INTERVIEWS, Vol.7 no.4, p.31, April 1987
LENNY VON DOHLEN
LENNY VON DOHLEN is not a member of that overemployed fraternity, the Brat Pack; he refuses to be associated with the herd mentality of those Melrose Lotharios. His talent is as distinctive as the distilled, quiet stare of his eyes. They are the eyes of the complex title character in his new motion pictures Billy Galvin, as well as those of a yuppie stockbroker in the recent off-Broadway production of The Maderati. They are eyes bluer than Newman's. Or Sinatra's. Or noon in New Mexico, where Lenny likes to spend time between his many roles, which have included a country-western singer in Tender Mercies, the computer nerd in Electric Dreams, a child molester in DonÕt Touch and the sexual stepson in O'Neill's Freudian masterpiece, Desire Under the Elms.
A child of Goliad, Texas, Lenny is from a family of champion-racehorse breeders. In fact, his father owns the largest horse track in what a true Texan would still insist is the largest state in the union. "I always wanted to be a jockey," Lenny confides in an accent that walks on stilts around a low, lazy drawl. "But I quickly got too big for the job, so my dreams turned to acting. I even sent away for John Gielgud's Shakespearean album, Ages of Man, when I was a kid. I remember the Life magazine I ordered it from was the one with the picture of Robert Kennedy's assassination on it. IÕve always been attracted to the dramatic. I'd lock myself in my room and listen to Gielgud's voice over and over till, at the dinner table, I was asking for the 'mahshed potahtoes'."
But when talking about his craft, Lenny turns back to his southern roots. That drawl works up some energy. "I want to act like Flannery O'connor wrote for blood."
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