David Behrens talks to a Hollywood star who constantly rejects film roles to avoid being typecast.

Americans, says Kevin Kline, do not know how to behave in public. Especially at the theatre.

"They think they're watching television," he says. "They cough, they talk, they comment. They think they're in their own lounge."

Standards of behaviour, Kline suggests, are what separates us from our neighbours across the Atlantic.

"British audiences, I'm amazed, still watch theatre with respect," he enthuses. "I love doing theatre work in Britain."

Kline is one of the few performers prepared to publicly judge his audiences. Usually, it's the other way around - and not unnaturally, since it's the audience that has paid to get in.

But the question of maintaining standards has become an obsession to him - so much so that he has become known in Hollywood as Kevin De-Kline, on account of the numerous roles he turns down.

"I know," he says. "It's just one of those things. It's probably the reason I'm not more famous."

The roles he has accepted have included two with his friend John Cleese (last year's Dangerous Creatures and, more memorably, A Fish Called Wanda) and that of the American president, in Dave.

Currently he is to be seen in not one but two new films: as an adulterous father in 1970s New England, in Ang Lee's highly-praised drama The Ice Storm; and as a gay high school teacher in the comedy, In & Out. The two characters could not be more different.

"I like the public not to know what to expect from me," he says. "That's why I take on so many types of role.

"Some actors trade on the fact that if you go to see their movies, you know what you're going to get. I've never been interested in doing that - I was spoiled by years of repertory acting in the theatre."

The attraction of playing Howard Brackett, the sexually-repressed drama teacher in In & Out, was, says Kline, down to the quality of the script and the fact that Brackett is neither camp nor flamboyant - unusual qualities by Hollywood standards. But it was the requirement for him to kiss Tom Selleck which got the film noticed in America.

"I had kissed men before on stage, although never on-screen," he says. It's not a big deal.

"The only way to do it was wholeheartedly, and Tom was wonderful. He was like Clark Gable and I was Scarlet O'Hara."

The film is based on a real-life incident in which Tom Hanks, accepting a Best Actor Oscar for playing a gay lawyer in the film Philadelphia, inadvertently "outed" his old high school drama teacher. The man's friends did not know, apparently, that he was gay.

Kline didn't see the Oscar night debacle - his daughter was being born at just that moment - but he agreed to look at the resultant script after first sending it back for re-writes.

"People actually asked me how I felt when I was told I was going to play a homosexual," he says. "I said, 'What do you mean, TOLD?' Actors do have some choice in the work they take on, you know.

"And I'm not the only one to turn parts down. There are quite a few performers who feel as I do that we'll bore the audience if we just keep on doing the same things.

"But the movies seem to have perpetuated this idea that actors are assigned roles, just as they were in the old days of the Hollywood studios."

The reaction of misunderstanding movie-watchers was in any case eclipsed by a more serious controversy generated between In & Out and Barbra Streisand.

Repeated references to her in the film drew attention to the cult following she has garnered, evidently, within the gay community.

"She read about it in the paper and was both flattered and not a little miffed," says Kline. "For her to deny that she has a gay following would be absurd. And the world knows that she has an enormous heterosexual following as well - as does Maria Callas and presumably many other gay icons."

The film also brought to light a growing movement in the US to sideline gays within the education system.

"It happens in various communities, and not only in the provinces," says Kline. "In New York City, while we were filming, a teacher came out and admitted he was gay, and he was fired. There is this fear that gays should not be teachers - some puritanical educators and nervous, ignorant people think that gay teachers will somehow turn everyone else gay.

"The whole point about our film is that it's not a big deal and that sexuality has nothing to do with the ability to teach."

Howard Brackett's students assume him to be gay by dint of his expressive hand movements and liking for poetry.

It's an odd case of art imitating life, since Kline's wife, the actress Phoebe Cates, had once made the same mistake.

"Before we were dating, Phoebe said she'd seen me in Sophie's Choice and presumed I was gay," he recalls.

"I said, 'Really? Why was that?' She said, 'Well, because you moved your hands so much.

"And you seemed so clean'."

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