Elliott Gould

Elliott Gould: A Star for an Uptight Age

In October 1969 Elliott Gould told an interviewer, "I'm the hottest thing in Hollywood right now," and he was not exaggerating. Within a year he had an Oscar nomination, the lead in *M*A*S*H*, a four-picture deal at Fox and a *Time* cover calling him "a star for an uptight age." Within two years he was unemployable. The arc of his career is the strangest in modern American film, and the interesting part is that the ruin and the greatness came from the same quality.

Bensonhurst

He was born Elliott Goldstein on 29 August 1938 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to a Jewish family whose grandparents had come from Ukraine, Poland and Russia. His mother Lucille sold artificial flowers to beauty shops; his father Bernard was a textiles buyer in the garment trade. He was pushed into performing young and graduated from the Professional Children's School, which is a particular kind of childhood.

Broadway took him first. He debuted in the musical *Rumple* in 1957, played small parts in *Say, Darling* and *Irma La Douce*, and in 1962 got a starring role in *I Can Get It for You Wholesale*, which ran 300 performances. The show's other discovery was a twenty-year-old named Barbra Streisand. They married on 13 September 1963 and had a son, Jason; the marriage ended in divorce in July 1971 after a two-year separation, by which point she was the most famous woman in America and he was the husband.

The Hottest Thing in Hollywood

His film debut, *Quick, Let's Get Married* in 1964, cast him as a mute. Then Paul Mazursky put him in *Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice* (1969) opposite Natalie Wood, Robert Culp and Dyan Cannon, and something clicked with an audience that had not seen itself on screen before. Roger Ebert's verdict was precise and slightly barbed: "Gould emerges, not so much a star, more of a 'personality'" — and he was "very funny." The Academy nominated him for Best Supporting Actor; he lost to Gig Young.

He had already signed a four-picture contract with 20th Century Fox in March 1969. The first film under it was Robert Altman's *M*A*S*H* (1970), in which he played Trapper John McIntyre. It was an enormous hit, was nominated for Best Picture, and brought Gould BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations. *Getting Straight* followed the same year, with Gould as a Vietnam veteran caught up in campus protest alongside Candice Bergen. He won a Laurel Award for comedy performance. He was, for about eighteen months, the face of a new kind of American leading man: rumpled, ironic, hairy, funny, unheroic.

The Fall

In 1969 he had formed Brodsky-Gould Productions with Jack Brodsky. It made *Little Murders* (1971), directed by Alan Arkin, which flopped and only later found its cult. He went to Sweden to make *The Touch* (1971), Ingmar Bergman's English-language debut — the first Hollywood star Bergman had used — and it was received tepidly.

Then *A Glimpse of Tiger*, which Gould was producing and financing himself, was abandoned after four days of shooting. Rumours of drug addiction followed, which he has always strenuously denied; his own formulation is that he had "a problem with reality," not with narcotics. What actually happened, as he tells it, was procedural rather than moral: the industry decided he was uninsurable on the strength of a claim rather than an examination, and simply stopped hiring him.

Altman

Robert Altman made him, and then remade him. Casting Gould as Philip Marlowe in *The Long Goodbye* (1973) was a provocation — a shaggy, muttering, permanently outclassed Marlowe wandering through 1970s Los Angeles — and it worked. Alan R. Howard wrote in the *Hollywood Reporter* that "the eccentric casting of Elliott Gould is altogether successful."

Altman had hired a skywriter to fly over Gould's house trailing the film's refrain: "It's OK with me, too." What he offered Gould was permission. "You are this guy," Altman told him. During *M*A*S*H* he had said, "I can't keep my eyes off of you… I don't know what you're going to do." Gould in turn describes taking the freedom rather than being handed it: "I *took* it… I took it."

They made *California Split* (1974) together, with George Segal, and Gould appeared as himself in *Nashville* (1975).

The Long Second Act

He came back as a working actor rather than a star, and stayed one for fifty years. *A Bridge Too Far* (1977), *Capricorn One* (1978) and the excellent Canadian thriller *The Silent Partner* (1978) re-established him. He hosted *Saturday Night Live* six times between 1976 and 1980, joining the Five-Timers Club, and returned decades later to induct John Mulaney into it. Warren Beatty used him as an ageing mobster in *Bugsy* (1991), which drew a National Society of Film Critics nomination.

From 1994 he was Jack Geller, Ross and Monica's father on *Friends*, across twenty episodes — which is how most people alive now know him. Steven Soderbergh cast him as Reuben Tishkoff in *Ocean's Eleven* (2001) and he returned for *Twelve*, *Thirteen* and *8*. There was *American History X* (1998), *Contagion* (2011), *Ray Donovan* (2013–16), voice work on *Kim Possible* and *The Simpsons*, and *The Lincoln Lawyer* in 2023.

Why Elliott Is Called a Genius

Gould's gift is not technique in the classical sense, and nobody claims it is. It is a specific, hard-to-manufacture quality: he played leading men stripped of performed masculinity at a moment when that was new, and the camera found it fascinating. He describes his approach to Marlowe as a man with no ego and no pretence, thinking audibly — "everyone has an interior monologue" is his defence of the muttering — a radical idea for a hard-boiled detective, and the whole film.

Altman put the quality in one sentence during *M*A*S*H*: "I can't keep my eyes off of you… I don't know what you're going to do." That unpredictability is the asset. Gould's own account of his craft is unusually clear-eyed for an actor — "the camera is my first friend. It doesn't lie to me… it's objective" — and his insistence that he *took* his freedom rather than receiving it explains both the work and the wreckage.

The counter-case is severe, and Ebert wrote it in 1969 before anyone needed it: Gould emerged "not so much a star, more of a 'personality.'" A personality is not a range. His peak lasted roughly three years; his own production company destroyed his employability; he never again had a sustained run at the centre of American film, and half a century of character work followed, some superb and much of it paying the bills. He is a genius of screen presence, which is a real category and a narrow one.

Legacy

He married Jennifer Bogart twice, in 1973 and again in 1978, and divorced her twice; they have two children, Molly and Samuel. He describes a "very deep Jewish identity," sits on the SAG-AFTRA National Board, and narrated the documentary *Forgotten Ellis Island* for the Save Ellis Island campaign. His filmography has been called the most fascinating of any 1970s star, which is exactly right: it contains Bergman, Altman, Soderbergh, a Chandler detective and a sitcom dad, with no through-line except the man himself.

Achievements

• Educated at Professional Children's School
• Worked as television actor, actor and film actor