Holbrook is Mark Twain tonight

Press, 23 September 1987, Page 22

Holbrook is Mark Twain tonight

Hal Holbrook has just finished filming a new movie, playing opposite the glamorous Sophia Loren.

At next year’s New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington he will present a blend of wit and homespun wisdom in his one-man show as American author, Mark Twain.

A contradiction? Perhaps, but then Mark Twain was a man of contradictions, and Hal Holbrook is far from being your average Hollywood movie star.

Now veteran of more than 40 motion pictures and television performances and the winner of several Emmy awards, Hal Holbrook has kept coming back to the role which brought him the first major success of his acting career. He makes up the programme as he goes along, drawing on the 12 hours of material he has researched and developed over 30 years in the show. Originally a university project during Holbrook’s theatre studies after the war, the Mark Twain performances took him to

small towns all over the United States. Eventually, after five years of researching his character and material, and honing his performances in front of local audiences, Holbrook opened in a tiny theatre off Broadway in New York. It was a stunning success, and Holbrook became a star almost overnight Success in television and film roles followed, as well as further acting opportunities in the theatre. But every year since 1954, Holbrook has toured his Mark Twain show, which has taken him around rural

America as well as Europe and Asia. Mark Twain is, perhaps, best known here for his creation of the schoolboy classics, “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn.” Yet George Bernard Shaw described him as “America’s. Voltaire,” and it is this side of Twain that Holbrook uses in his shows to provide powerful and still relevant comments on modern society. “I think he represents an ideal in the American character,” Holbrook says. “He was independent; he had a terrific

sense of humour. He could take serious subjects and tear them to shreds with his sense of humour; he could make you laugh.” Holbrook now lives in Los Angeles, and as a keen yachtsman has already visited New Zealand on voyages around the Pacific, although he has never performed here before. Television New Zealand will screen several of his movies prior to his festival shows at the Michael Fowler Centre on March 16 and 19. "Mark Twain Tonight!” is being sponsored by the Bank of New Zealand.