Greg Kinnear has found movie stardom, coming to it almost inadvertently from cable and late-night television. His acting has won critical praise even comparisons to the late Cary Grant and Gig Young, actors superbly gifted at the kind of light romantic comedy Kinnear is now doing. Yet, despite his achievements and new fame, Kinnear, 33, remains modest and self-effacing in person, surprised by and a little wary of the success that has overtaken him. Above all, he is grateful.
"Thank God for this business, this little niche that has been eked out in the employment landscape for people like me', he said, "because I honestly don't know what I would be doing otherwise.
"When I was growing up, I had a sense of displacement, of being the odd man out. I spent my teenage years in Beirut and Athens. I had a hard time in school. I never excelled scholastically. I was never good at anything. I come from a pretty nose-to-the-grindstone kind of family, and early on l knew I had to make a living."
I went to see Kinnear to learn more about his life and the talent that had taken him so far in only five years. We met in Los Angeles, where he shot his latest film, Dear God, a Frank Capralike comedy directed by Garry Marshall. It came just a year after his first film, Sabrina, a $51 million romantic comedy co-staring Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond. When Sydney Pollack, the film's director, chose Kinnear for one of the three leading roles, it was completely unexpected. Kinnear was a relative unknown who only recently had come to public attention through Talk Soup, a program on cable TV's E! channel, and NBC's Later, a late-night talk show.
Kinnear is handsome, with a thin face, blue eyes and a high forehead framed by wavy brown hair. He's personable and polite, and his humor is never offensive. With his gentle laugh and crooked smile, he is at once both sexy and non-threatening. He is, in a word, charming and completely aware of the fact.
I asked about his beginnings.
"The fondest memories I have are of Lake Wawasee in northern Indiana, where we spent the invariably hot summers of my childhood," Kinnear recalled. "My parents would drive my two brothers and me up to our little cabin, and we'd proceed to raise hell and wreak havoc over the course of our stay. My dad got us up at dawn and took us fishing, something I still love, and we'd swim, and Mom was always around to manage us. We were all so close."
Kinnear's brother Jim, 39, is today executive director of the Corvallis, Ore., Convention and Visitors Bureau. His brother Steve, 37, is business manager for the Billy Graham Training Center in Asheville, N.C. His parents are retired and live in Arizona.
Kinnear was born and raised in Logansport, Ind., where his father, Edward, was president of the family vending business. When Greg was 9, his father took a job with the State Department, and the family settled in Reston, VL. Three years later, in 1975, the family moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where Edward was posted as a trade officer at the American Embassy a few months before the terrible civil war between Muslim and Chnstian militias tore the city apart. I asked Kinnear about his time in Beirut.
"We were there a good three months before bad things really started to happen, and they started to happen very slowly," he replied. "At first you'd hear occasional gunfire around the city; like the tiny, soft claps of a little kid's hands. Initially it happened only at sundown. Then it escalated every night and, along with the machine-gun fire, we started hearing explosions. Then we had a couple of hits very close to where we lived.
"Our neighbors, the Gallaghers, lived across the street, and I was really close to their son. Mr. Gallagher was one of the first Americans kidnapped in Lebanon. He disappeared one day and wasn't released for months. It was scary and strange. The bombing increased, the near hits. One day I had a softball game at the American Embassy. It had a beautiful field. We heard a shot. They thought it was a sniper; and they grabeed us students and ran us off the field and held us in school. Then one day the American ambassador was assassinated, and all sorts of frightening things started to happen, and it got worse and worse.
"The last few weeks we stayed inside our house with the shutters closed, sitting on the floor listening to the BBC by candlelight. That's how we got the signal that we were being evacuated In the early morning they loaded us into a couple of buses, and we headed off to the airport. To get there you had to go through PLO camps, dangerous areas. A tank pulled into the road, and we were stopped. I'll never forget this. These armed gentlemen, PLO soldiers, got on and walked around our bus doing a check on passports. For the first time, I saw my mom look frightened. They finally let us through, and we got to the airport, where there were two beautiful TWA 747s waiting on the tarmac, loaded with American Coca Cola and pizza, to take us to Athens. Several weeks later; my father joined us."
For the next six years, Greg lived in Greece. At an American school there, he met a teacher who changed his life.
"I had a great drama teacher named Mrs. Pinopoulos, who was the first one to get me interested in performance," he recalled. "She went out of her way to be encouraging, to tell me, 'This is good.' I remember thinking, 'Well, I finally got a thumbs-up!' Because of her, I quickly got involved in improvisational speaking, acting, the debate club. There were competitions between our school and other international schools in Egypt, England, Italy, Spain-and we took trips to these little tournaments. I even hosted a radio show in high school, (School Daze With Geg Kinnear, a rock music program on Armed Forces Radio). Anything that was performance oriented I was really interested in doing."
He thought a moment. "Looking back on those years abroad, whatever fear I had, whatever sense of displacement, the fact that we left Logansport, Ind., God bless it, was the best thing that ever happened in my life, because it changed the way I look at the world. I learned a huge lesson. With my generation, I think there is a great deal of cynicism that has set in. There's a sense that things aren't working right. But I've been around. American democracy is still the best. That's a wonderful, redeeming, hopeful lesson to learn."
After graduating from high school in 1981, Kinnear returned to the U.S. and entered the University of Arizona, uncertain whether to train as an actor or a broadcast journalist. "All I could realistically see myself doing was either acting or television and radio journalism," he explained. "I majored in drama for a year until a teacher said, 'You know that only about 2 percent of actors actually make their living acting.' He was very straightforward about it. I was stunned! I thought to myself, 'Geez, that leaves the news."'
"Let's face it"' he added. "The lines between entertainment and broadcast journalism were blurred way before I came along. Bill Moyers would probably be a hell of an actor if you put him in the right thing. Same with Peter Jennings. You cast him opposite Meryl Streep and, by God, you've got yourself a movie there. The lines between news and publicity have been blurred. It's increasingly difficult for the viewer to discern between what is true and what's a he. That's incredibly scary."
Kinnear graduated with a degree communications and he headed for California. He landed a job as a purchasing agent in an electrical supply house - not the career he had in mind. "I lasted five months," he recalled. "I quit and was on my way back to Tucson to curl up in a fetal position in my parents' living room and hang out there indefinitely when I got a call about an opening at Empire films. I marched right in and said, 'I'm your man."'
Empire Entertainment, a now-defunct operation, specialized in low-budget exploitation movies like Space Sluts in the Slammer, and Kinnear's job was marketing them. It wasn't broadcast journalism, but six months later he made the jump into cable television as a video jockey for the new Movietime channel. "They launched Movietime on July 31, 1987," he recalled, "and I was the first half-hour of it. It was a big, gala event - all these people in the theater, monitors set up and they did a countdown to air time. It came on at 8 p.m., just me, and I was bad! It was abysmal, horrible television with an unpolished, awkward yours truly. But everybody started clapping and, you know, this thing was off and running, and suddenly it felt like New Year's Eve! I had the sense that maybe I'd gotten to the place where I was supposed to be, arrived where I was meant to be at."
"That feeling lasted about half an hour," Kinnear said, laughing. "Then I stared thinking, 'It's too good to be true."'
Kinnear stayed with Movietime for three years, occasionally moonlighting as an actor on LA. Law, Life Goes On and other TV shows. But in 1991 he was sacked when Movietime changed its format-and its name, to E! Entertainment Television. He rebounded by producing and acting as host of a series for the Fox network called Best of the Worst, an irreverent celebration of "thee dumb, the stupid, the nonfunctional things in life," from disgusting airline food to Elvis impersonators. The series bombed, but not before it caught the attention of E!, which hired Kinnear back as the host of Talk Soup. The show was a compilation of highlights from Geraldo, Jessy Raphael, Donahue and other TV confessionals. Done on the cheap, it became E!'s hottest program because of Kinnear's irony and wit. As a result, NBC lured him away in 1994 to replace Bob Costas as host of Later, which promptly increased its ratings. But by then, Kinnear had begun a serious movie career with the filming of Sabrina.
How did he get the role of David Larrabee, the younger brother in the film? "Sydney Pollack was having a heck of a time casting the part"' Kinnear said. "Tom Cruise passed on it. A lot of other actors were approached as well, and they couldn't or wouldn't, whatever, and they worked their way down the ladder until they got about to [diet salesman] Richard Simmons, who said he couldn't possibly do it because he had a Carnival cruise to somewhere. So, whaddya know? 'Greg, come on in!' And I did."
Kinnear lives with his girlfriend, Helen, 29, a writer I asked about her.
"She's a terrific lady, whom I met almost three years ago when she was visiting here from jolly old England," be said, sounding pleased with himself. "We met at a party, struck up a conversation, and she made me laugh, which doesn't happen very often. I've gone through my series of girlfriends and, for one reason or another; things haven't worked out. With Helen, it's very serious, one of the great loves. My parents have been married for 40 years, and, from what I've seen just living out here, the idea of divorce scares me. I want to have a marriage and kids, but I've got to do it right the first time."
Before I left, Kinnear told me that he had finished another romantic comedy, A Smile Like Yours, and had signed to star in Old Friends, with Jack Nicholson. "The fact that I enjoy this so much," he added, "and that I'm also able to make a living doing it, still makes absolutely no sense to me. At any given moment, I have the sense that my tram is seconds away from derailing. I know I'm lucky. But I still worry that maybe it's a little too good to be true."