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When Dreyfuss was eight, his family moved to Beverly Hills. Rick was in his first production at the local Jewish center when he was nine. "I never got less than the lead after that," he boasts. By the time he was twelve he was reciting Shakespeare before the bathroom mirror. His dream—then, now and probably for-evermore—was to play Cassius in Julius Caesar. Though the world has made a villain out of Cassius, the leader of the plot to kill Caesar, the scion of political iconoclasts knew that he was really a good fellow. "Cassius was sympathetic to me," he says. "He hated tyranny and he was anti-authoritarian." Also, he adds, "Cassius was the smartest man in the play."
After graduation from Beverly Hills High, Dreyfuss put in a year at San Fernando Valley State College. Because he was a conscientious objector, he spent the next two years in alternative service, as a clerk at a Los Angeles hospital. Carefully mapping out his life, the Cassius side of Dreyfuss planned on ten years of acting apprenticeship. But before he could get started, he says, in a voice that wavers somewhere between woe and wonder, "the movies happened—boom! boom! boom!" American Graffiti led to The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which led to Jaws—which led to the beginning of a breakdown. The movie was just a big fish story, says Dreyfuss, and he "felt like a whore" acting in it.
Still suffering from the sulks when shooting ended, he auditioned for Joseph Papp's Lincoln Center production of Julius Caesar. At last he was to be Cassius. "I went home, and for the first time I did homework," he says. "It felt so good to struggle over a part!" Two days into rehearsal, however, Papp canceled the production, and Dreyfuss "just went crazy. For about a year and a half I went berserk, I took drugs, and I started drinking a bottle of cognac a day."
What pulled him up, ironically, was what set him down: Jaws. Nothing is so good for an actor's ego as a hit, and Dreyfuss's ego, which Jaws had punctured and which Papp had exploded, returned to its normal enormous size. He now calls Steven Spielberg, the director of Jaws, a genius, and admits that the movie was not the "dreck" he once thought it was.
Today Dreyfuss can have almost any part he wants. He is currently playing a hookah-smoking private eye in Jeremy Kagan's The Big Fix, and next spring he will portray a ruthless director in Bob Fosse's All That Jazz. With what sounds almost like resignation, he admits to being content. Friends say that Lucinda, a Puerto Rican who worked as a TV researcher, has brought a new stability to his life. After six weeks on a liquid protein diet, this former junk-food addict—"I still dream of Twinkies," he sighs—has even lost his famous baby fat. For the first time he is ready to play that "lean and hungry" hero-villain Cassius.