U.S. actor lured to New Zealand

Press, 24 March 1977, Page 15

U.S. actor lured to New Zealand

By

ROBIN TURKEL

Warren Oates, an American actor who has made his name in Westerns and gangster films, has been lured to New Zealand to play a part in a budget film because his agent had been to this country and loved the place. Oates is to appear in Aadvark Films’s first feature film, “Sleeping Dogs,” which is based on Karl Stead’s novel, "Smith’s Dream.” He made his name in Westerns like Sam Peckinpah’s, “The Wild Bunch” and ganster films incl u d i n g “Dillinger,” recently shown on television here. “We saw Oates in ‘Dillinger’ and decided he

would be perfect in the role of Willoughby, a United States Army adviser in New Zealand in the futuristic, fascistic ‘Dogs’,” explained lan Mune, a co-producer for Aardvark. Oates was sent a script and a mouth-watering set ot travel brochures. “That did it,” said Mune. “We couldn't pay him anything by international standards, so we offered him sort of a working holiday — flying him down here and sending him for a South Island holiday after about 10 days shooting.” No-one will say exactly what Oates is getting, but the whole picture is budgeted for only $300,000 — with a reported $lOO,OOO from Rroazibank. another

$lOO,OOO underwritten by the Arts Council and about half the remainder from TVI in return for world television rights. Warren Oates has been somewhat typecast as a psychopathic heavy, beginning with “Up Periscope” in 1958 and including "Drum” now playing in New Zealand.

He also played the peeping tom deputy, Sam Wood in “In the Heat of the Night” 1967 which won an academy award for Rod Steiger as a redneck sheriff.

“My reaction to psychopathic parts is to try to humanise them and give them more depth,” Oates said.

He is self-effacing, works hard and plays hard — mostly in the outdoors — and firmly believes life is tor living. “I have a 656-acre ranch in Montana, in the middle of a national park and I go there whenever I can. In Carolina in the 1780 s Oates’s great-great-grand-father got into a shootout with a militiaman who was giving him a hard time and the family pushed westwards to Kentucky, following Dan!6l Boone’s trail.

Later an English relative, Captain Laurence Oates, with Scott in Antarctica, sacrificed his life in a vain attempt to ease the plight of the others on the return journey from the South Pole.

Warren Oates was born in Kentucky. He went to the University of Louisville, and then to New York to study acting. His only television series until now was “Stony Burke,” a Western in wheih he played with Jack Lord. But for C. 8.5., he has just completed the

lead in a pilot for a series based on “The African Queen,” the academy aw a r d-winner starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn.