I still get a kick out of those TV commercials for Dos Equis featuring "The Most Interesting Man in the World." (My favorite is when he says that he once visited a psychic… to warn her.) The New Yorker has a very short profile of the actor behind the Man. His name is Jonathan Goldsmith. He's 72-years-old. Jewish. And from the Bronx. And he's pretty interesting too! From the New Yorker:
His mother was a Conover model, his father a track coach at James Monroe High School. Postcollegiate dissolution (and a session with the famed psychoanalyst Fredric Wertham) led him into an acting class at the Living Theatre and, eventually, into competition with the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall. (Goldsmith recalls a contentious exchange with Hoffman: "I jumped up and said, 'Dustin, the reason you don't like me is because I'm gonna make it and you're not.' ") Goldsmith eventually made it–out to Los Angeles, anyway–and embarked on a career as a "that guy," very often the that guy who gets killed, on television shows such as "Bonanza," "Mannix," "Gunsmoke," "Hawaii Five-O," "The Rockford Files," "Barnaby Jones," "Charlie's Angels," "CHiPs," "Dynasty," "T. J. Hooker," "Knots Landing," "Magnum, P.I.," "MacGyver," and "Dallas," to name a few. He had an equally peripatetic career off the lot, the particulars of which he's saving for a book. He divulged one old surefire tactic: knowing that Warren Beatty kept a penthouse suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Goldsmith used to wait in the lobby for the young women who'd been summoned there, and he'd intercept them, saying, "Warren sent me down. I'm terribly sorry, but he had to cancel the meeting."
"Interesting" (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)
