Sunday, July 23, was not a good day for Greg Kinnear. In the LATimes that morning,, he found a rather unfortunate picture of himself. His hair was piled high in a nasty pompadour. He looked pale, vaguely cross-eyed, and jowly, and he was wearing a decidely demonde persimmon sport coat. Even more displeasing was the photos placement. It appeared in the real-estate section, above a story detailing Kinnear's purchase of a $1.4 million "Meditteranean villa" in the Hollywood Hills-a 5,000-square-foot, four-bedroom affair with a courtyard spa, black-bottom pool, fountain, and outdoor fireplace.
Reading about the transaction depressed Kinnear. "After pulling the gun out of my mouth, I thought: Well, maybe none of my friends saw it. Let's just forget about it-we'll bury it," he says. "All of a sudden, 10 minutes later, the phone starts ringing off the hook. Meanwhile, I'm sneaking around the neighborhood, picking up the LATimes off people's lawns."
Ah, fame's high price: everybody knows your dark secrets. Even what you've shelled out for your Mediterranean villa. But if Kinnear-who first found notoriety as the presenter on E! Entertainment Television's conceptually slight but highly entertaining Talk Soup, then moved to NBC's 1:35 am talk show, Later with Greg Kinnear, and now has a starring role in the remake of Billy Wilder's classic Sabrina thought the price was high last July, he's barely crossed the border of celebrity wonderland. Several major studios are now scouting him for leading roles in other films. In fact, Kinnear might start bracing for the long parade of Starline tour buses that are sure to be rumbling past his black-bottom pool any day now.
Early reports on his performance in Sabrina, which is his big-screen debut and which will be released by Christmas, are very good. Sydney Pollack, the film's director, says that "Kinnear is wonderful. He's not an experienced actor, but he's a brand-new guy who's damned good. I think he's got a lot of charm and a lot of skill." Kinnear himself, however, admits that he "has some very large footsteps to follow in."
Most aspects of the story have been modernized. The Larrabee family, for example, is in the telecommunications business now. And instead of the silver Nash-Healey Sports roadster Holden drives in the early version, Kinnear's character gets a red Ferrari. "It's a convertible from the 98743-6325 series, I believe--or something like that."
Early on, the Hollywood rumor mill was sputtering out the word that Tom Cruise had been cast in the David Larrabee part, so no one was more shocked than Greg Kinnear when Sydney Pollack, the director who helped make Robert Redford a superstar in The Way We Were, asked for a meeting. In fact Kinnear admits that he was so unprepared for the call that he had trouble figuring out just what Sabrina was.
"When I first heard that I was going to go meet with THE Sydney Pollack on this film," says Kinnear, "it had to be explained to me that this was a remake, because I had not seen the original. Which isn't that unusual. You know, I think it is a very well-respected film and it is Audrey Hepburn and everything, but when I warm up my audience on Later, I'm always asking them, 'Has anybody seen this film Sabrina?' And there is a large audience of young people who haven't."
Kinnear's career started when he was about 16 and landed a time slot on Armed Forces Radio. His Saturday show was called School Daze with Greg Kinnear ("That was the kind of cutting-edge work I was doing in the late 70s!") and originated from Glyfada, Greece, outside of Athens, where his father worked as a diplomat at the American Embassy. After graduating from the University of Arizona with a degree in broadcast journalism, he went directly to Los Angeles, where he landed a marketing job at a sub-Roger Corman outfit called Empire Pictures. "We had quite a lineup of films there: Assualt of the Killer Bimbos, Space Sluts in the Slammer, Classics!" In 1991, he began "anchoring" the oddball hit Talk Soup, a digest of the most incendiary moments from the previous day's Sally Jessy Raphael, Montel Williams, etc. Then, in 1993, NBC tapped Kinnear to replace Bob Costas on Later, the "desk format" comedy half-hour that includes filmed skits (and owes a heavy debt to the broadcasting innovations of his fellow Hoosier David Letterman).
Kinnear has managed to improve on Costas's ratings, and his naturalness and easy humor at 1:35 am have caused constant speculation that NBC will move him down an hour into the wasteland currently patrolled by the preppy, frenetic Conan O'Brien.
"It's a nasty rumor," says Kinnear. "From the first day I got to NBC that was, of course, something floating around out here and back in New York, but we've never had any serious discussions about that change." Kinnear says he's happy in NBC's cramped Studio 5. Yet he seems comfortable dropping what might be construed as a subtle hint to NBC president Robert Wright and the other network brass. Says Kinnear "I mean, I would be lying if I said I wanted to stay at 1:35 for the rest of my life!"
October 1995, Vanity Fair magazine.