A close encounter with Richard Dreyfuss
If you are ever playing trivia and someone asks for the corniest lines you've ever heard, try the following: Girl (approaching an actor she has seen only on the screen): I love you. Actor: Give me two minutes and I'll love you right back.
That exchange says three things about the actor, hereafter identified as Richard Dreyfuss, the star of Jaws and two of this year's best films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Goodbye Girl: 1) he is brash, 2) he is never at a loss for words and 3) he knows what he likes when he sees it—he and the girl, Lucinda Valles, 23, have been together, off and on, ever since they met in a Manhattan restaurant three years ago.
Add to the first three a No. 4: sometimes he doesn't know when to shut up. Faster than you could say William Shakespeare, Dreyfuss was reciting one of the bard's sonnets over the coffee cups: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment..."
The list could go on, but one word sums it up: energy. In person and onscreen, Dreyfuss, short, gat-toothed and, until recently, distinctly chubby, generates enough electricity to light up a small town—Cleveland or Chicago, say. "He has an energy that just flies off the screen," says Neil Simon, who wrote The Goodbye Girl. "He doesn't fall into any of the usual acting categories. He's not a handsome-man type like Redford or a dramatic-actor type like Pacino or De Niro. Rick can do anything—and he is funnier than any of them." Not a victim of false modesty, Dreyfuss agrees. How does he think he is in Goodbye Girl? Just ask him: "I think I'm wonderful."
He is right, of course. He is good as the star-struck hero in Close Encounters, but he is nothing short of wonderful as Elliott Garfield, the brash but vulnerable actor in Goodbye Girl. In fact, the character is so like the real-life Dreyfuss that Simon would have saved everyone some trouble by just calling him Rick in the first place. The part was so natural, admits Rick himself, that "I could have done it as a 9-to-5 job for the rest of my life. Imagine! Sixty years old and still shooting The Goodbye Girl!"
Only halfway to 60 now, Dreyfuss has already had at least 60 years of acting experience. He can hardly remember a moment when he was not acting—if only for himself. He was born in New York City and spent his early childhood in Bayside, a pinkish nook of Queens. His grandmother had been private secretary to Socialist Leader Eugene Debs. His father was a passionate Zionist, and his mother was always peddling leftist petitions. "When you were poor and Jewish in New York," says Dreyfuss, "you were either a left-winger or you were dead."