Adding a Little English : Paxton Whitehead Draws on British Roots for Starring Role in ‘How the Other Half Loves’

COSTA MESA — “Oh, I hate talking about acting,” Paxton Whitehead said over lunch the other day.

He had been asked how he prepared for his starring role in “How the Other Half Loves” at South Coast Repertory, which opened last month to positive reviews.

Whitehead, a legend in theater circles for his comic genius, sounds veddy British upper crust. His robust bass-baritone voice is remarkable for its cavernous resonance. It gives the impression that he does not suffer foolish questions gladly.

But far from being pompous or solemn, he submitted graciously.

“Usually what I try first to do is not the hat and it’s not the nose,” he said, recalling Ralph Richardson’s habit of finding the right hats for his roles and Laurence Olivier’s almost obsessive use of false noses.

“I can’t do anything about the nose. It’s already too big. I like to find the vocal intonation. I don’t say it’s the voice, because it’s still my voice. But it’s a pattern of speech, a rhythm, if you like. When that is in place, then the body follows.”

In “How the Other Half Loves,” Alan Ayckbourn’s farcical 1970 comedy about three English couples caught up in real and supposed adulteries, Whitehead plays Frank Foster, a peculiar, trusting, absent-minded husband whose paternalistic instincts always get things backward.

As Whitehead portrays him--he’s “a sublime British twit,” The Times’ critic Laurie Winer noted--Frank stumbles through life and marriage with the foggy serenity of a dim bulb. The body language alone is a symphony of hesitations, personifying mental vacuity without ever descending into caricature or parody.

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Born in Kent, south of London, Whitehead naturally has the advantage of his English accent and manners for the role. They are so ingrained, in fact, that he has never come close to losing them even after living in this country for 37 years (since 1987 in Irvine). He also has the advantage of experience, having played the role once before at the Tiffany Theater in West Hollywood, which won him a 1988 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award.

“Actually, I have not done an enormous amount of Ayckbourn,” Whitehead said, adding that he’s done only two others: “Relatively Speaking,” an early play like “Other Half,” and “Woman in Mind,” a dark comedy.

What Whitehead has done a lot of is George Bernard Shaw, including “Heartbreak House” at SCR in 1992. He is renowned, moreover, not only as a Shavian actor but as former head of Canada’s Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lakes, Ontario.

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During his time there from 1965 to 1977--he was appointed artistic director in 1967--the festival grew from a local summer event with one theater into a year-round, international attraction with three. He produced, directed or acted in nearly the entire Shaw canon (27 of the 33 plays) and always drew top actors to the festival’s stages--Jessica Tandy, for example, or Lela Kedrova.

Comparing Shaw and Ayckbourn, Whitehead cites their immense comic talents: “Ayckbourn, even at his darkest, which he tends to be in his later works, always has an enormous amount of humor. So does Shaw. Even his most serious or didactic works still have the credible saving grace of humor.

“Shaw is wittier. I don’t think Ayckbourn is a witty writer. His comedy is situational, and it’s about ordinary people in a pressurized situation. Shaw’s people tend to be rather extraordinary, in the sense of gifted. They’re wonderful speakers, for a start. Ayckbourn’s aren’t always. So there’s that difference.”

Whitehead, who is 59, might have made a major stage career in England but for coming to New York and landing his first Broadway play in 1961. It was C.P. Snow’s “The Affair,” which ran for a season. In 1964, having stretched his intended year abroad to three, he was cast in the touring company of “Beyond the Fringe,” more or less sealing his fate.

When Jonathan Miller left that famous comic revue, which had come to Broadway from London’s West End with the original cast--the others were Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Peter Cook--Whitehead was brought back from the road to replace Miller in New York. “Fringe” played on Broadway for about 18 months; he was in the revue for seven.

“It was a wonderful thing for me to do,” Whitehead said, “because I think I was really quite a tentative actor, or at least not one to take risks, until then. I was a bit tight, I would say, safe. I wasn’t really the comedian I was able to become through the freedom of ‘Beyond the Fringe.’

“Doing sketch humor with not much characterization, I had to rely on Paxton Whitehead. I had to rely on my own personality to put over the material. And that was the first time I began to trust myself. I didn’t have to hide behind a character or heavy makeup, or whatever crutch you like. It was refreshing to sell material purely for the purpose of laughter.”

Still, he added, he was “grateful to go back to a text when that was over and actually have a play and a character to do.”

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More recently, Whitehead has been doing network sitcoms. Last fall, he was on “Ellen” for two episodes as her psychiatrist, along with spots on “Fraser,” “Third Rock From the Sun” and “Caroline in the City.”

But as anybody might have guessed, his real love is the theater. “I couldn’t do without it,” he said.

He won’t have to, either. After “How the Other Half Loves,” Whitehead goes to the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego to star as Sherlock Holmes in Hugh Leonard’s “The Mask of Moriarty.”

“We tried it out two years ago in Williamstown,” he said, referring to a summer festival in Massachusetts. “Now we’re going to give it a proper production. It’s huge, so I don’t know about its commercial prospects. We’ll see.”

* “How the Other Half Loves” continues through June 29 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $28-$41. (714) 957-4033.