From the Archives: Fears of a Clown

Reported by Vogue.

Nathan Lane has never been comfortable with his own stardom — and that discomfort, it turns out, is exactly what makes him magnetic. The Broadway comedian, born Joe Lane in Jersey City to a truck-driving father with an untapped Irish tenor and a mother who kept the family firmly grounded, rechristened himself after the character Nathan Detroit, whom he'd played on the dinner-theater circuit. He changed it at 22, partly because Actors' Equity already had a Joe Lane, and partly because the name fit something he was still figuring out about himself.

According to Vogue, Lane traces his compulsion to perform back to a grammar school production of Around the World in Eighty Days, where, playing a French servant during an Indian raid on a train, he improvised — unrehearsed — diving behind a suitcase. He was a chubby kid. The audience roared. "I think it started then," he says. That instinct — physical, unscripted, slightly self-sacrificing — became his entire career: Drama Desk nominations, a long creative partnership with Terrence McNally, a celebrated run in Guys and Dolls, comparisons to Zero Mostel and Jackie Gleason for his elastic face and theatrical swagger. His weight reportedly fluctuated 30 to 40 pounds between roles. At dinner, he looked svelte. He identified, anyway, as "a big, fat guy at heart."

The Birdcage Changes Everything

Lane's film career had been, until recently, a footnote — bit parts in He Said, She Said and Frankie and Johnny. That changes with The Birdcage, Mike Nichols' Americanized remake of the 1978 French farce La Cage aux Folles, written by Elaine May and co-starring Robin Williams, Gene Hackman, and Dianne Wiest. Lane plays Albert, a female impersonator who performs as Starina at a Miami Beach nightclub owned by his longtime lover (Williams). The plot mechanics are classic farce — a son's impending marriage, conservative in-laws, a panicked request to act normal — and Lane, dragged into the center of it all, plays the wife. "I look like a young Barbara Bush," he says. Director Nichols distinguishes him from the merely funny: "a true comic actor, which is different from being a comic personality." His Forum director Jerry Zaks puts it more simply: "fearlessness, no qualms about playing a situation full out."

The fearlessness offstage is harder to locate. A scheduling conflict between a Hallmark Hall of Fame special and the film adaptation of McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion! fractured one of theater's more generative creative relationships, with rumors swirling that Lane didn't want to be typecast as gay. Lane disputes that framing entirely — "Why would I be afraid of playing a role I won a lot of acclaim for?" — but the tension is real. McNally, he deadpans, "stopped speaking to me." The joke lands. The wound doesn't fully close.

The man Hollywood is currently circling describes his inner life as one of chronic self-doubt — "every time I start something new I think, I don't know how to act" — and considers worrying "really my hobby." The toast of Broadway? "Not the toast," he insists. "Maybe the cruller." It's a funny line, and he knows it, and that's precisely the point: Nathan Lane has built an extraordinary career out of the gap between how brilliant he actually is and how little he believes it.

Read the original at Vogue.