actor Oscar for Sounder. But he has also won Emmy nominations for two miniseries: 1978's King, playing Martin Luther King Jr., and 1979's sequel to Roots. His versatility has served him well: He has been a TV regular for the past two seasons, playing a music producer on CBS's Wiseguy and an uppity landlord on NBC's 227. "I've been very patient," he says. "If you stick around long enough, your chance will come."
For a while, in the mid-'70s, it seemed as if Winfield's chance had come and gone. Working on Huckleberry Finn in Mississippi in 1973, the Oscar nominee was busted for pot possession. He says it wasn't his, but pleaded no contest and paid $11,000 in fines. Meanwhile he was reeling from an aborted relationship with Cicely Tyson, his Sounder co-star, with whom he lived for about a year and a half. "I think we both fell in love with that couple on the screen," says Winfield. "But when I came home, I had no idea how to do it." They have remained friends and co-starred together again in King. After Tyson, Winfield had a relationship with a woman who later committed suicide. "She was much more serious [about the relationship] than I was," Winfield says. "I could have helped more than I did."
This remembrance of things past is taking place in the living room of his three-bedroom home, purchased last winter for $945,000, in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. Surrounded by the five pugs he raises (names: Oliver, Othello, Phoebe, Bubbi and Desdemona), Winfield displays some of the same cocked-eyebrow irreverence as Judge Lyttle. He remembers auditioning for Sounder by first berating director Martin Ritt about his film version of The Great White Hope. "I said, 'How did you f—up that movie?' " Fortunately, Ritt overlooked the actorly angst and gave him the part of Nathan the sharecropper. More than a year later, a New York City cabbie told Winfield he was nominated for an Oscar (Marlon Brando won for The Godfather). At the ceremony—accompanied by Tyson—"I was star struck," he recalls. "To actually see Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor in the flesh was amazing."
Back when Taylor was Hollywood's premier ingenue, Winfield was a poor boy from the Watts section of L.A., born out of wedlock to a garment-industry organizer who didn't marry until Paul was 8. A precocious child, he temporarily escaped Watts's dead-end schools when his stepfather, a laborer, moved the family to Portland, Ore., for a few years. Back in L.A., still shy and aloof, he found his confidence in high school plays. Declining a drama scholarship to Yale, he bounced through four West Coast colleges but dropped out of UCLA six credits shy of a degree to star in a play. That led to a 1966 contract at Columbia. One of his fellow contractees was future Presumed Innocent star Harrison Ford. "He was down-to-earth," Winfield recalls. "Actually, the only one who spoke to me." Later, in an L.A. stage production of The Glass Menagerie, Winfield wore whiteface and a blond wig to play the Gentleman Caller; his Laura was another future Innocent co-star, Bonnie Bedelia.
Winfield's stature in Hollywood rose after Sounder, but the broken affair with Tyson and his girlfriend's suicide made him want to escape. He fled to San Francisco, a place, he says, where "a lot of people go to find themselves. There's a lot of introspection, a lot of social and sexual and interpersonal experimentation. Living without all the distractions you get in L.A. was a great lesson to me." In San Francisco he had the leisure to indulge his many avocations: the cello, cooking, collecting art and antiques, and home renovation. But five years ago he moved back to L.A. and steadier work: "They were about to foreclose on my house."
He mentions no current relationship, but careerwise, Winfield is having something of a second honeymoon. This month he's appearing in L.A. in the play Love Letters with Diahann Carroll. In October he'll co-star in a Disney television movie, Back to Hannibal, a Huck Finn sequel. Then there's the golden specter of an Oscar for Presumed Innocent. "Is Brando going to get nominated for The Freshman?" Winfield asks, grinning. A guest ventures a no. "Oh, good," he says. "Maybe I have a chance."
—Tim Allis, Michael Alexander in Los Angeles
- Contributors:
- Michael Alexander.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
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