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**.lt;■■•i:Greenfield, Massachusetts—Saturday, February 12, 1972By: RUTH THOMPSONThe real Val Avery stood waiting in Sardi’s entry way.; I; didn't recognize him. Happens all the time, he says. He comes on so strong you confuse him with/ the. last character he’s played. Right now that’s the drunken slob who roughs up Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes movie, “Minnie and Moskowitz.”Like all good mask actors he’s also a master of makeup and during lunch he explained how.lje uglies up his face by slipping snips;i0f the plastic tubing surgeons use for tracheotomies inside his nostrils to broaden them. “I was a pre-med student, once you see so I knew of it.”He’s just about the best heavy in the business but. wails: “I’d like to do something sympathetic for a chanee. say play a persecuted priest.”As it is, being a practical man — and justly popular with producers — he grabs every good role that comes along. Coming next: a television drama with David Wayne and Wendell Burton. After that? “Well, it’s true the.business has certainly changed. Unless you have your own series —^ and I’m developing a pilot in which there’s interest, by the way .— you can!t plan ahead any more. Because even the very best producers like Quinn Martin just don’t get their scripts until about a week before the shooting date.”Val who lives with his actress wife Margot Stevenson and their teen-age daughter in a large Greenwich Village apartment (he owns the* building, rents the rest out) says it’s routine for him to take off on a day’s notice for a job on the coast. Where he moves into the Malibu Beach house of his best pal, Rodc Steiger.A good deal for Rod, too, because Val, who is compiling, two cookbooks, is a noted amateur chef. “I can cook in any language. I think I do Chinese better than , Danny Kaye. And of course Armenian, well, that’s easy; the grape leaves, the sfoglie. A wonderful* * I * ' . i i ,Armenian type of ravioli I learned from my mother. .*“I did tell Rod, though, I wouldn’t cook unless he got me. a restaurant stove. Then we found out what they cost.” ! The eventuaj solution: two 27-inch kitchen ranges set up side by side. “Works fine. Two ovens, eight burners.” Val’s own kitchen with, its collection of copper and cruse utensil is a gathering place for friends. “I took out a wall sothe! kitchenmerges with the livingroom.” *Does his wife cook, too? “Yes, and pretty good. But she drives me crazy. She’s the methodical type who measures.”Does he nit-^ick at her acting ;style, too? No. “We do summer theatre together. But rarely a movie of television show. So seldom in fact, that when I was working in ‘theVeteran heavy Val Avery yearns for a sympathetic role. Right now he’s his meanest on local screens in “Minnie and Moskowitz.Abrahamian, helped found the Armenlcan Republic.Brotherhood’ and they told me, ‘Margot’s been hired to play Kirk Douglas’s secretary,’ I asked, ‘Margot Who?”’ms nrst move was ine Harder They Fall” with Humphrey Bogart. The one that gave him for a time a fat/ as well as/“heavy,” image was “The Magnificent Seven.” “I ate my way from 155 pounds to 200 in four months for that role.” He’s sinced whacked off 20 says he thinks now like a thin man. A thin man he hopes will get cast if the series sells. And the mood? Well his character wouldn’t be really persecuted, but he’d be nobody to sneer at, either. ,Before the terror, his mother had been an actress. So Val heard the lore of- the stage in childhood. Still, he had, gone through' three years as a World War II pilot and was enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania before it hit him that what he really wanted was to] act; So he quit school, j oined j asper Deeter’s hedgerow;// Theatre progressed later to ■ the new York stage. /Is he putting you on? You don’t know. But the, ever-welling humor is comfortable. It’s his heritage, a tool that helped his parents survive and start life anew in ihe United States. His mother] now 90, was sold into slavery during the Turkish massacre of 1915. Hishero-father, Mgerdich der(LISTINGS BY T V STATIONS SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE — VIEW Magazine (All Rights Reseived Dickinson Newspaper Services, Inc., N.Y.C.)
Newspaper Details
Greenfield Recorder
Greenfield, Massachusetts, US
Sat, Feb 12, 1972
Page 23
Full Page
Clipped by
Margot A.
NY, USA 18 May 2018
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