Elliott Gould: pure Gould

Elliott Gould has seen it all - meteoric rise, career-breaking fall, chaos and redemption. But now his eccentric comic talent has found a new audience. In a rare and frank interview he talks to Andrew Gumbel about his second coming

I am on the phone to Elliott Gould, asking him if we can postpone our interview for 24 hours because of an unexpected last-minute hitch.

"I'm afraid I'm in Chicago," I say, "and won't make it back to Los Angeles in time for our meeting tomorrow. Can we put it off until Wednesday?"

Gould is as affable as could be as he checks his schedule. "What's the weather like in Chicago?" he asks.

"Cold," I say, "but not as cold as New York." The previous night, Manhattan had endured its worst winter storm in memory, with more than a foot of snow.

"You flew to Chicago from New York?"

"No," I answer. "I flew here from Los Angeles."

"So what was the thing about New York?"

I realise we are heading irretrievably down the wrong track, but somehow I feel the need to explain myself. "I haven't been anywhere near New York. In fact, the only reason I had to go to Chicago was because all the East Coast airports are closed and my colleague from New York couldn't get out. Otherwise he'd be here instead of me."

Gould sounds completely thrown by this. "So you're in Chicago on your way to New York?"

"No --," I begin, but he cuts me off.

"Never mind. I'll see you Wednesday."

"See you Wednesday," I say, and we hang up.

"MY Greatest fear," Gould declares, "is to be misunderstood." Two days have gone by, and we are now in the living room of his bachelor pad in Los Angeles, a one-bedroom apartment in a nondescript neighbourhood that at least has the benefit of easy access to the Hollywood studios, the beach and the airport. This is where he bases himself when he's casting around for film roles, or shooting episodes of Friends, or fulfilling his duties as Recording Secretary of SAG, the Screen Actors Guild. (Otherwise, he likes to spend as much as possible in northern California with his wife, Jenny, and their two grown up children.) It is a little dark and just a little poky; not exactly a movie-star palace. The paint is peeling off the wrought-iron furniture on the narrow balcony. There are scraps of paper and bills strewn across the plain wooden desk near where we sit. A small buddha adorns a coffee table, and on the wall next to the front door is a framed poster for the classic 1950 John Huston thriller, The Asphalt Jungle.

His handshake is as warm as his unmistakably seductive bass-baritone voice. There is a sparkle in his eye and a certain irreverent charm to his face that has not faded from the days of his first exuberant outings on the big screen more than 30 years ago. He seems anxious both to please and to set the right tone, offering water and fresh fruit and putting on a CD of old Jewish stories retold for National Public Radio to entertain us while he poses for the photographer.

I am reluctant to ask more than the most perfunctory of questions while the pictures are being taken, but there is no need to worry. Gould does almost all of the talking, entirely drowning out the CD as he launches into the beginnings of a justification for his professional life and the many bizarre turns it has taken down the years. Without prompting, and in one declarative sentence after another, he apologises for his lack of formal education, talks about the dangers of vanity and expounds on the pitfalls of becoming a celebrity "before you know yourself". He cites Webster's dictionary to give the etymology of the word "career" – from the Spanish, he says, literally meaning an obstacle course or racetrack. "My take on celebrity," he adds, a touch overhastily, "is that some of us have to make bigger fools of ourselves than others." It dawns on me that Gould is considerably more nervous about this interview than I am.

He relaxes somewhat as the camera closes in on him, his face utterly unperturbed even with the lens just inches from his nose. He remains, clearly, a consummate pro. He produces a beautiful felt hat – bought from James Lock & Co in St James's Street, London – and talks animatedly about its value as a prop, as an old-fashioned symbol of the common man. "I've always been interested in homburgs, but they don't fit me," he remarks. "Wearing a hat always reminds me of my father, who used to keep his hat in a hatbox for going to schul, to synagogue. f He wasn't Orthodox, but he came from an Orthodox family. I, on the other hand, consider myself unorthodox ..."

And so the conversation goes, tearing from one subject to another with a zany energy that verges, at times, on an unstoppable stream of consciousness. From hats, he moves on to his love for Ireland, where he shot the upcoming film version of Spike Milligan's madcap novel Puckoon. He talks about an unlikely friendship he struck up with a pair of cobblers in Belfast who still send him the occasional bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey. From there he's on to Sean Penn, Brendan Behan, his memories of Ian Carmichael and Angela Lansbury in the 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes, his ambivalent feelings about America as the land of limitless plenty, his unwavering commitment to SAG as the great provider and protector of working actors, the move to digital technology in the film industry, his West End debut in On The Town in 1963, and a curious episode during a visit to the White House for Bob Hope's 75th birthday in 1978 when he felt strangely compelled to pick up an empty Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket he spotted on the president's lawn.

As the photographer and his assistant say their goodbyes, Gould offers me a cup of tea. I follow him into the kitchen to listen to the rest of a story about a second visit to the White House when George Bush Snr was in power, but he tells me to hold on for a moment. "I find it so easy to get distracted," he says. "I try not to do more than one thing at any one time."

At first, he's not sure he can find any tea in his sparsely stocked cupboard. "Damn," he says. "If there's anything I hate, next to being misunderstood, it's offering something I don't have." After some more searching the tea turns up, and despite his earlier admonition to himself he launches into his story about meeting Barbara Bush and asking her advice about a speech he was about to give for an awards ceremony called Victory of the Spirit. With some trepidation, I notice the box he has pulled out is herbal Sleepytime Tea with extra valerian. It is about one o'clock in the afternoon.

Concentrating on his story, Gould plops a teabag in a mug and absent-mindedly starts to fill it with chilled water from his cooler. He is trying to recollect the exact line in his speech that he bounced off Barbara Bush – something about exhorting people of religious faith to "praise the Lord and pass the ammunition" – when he notices what he has done with the tea, walks over to the sink, dumps out the water and the tea bag, and starts again. This time, he finishes the story (Barbara Bush loved the line, and so did the audience), pours hot water on the teabag instead of cold, and soon we are sitting back down in his study and resuming our conversation.

I'm not sure "distracted" is exactly the word I'd use to describe his manner. Mildly neurotic is more like it. He is trying to connect to me and tell interesting stories and figure out how to reveal himself all at the same time, but the combination isn't quite working. He seems to be anticipating a line of questioning that, in essence, asks: how come you were once such a big star and then blew it so spectacularly? So I tell him out straight that is not what I want to know, or not primarily. "I don't think my readers are that interested in your status in the great Hollywood rat race," I say. "I think they regard you as a funny, intelligent, talented actor. They want to know about your work and the parts you've played, and would like to see you do more of them."

Gould is suddenly beaming. "Really?" he asks, almost incredulous. And, for the first time, his face suggests he might actually enjoy this interview after all.

It is impossible to talk to Gould as a journalist without being reminded of the outdoor party scene in Robert Altman's Nashville where Geraldine Chaplin, playing the pricelessly superficial radio reporter Opal, spots him across a crowded lawn while in mid-interview with someone else entirely. "Elliott! Elliott Gould!!" she screeches at the top of her lungs, abandoning her hapless interlocutor, who happens to be opening his heart out to her, and running at full pelt with her recording equipment slung over her shoulder and her microphone thrust out like a jousting pole. "How are you? Oh, you look marvellous. Opal from the BBC. Remember, from the Cannes film festival?"

The scene is a painfully funny object lesson in how not to approach a Hollywood celebrity (though you might be surprised how many bone-headed entertainment journalists really behave this way). Admittedly, at the time Nashville was made, in the mid-Seventies, Gould was the very byword of cool in the movies, and indeed in his brief cameo as himself he is sporting large tinted shades and a floppy Hawaiian shirt left open low enough to reveal a thick mane of dark chest hair. This was the Gould of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, of Getting Straight, and, especially, the early Altman movies that set the tone for the whole counter-culture, films like M*A*S*H and The Long Goodbye. He was a virtual emblem for the children of the Vietnam era – irreverent, anti-authoritarian, vulgar, long-haired, clownish, in your face and, above all, funny, especially on subjects deemed by the older generation to be utterly inappropriate for humour. Gould once told Altman he considered himself to be his actor, a bit like Toshiro Mifune was Kurosawa's. And Altman, apparently, replied: "Yes, you are." (Altman told me that, although he has not worked with Gould in years, he still considers him "an ideal actor".)

Something darker was going on behind that happy-go-lucky exterior, though. Right at the moment when Gould reached the pinnacle of his early success – an Oscar nomination for Bob & Carol, the cover of Time magazine, you name it – he also crashed and burned in a spectacular concatenation of events he once referred to as The Debacle. The low point came in 1971, when he lost control of a fantasy comedy called A Glimpse of Tiger, bringing production to a clanging halt after just four days of shooting. In quick succession, the director was fired, the lead actress insisted on security guards to guarantee her safety and Gould, ultimately, failed to show up on set at all. The film was being made by Gould's brand-new production company, which promptly went bust. Gould himself was blackballed from the industry and did not work again for two years – and even then he had to undergo a rigorous, and humiliating, psychiatric exam to re-establish his sanity.

Hollywood has always liked to blame Gould's breakdown on drugs, but it was clearly something more complex than that. Something to do with the shock of overnight celebrity and the inability to cope with it. Something to do with deep-rooted psychological problems stemming back to his childhood and their manifestation in compulsive and self-destructive behaviours. (For years, for example, Gould was a habitué of gambling houses in southern California and Nevada, a world he willingly recreated for the 1974 Altman film California Split, in which George Segal played a thinly disguised version of himself and he played a thinly disguised version of his fellow gambler and screenwriter on the movie, Joseph Walsh.) Also, it must have had something to do with his divorce from his first wife, Barbra Streisand, and the uncertain beginning to the relationship with his second, Jennifer Bogart, all of which was going on at the same time.

As Gould explained it, the whole thing really started – in an oddly appropriate way – on the set of a Bergman movie. Back in 1970, being called to play the lead in The Touch was an enormous coup for Gould. No American had ever starred in a Bergman film, much less an American Jew. That said, his part was, in many ways, unenviable: an unsympathetic, tortured, narcissistic archeologist who embarks on a bleak affair with a married woman, played by Bibi Anderson. The film is not one of Bergman's finest, to put it mildly, with its hopelessly stilted English dialogue and willful emotional obscurity. Watching it now, the impression Gould gives – with a trim academic beard concealing his fleshy lower lip, and an improbably well-combed parting in his unruly hair – is of a naughty boy straining very hard to be grown up. ("I was such a beginner," he says now. "That film could have introduced me.")

But the part was not really Gould's problem. As he put it: "I could play him, but I had no confidence in me." At first he was inclined to turn the part down "because I didn't want to expose my own ignorance". Then, when he got to Stockholm with Jenny, just his girlfriend at that point, he wondered if divorcing Barbra wasn't some horrible mistake and seriously considered getting back together with her. He ended up dispatching Jenny back to New York to see his Freudian analyst and wondering if Barbra couldn't star in Bergman's projected film of The Merry Widow.

Gould could feel himself spinning out of control, and at a certain point he turned to Bergman and said: "Stop everything. Let me talk to you as me. Don't assume I understand what I'm doing." What Bergman told him was to have a profound effect on him as he went through his breakdown and emerged again on the other side: "He said I'd gone beyond my boundaries and would have to live more to understand what I'd done."

Part of what had attracted Bergman to Gould in the first place was a certain danger he had sensed in him. Altman sensed it too, marvelling at his almost preternatural instinctiveness as an actor. There was a reason for that, which years of therapy have taught Gould to understand originated in his dysfunctional childhood. "I had my own instinct suppressed at birth," he said. "I needed success in motion pictures to have that instinct grow within me." When stardom struck, it was like letting loose an inner child on the world, and the result was disastrous. "I'd gone way beyond my boundaries," Gould explained. "My problem was I let myself become known before I knew myself." f

Years later, in the early Eighties, Gould was back in Stockholm and he had a dream about Bergman while sleeping off his jetlag in a hotel room. "He was directing me in a scene with fire engines," Gould recounted. "He was telling me something and then the hoses blasted me. What came out was the colour of blood, and it raised me up." The dream ended when the phone rang: it was Bergman's wife, calling to say the director was sick and wouldn't be able to make their appointment. The two of them have corresponded only rarely since.

SOONER OR LATER, everything comes back to Gould's relationship with his parents. One of his earliest memories is of being no more than a baby lying on his back in his cot and becoming aware of his parents standing side by side next to him. The reason he remembers it is because it was such a rare moment. "Theirs was not a love affair," he says flatly. "They told me: you don't know how to think, you don't know how to feel. We have to tell you. We are your best friends. You'll never have a better friend than us. Well, they were wrong."

Gould's father, Bernie, was a textile buyer, and his mother, Lucille, an ambitious stage mum who got him singing and dancing in shows and at bar mitzvahs and changed his name from Goldstein to Gould without telling him when he made his first appearance on local television. Much later, he learned about his parents' hardships, how his mother had been abandoned by her own father when she was two, how the family had had to live on government relief before he was born. Even though his parents are now both long dead, he is still working on his relationship with them and starting, as he puts it, "to separate the mother and father within me".

His first years in showbusiness were overshadowed with the constant spectre of failure. After he married Streisand in 1963 (they had co-starred in the Broadway musical I Can Get It For You Wholesale) he watched her career take off while his remained stuck in neutral. Just before he was hired for M*A*S*H, the film that put him unmistakably on the map, he was fired from a Broadway play called A Way of Life. Arriving at rehearsals one day, he found himself locked out. He did not want to believe this had something to do with him, but decided it might be a good idea anyway to smarten up his appearance – he had just started to grow his hair. The hair salon was where the producers tracked him down and told him that his part just wasn't working out. Gould replied testily: "I wish you'd called me before they'd cut off my first sideburn." The rest of his hair remained uncut, which, as it turned out, was exactly how Altman wanted it for his film.

Four years later, when Altman rescued Gould from oblivion and cast him as Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, his genre-bending take on the Chandler murder mystery, Gould threw himself into the part so wholeheartedly – recklessly, even – that he never let himself be out of character. In one of the film's most memorable scenes, Gould as Marlowe plunges into the Pacific Ocean after an alcoholic writer, played by Sterling Hayden, who has just committed suicide. The scene was shot in Malibu and Gould did not hold back, even as the waves overwhelmed him and almost pulled him under. "Suddenly, I realised that's mother ocean. It's not a set," he said. "Afterwards, when I watched the dailies, I wept because I realised how close I had come to drowning."

Altman said this sort of total performance is typical of Gould. "He's like a fuse that's been lit," he said. "You don't see how far the fuse has to go before it explodes, but you hear it. You have to be aware of it."

The one constant in Gould's adult life, and the thing that ultimately brought him back from the professional brink, was his relationship with the camera. "My first objective relationship was with the camera," he said. Beginning with a seminal insight on the set of Bob & Carol, he realised he could trust the camera in a way he could not necessarily trust other people or even himself. "The camera doesn't give me problems; I give me problems. I realised the camera was my friend. It will never lie to me."

Even if Gould's status as a Hollywood darling evaporated (and his was hardly the only career to go up in smoke as the golden age of the early Seventies gave way to the era of the mindless blockbuster), he never again stopped working. The pay cheques were never stellar, especially in the light of his acknowledged difficulties in managing money, but at least they kept coming. Much of his output over the past 25 years has been forgettable, and that has been an understandable source of frustration to him. As he put it: "I've had to do a lot of crap, and yet work is what is most important to me."

At least a few of his performances, though, have hit the mark, even if they haven't always been widely seen. He made a series of films in Italy in the late Eighties and early Nineties, including a role opposite the great tragicomic actor Vittorio Gassman – a performer to whom he bears certain temperamental similarities – in Dino Risi's Tolgo il disturbo, a touching film about family ties and mental illness. In 1995, he was memorable as a corrupt cop in Charles Burnett's critically lauded but poorly distributed The Glass Shield. And in 1998 he played a Jewish teacher in the LA skinhead drama American History X, directed by the "difficult, it not impossible" Tony Kaye. Better known – partly because it generated talk of a possible Oscar nomination – was his turn as a Mafia grass in the lavish gangster spectacular Bugsy (1991). And, much more recently, he almost stole the show as a wonderfully degenerate gay Las Vegas casino mogul in Steven Soderbergh's tongue-in-cheek remake of Ocean's Eleven. (Some of his fellow cast members later said he was doing a cruel parody of the Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein. He denies any such intent: "I wasn't doing anyone.")

That role – along with his deft recurring cameo on Friends as Monica and Ross's father – got a lot of people wondering why they haven't seen more of Gould over the years. Could this be the moment for a comeback, for a really meaty part that would put him properly back on the map? Gould has been around too long and struggled too hard to believe he could possibly be on the verge of some sort of renaissance now. That sort of thing just doesn't happen to 64-year-old actors in Hollywood, or not often. He's been waiting for years for directors to rediscover him and, for the most part, they've looked straight past. As far as he is concerned, the prospect of a forthcoming sequel to Ocean's Eleven, is as much as he is allowing himself to get excited about. "It would be more employment," he said. "And that's good." There may also be an opportunity to work with Altman again, on a political satire called Voltage, but it remains to be seen whether the film can get financed.

In that context, it was a relief and a joy for him to work on Puckoon – he plays the Jewish doctor in Spike Milligan's madcap town where the border between the two Irelands runs right through the churchyard. He loved his time in Ireland so much he now talks about moving there – a pipedream, perhaps, but one he doesn't want to let go quite yet. He was evidently a popular actor to have on set, too. "It's hard not to sound sycophantic, but he was a pleasure to have around," said the film's producer, Ken Tuohy. "After he turned up, he did the Irish accent perfectly after one hour sitting with the voice coach. A lot of actors need time to get into their parts. But Elliott could just immediately switch – bang, he's straight into it. He's a real professional."

In the early part of his career, Gould took time to pay homage to his heroes in the business. He became very close to Groucho Marx in his waning years, and received one of his favourite compliments after he changed a light-bulb above the old man's bed. "That's some of the best acting I've seen you do," Marx growled. (His other favourite compliment came from Mohammad Ali, who told him rather less vituperatively: "You do what you do as well as I do.")

In the late Seventies, Gould also sought out Alfred Hitchcock on the Universal lot and promptly earned himself the first of several lunch invitations. "How's Friday and fish?" Hitchcock suggested. "It won't be a stylish luncheon, I can't afford a mansion." It was a disappointing time for both of them. Gould was appearing in a lot of pulp movies like Capricorn One, a conspiracy tale about Nasa faking a landing on Mars, while Hitchcock was coming to realise he was too old to make another film. "I'm working on one now, but I don't know if the audience still wants my fantasy," he lamented to the younger man. And he confided: "I'm perfect from the waist up, but don't ever get arthritic knees."

Gould clearly loves to relive these memories. In fact, at several points in our interview, he jumped out of his seat to act them out with his customary brilliance. For days afterwards, I could have sworn I had Hitchcock's unique vocal timbre ringing in my ears. One thing about Gould is that he has a prodigious, and unerring memory for dates, names and whole volleys of dialogue. I checked out some of his references, just to see, and all were spot-on.

Regarding his own future plans at the senior end of the industry, Gould says he has every intention of becoming an older actor, even a very old actor. His ambition, above all, is to keep working, for himself and for his family. "Someday, perhaps, we'll have a house," he says, "depending on my ability to earn a living." That's a strikingly modest statement, from a film actor who knows what it is like to have it all and then lose it again. But modesty is Gould's watchword these days. He refuses to put on airs, and regards acting not as a mystical state of being but rather as a craft much like lighting or photography. On Puckoon, his director Terry Ryan marvelled at how much time he spent, ankle-deep in mud and spattered with rain, just watching what was going on on set. As he puts it: "I consider myself part of the crew that works in front of the camera."

He takes his pleasures where he can get them – from work, from his children. Just last November, he, Barbra and their son Jason had dinner together for the first time in years. He now considers himself extremely close to Jenny even though they have not actually lived together since 1989. He admits to some trouble sleeping, rarely managing to close his eyes for more than a couple of hours at a time, but says he is still "in tune with nature" and gets the rest he needs.

Is he happy, or does he still consider himself to be tormented by his various demons? "I don't think I'm tormented any more or less than anyone else," he says firmly. "I'm quite happy now, and have been most of the day."

'Puckoon' is released on 4 April