Boyd Gaines on Co-Starring With Strong Women and Making His West End Debut in Driving Miss Daisy

At 58, and with four Tony Awards to show for his sterling career, Boyd Gaines is only now making his U.K. theater debut alongside Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones in Driving Miss Daisy, reprising his Broadway performance as Boolie Werthan, son of the ornery title character. Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is running through December 17 at Wyndham’s Theatre, where Broadway.com caught up with the engaging, articulate performer one recent evening.

It seems astonishing that Driving Miss Daisy represents your West End debut.
I have been offered several things [in London]. After the New York production of She Loves Me, when John Gordon Sinclair was doing it here, he broke his knee so they asked me to come and replace him for a couple of months, but I was tied up in a TV show. They also asked both Debbie Yates and me to reprise our parts in Contact here, but my father was dying so I elected not to.

Have you ever worked here on screen?
I did a TV show for London Weekend Television [in 1988] called Piece of Cake, where I played a Yank in the Royal Air Force in what was known as the “Phony War” [early in World War II]. In the early 1980s, I came here as a tourist and saw a lot of theater and rented a car and travelled all over the UK.

Your career seems very British in the ease with which you move from plays to musicals and back again, and from supporting roles to leads and vice versa.
Well, the actors I always admired were the ones who did everything and worked in repertory companies across the country—my great friend Michael Winters, for instance, or Byron Jennings. And that’s really the English model—that sense that you do it all, or at least try to [laughs].

The role of Miss Daisy certainly seems to be catnip to Brits, from Jessica Tandy on screen to Dame Wendy Hiller and now Vanessa Redgrave on the West End.
Yes, but I’m not sure that the role is that much of a seismic leap for these women—not to mention the fact that the urban sophisticated southern dialect is actually closer to old-fashioned British English, especially when you get, for instance, to the letter R. Hence, you have that long succession of English actresses playing Tennessee Williams heroines, not to mention Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind!

But do you feel with Alfred Uhry’s play that you are performing it to an audience at one remove from the material?
Probably, to a degree, but it’s unreasonable to expect that a London audience would know anything about the “temple bombing” in Atlanta [in 1958] or about Martin Luther King being honored by essentially that same temple after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the fact that the temple was bombed not by anti-Semites but by the KKK because of its stance on behalf of civil rights. Ironically, the person who was really hell-bent on making sure that showed up in some way in our production was Vanessa. The southern synagogues were sort of “civil rights central” for the urbane southern society.

You grew up in Atlanta. Does the play tally with your own experience of the city?
It rings absolutely true. I remember so clearly “whites only” water fountains and “colored only” bathrooms and how upsetting that was and what a terrible thing if you were raised, as I was, to believe that all people are created equal. I knew very few Jewish families in Atlanta, but there were some; when I was doing research for the play, I found myself coming upon interviews with Sam Massell, the first Jewish mayor of Atlanta, so I kind of based my dialect in the show on him. But other than a TV movie, I have never actually acted in Atlanta, even if the play is chock full of resonances for me night after night as I hear it on stage and off.

You must have seen the original off-Broadway production.
I must confess that I didn’t. I was out of town at the beginning of it and then was doing The Heidi Chronicles [for which Gaines won his first Tony]. But, of course, I know Dana Ivey [the original Miss Daisy], who’s such a brilliant actor, and the play was so personal to her. She said to me, “I would come and see you but I just can’t.” I’m sure Morgan [Freeman] getting to do the movie, and not her, was just another in the long line of insults that happen to actors who do plays that get turned into movies.

Your Gypsy leading lady, Patti LuPone, is no stranger to London, having done at least four shows here, plus her cabaret act. Did she give you advice about expat life?
Not exactly in that way, although I have had that from plenty of people. The last time I saw Patti was at Arthur Laurents’ memorial in the summer, and she was thrilled for me and told me to have a great time here. And of course we have a little connection on this play in that Patti played my character’s wife in the film version—someone who isn’t in the play.

There has been talk of London getting to see your Gypsy, a musical long-overdue for a major West End revival.
As is the case with most things on that scale, there is at least conjecture about a possible move to London; we heard talk of that before we had even transferred from City Center to Broadway, though I don’t know who would take the reins on it at this point.

You clearly have no qualms about working with strong women—LuPone and Redgrave, to name two.
I adore both of them. They’re completely different personalities, but they’re both brilliant and playful and a constant source of inspiration; it can be such great fun to fly by the seat of your pants. I had actually met Patti through Juilliard several times before Gypsy and we had done a couple of benefits together, including a one-night gala of Anything Goes where she and Howard McGillin reprised their roles from Lincoln Center and I was Lord Evelyn Oakleigh: we had such a hoot and a holler.

What about Laura Benanti? Are you in touch with her?
I owe Laura an e-mail. She wasn’t able to go to Arthur’s memorial because she was shooting, but Patti read an e-mail that she had sent.

That must have been an extraordinary event.
It will sound like namedropping to say all the names that were there, and it happened midweek so there were people in shows who weren’t able to come. But it was at [Arthur’s] house in Quogue on a gorgeous day, and it was beautiful and fitting and so honest. People did not pull punches, which Arthur would not only have approved of but loved. I remember Terrence McNally saying, “I didn’t always like Arthur, but I loved him.”

And once Miss Daisy comes to an end? Broadway surely is beckoning in the new year.
There have been nibbles, but so far nothing confirmed. I’m superstitious, so I’ll leave it at that!