Magic and tragic

2:32pm Thursday 20th November 2008

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Starsky and Hutch star Paul Michael Glaser tells Viv Hardwick that he can’t remember enough of his career to turn it into an autobiography.

HIS successful screen career and tragic private life make Paul Michael Glaser an ideal candidate for a memorable biopic, but the man himself isn’t interested in offers.

Famous to a generation of Brits for playing the crime-fighting cop Dave Starsky alongside David Soul’s Ken Hutchinson, the 65-year-old actor-director-writer confesses that he’s turned down all offers to provide an autobiography or have a biography created.

“Publishers would much rather I write an autobiography, but I don’t remember that much. I don’t think there would be a hell of a lot to talk about based on what I remember.

It’s like I don’t remember what happened before my ninth year as a child. There are big gaps there and I think I’ve been so busy trying to figure out what’s going on now that I haven’t been able to focus.”

Even the film footage of his early career which includes playing Perchik in Fiddler On The Roof (1971) and 88 Starsky And Hutch episodes aren’t any help, he reckons.

Glaser replies: “That’s somebody else’s image. If anything they bring up distorted memories or biased memories or rosecoloured memories or something like that.”

And he claims he’s given that answer to those who want to capture his life story so far. “I guess if I had to address it, it seems like a very narcissistic thing to be doing. I would have to say that I’m best experienced in the expression of my life. I didn’t act for 17 years and now I act for the fun of the craft, but the PR and celebrity are things I don’t desire.”

His current interest is in writing familyfriendly adventure books and, surprisingly, British pantomime for the second year running as he follows last year’s Captain Hook in a Bromley-based Peter Pan with Abanazar in Aladdin at Sunderland Empire.

Sitting in the dressing room which will be his home for the next six weeks, Glaser toys with me over his portrayal of “the bad guy”

and his limited grasp of the UK’s favourite entertainment.

“It’s not like asking ‘how are you going to build this race car’? I think I’ll discover this role as I go along,” he says, adding that he jumped at the chance to play Captain Hook because he’d always wanted a chance to sing on a stage. “I didn’t know if I could, but I wanted to try,” he jokes.

His audience will be adults who idolised him in the late 1970s and early 1980s, plus children who might have caught his cameo in the lame 2004 movie re-make starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson.

Does he feel under any pressure trying to win over a new generation of fans? “Parents leaning over to tell the children who I am may be a recommendation or a condemnation. They could say ‘Leave me alone mum and dad, he looks like an old fart to me’. But it never enters my mind about winning them over. In my everyday life I’m more interested in meeting people who don’t know who I am, or think they know who I am,” he says.

He initially dismisses a question about surviving the death of first wife, Elizabeth, and daughter, Arial, who contracted HIV from an infected blood transfusion in 1981 – son, Jake, is also HIV positive. Then his mood changes and he says: “I was very fortunate. I was extremely fortunate to be blessed with some people who guided me and taught me and helped me through it. You can’t get through something like that by yourself. They pointed out that this could be opportunity. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a tragedy.”

How does he cope with the ghosts of that time now?

“I was told a long time ago that I had a choice to either become a bitter old man or to open my heart… not being a victim and opening my heart. I just try to do that and try to learn and grow as a person. Sometimes I accomplish it, sometimes I don’t. I think that’s being human,” he explains.

Anyone wondering what happened to Glaser since his Los Angeles TV cop days should know that he’s directed movies like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man and has helmed a host of popular US TV shows like Miami Vice plus raised millions for his wife’s charity, the Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric AIDS Foundation.

Today, a typical day for him in the US, involves finishing off a book and tackling another at the re-writing stage in the hope that he will catch the eye of the movie industry.

“I enjoy writing prose and screenplays, but I haven’t directed a feature film for about 14 years now and if I return to that career it will probably be because I created a decent project. Thematically I suppose the books are based on the journey of my life.

“They are fantasies… one is about three birds, a crippled crow, a one-legged seagull and a randy parrot and the journey they go on. It’s a family story featuring ecology and the world we live in and called Hookfoot and Peg: A Cautionary Tale.

“The other book is about a brother and sister in a Christmas story taking a journey underground in the world of minerals and crystals in a search for the source of light.

I’m very proud of both books,” he says.

At the moment the words occupying his mind are the first version of the Aladdin script which he was given on Monday and he promises “I’ll be putting in my own jokes as Abanazar. But I guess I’m going to do everything I can in terms of using Wearside humour.”

He did a quick piece of website research on the North-East before flying over and picks out Hadrian’s Wall as top of the list for siteseeing.

Not on the list, at the moment, is a reunion with London-based former co-star David Soul.

His own Christmas will, hopefully, include a visit from his son, but he reveals that daughter Zoe, from his failed ten-year marriage to Tracy Barone, won’t be visiting England.

“My daughter came over last year, but I don’t think she wants to do the flight. So it was a tough decision for me to take the panto.

“As a good friend of mine said ‘a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do’.”

■ Aladdin, Sunderland Empire, December 5-January 4. Box Office: 0844-847-2499