Spend an hour talking with the actor and director Austin Pendleton in the lounge above Studio 54, and three slightly alarming things happen. First, the diminutive eighty-two-year-old, in the manner of a sleepy hedgehog, will gradually slouch down into the banquette, so that his head ends up where his shoulders once were. This will cause what Pendleton calls his “very excitable hair” to pouf up vertiginously. Finally, an extension cord under the table will somehow get wrapped around his ankles.
Pendleton, best known for his supporting roles in movies—the nerdy musicologist Frederick Larrabee, in “What’s Up, Doc?”; Charles Durning’s shy sidekick, Max, in “The Muppet Movie”; Gurgle, in “Finding Nemo”—has worked with Steppenwolf for forty-three years. But it’s a relationship that almost didn’t happen. In 1979, when the fledgling Chicago-based troupe asked him to direct “Say Goodnight, Gracie,” he declined at first.
Pendleton has been teaching acting at Greenwich Village’s HB Studio for half a century. In 2011, an article in thedescribed how many of his female students found their rumpled, married septuagenarian teacher sexy, calling him a “babe magnet.” An accompanying photo showed Pendleton surrounded by fourteen attractive acolytes. Reminded of the “babe magnet” line recently, he thought for a moment, and said, “Still true.
❤️
The next question should’ve been: Define “Babe”.