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Los Angeles - In many of the pictures that chronicle the life of assassinated American president John F. Kennedy, he is cavorting on the fine lawns of the White House and Martha's Vineyard with his brother Robert and various sisters and cousins. When the Kennedys were at play, the recreation was, more often than not, the genteel sport of touch football. Bruce Greenwood, who plays JFK in Thirteen Days, preferred rougher fare when he was growing up on Vancouver's West Side.
Ben Glass
"I loved rugby," he says in a Los Angeles hotel room. "My father was one of the founders of the Princeton rugby team, and from the first time I saw him play I wanted to play it. Everyone gets the ball, and I was a scrum half [at Vancouver's Magee Secondary School], so I got the ball a lot."
In the photos, John Kennedy tends to look as though he had no cares. In fact, he had chronic back problems that forced him to take pain pills daily for almost 20 years. Made-for-television movies later re-created the myth that the photos and the public Kennedy of TV press conferences and speeches constructed. Greenwood wanted to add a new version of Kennedy to the countless filmed biographies, one that showed a less frivolous side than the images we're left with.
"We have this glossy kind of Camelot parenthesis that we put him in," he says. "When I was looking at rare file footage of quiet conversations, I noticed that his voice was very low, and it seemed to me that for public oration his voice jumped an octave or two. So I chose to go for that lower pitch. I also thought he concealed the pain of his back, so I felt that behind closed doors he probably didn't bother to conceal it. He was very well educated, very bright, and almost impossibly articulate. He could quote poetry out of the air and loved poets of all kinds. He was constantly making literary references and cared deeply about where the country was going. But we are used to seeing those pictures of him playing touch football or walking on the beach with tousled hair or sailing, and he was a whole lot more than that."
Ben Glass
The movie, which opens Friday (January 12), focuses on 13 crucial days in Kennedy's presidency. It begins with the U.S.'s October 1962 discovery that the Soviet Union was assembling nuclear missiles in Cuba. Kennedy immediately gathers his senior advisers and military leaders at the White House to discuss how best to handle the crisis and discovers that several of his military strategists are ready to bomb Cuba. Other advisers would prefer an embargo of Soviet ships to keep more nuclear warheads from arriving on the island; still others support a wait-and-see attitude. From these choices, Kennedy must pick a solution that is in the best interests of the U.S., keeping in mind that an attack on Cuba could lead to nuclear war.
Greenwood says he was struck by Kennedy's behaviour during the missile crisis and was amazed by his ability to withstand the pressure of the military. "The arguments to engage were compelling, and the alternative was unthinkable. He had recommendations from pulling the trigger to rolling over, and while neither of those choices was appropriate, the pressure that was behind them was beyond my ability to comprehend."
Greenwood was born in northern Quebec but then moved with his family to Princeton, New Jersey, and eventually to Bethesda, Maryland. He was a six-year-old living in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Bethesda during the Cuban Missile Crisis. "One of my earliest memories is runnning down the stairs at school and hiding under a desk," he says, referring to the duck-and-cover bomb drills imposedon students at the time.
The family stayed in the United States until Greenwood was 12, then moved to his parents' hometown of Vancouver. He says that he was more aware of politics and government in Bethesda than he was during his Vancouver high-school years because that time, the late 1960s, "was such a vibrant time."
Life in Bethesda might have been enlightening, but life in B.C. was probably more fun. He played rugby for Magee and skied for a Mount Seymour team. A few weeks before the end of Grade 11, his father, a geology professor at the University of British Columbia, took his family on a sabbatical to Switzerland. Greenwood took courses by correspondence, but needed to take Grade 12 again when he arrived back in Vancouver.
He went to UBC a year behind his friends and tried to play catch-up with a schedule that included philosophy, physics, economics and English. Realizing that the load was too tough for him to consider taking a fifth course that was difficult, he chose acting. It changed his life.
"I was looking for some easy credits and I thought acting would be easy. But it was fascinating. It had poetry and an eloquence, and passion, and tremendous humour, and girls. All the good things. What the hell else do you want? I was so young and I would inhale anything that was put in front of me, so the idea of being a professional actor seemed like a good one. I didn't think twice. After college I started doing plays at the Arts Club and the [Vancouver] Playhouse."
From there, Greenwood went on to the TV series Legman, Striker's Mountain, and Peyton Place: The Next Generation, receiving his first real U.S. break in 1986 when he was cast in a regular role on NBC's popular St. Elsewhere. More recently, he gained critical acclaim for two Atom Egoyan movies, Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, and a short-lived television series called Nowhere Man. He attributes at least some of his success to the moves from Quebec to New Jersey to Maryland to Vancouver to Switzerland.
"When you move to a new city you are allowed to reinvent yourself because there is no one who can say, 'That's not who you are,' and when we are young we consciously reinvent ourselves. I remember deciding not to be a certain way. I said to myself, 'I don't want to be like this anymore. I have too much energy to be so miserable, so I think I will cheer up now.' I think that we pursue a better self more honestly when we are younger because we are not intimidated by changing or throwing off people's expectations."
Greenwood could have been expected to follow his father into the geological sciences. He says that had he known when he was young what he knows now about geology, his life might have taken a different turn. "When I was younger I had a rock collection, but I didn't understand how exciting it is and what a deep study it is and how philosophical it is at its heart. If I had been as dedicated to it as he was, I would have discovered it earlier and had a different life. But I have no regrets. It's good to be where I am right now."
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