Von Bargen

        Daniel Von Bargen is one of those actors everyone recognizes but nobody knows. The Reading High School graduate (Class of '68) has appeared in almost 50 films and more than 20 television shows.

        If you can't place the name, you may remember the uniform.

        He played a police lieutenant in Shaft, a military officer in G.I. Jane, an Air Force general in Broken Arrow, and a sheriff in the upcoming Coen brothers comedy O Brother Where Art Thou.

        On TV, he recently played a military adviser on The West Wing. On Malcolm in the Middle, he plays Commandant Edwin Spangler, head of the military school attended by Malcolm's older brother Francis (Christopher Masterson).

        Military and police roles account for more than half his filmography. When it comes to his career, he says, “Thank God for the white male power structure.”

        The downside: “Most of these authority figures are not the hero.”

        Scheduled to open here in January, O Brother, which is based on Homer's The Odyssey, offers one of his most memorable roles, as the implacable pursuer of George Clooney's Ulysses. “I'm just like the prototypical Southern sheriff with the bloodhound and the shotgun. It's not a huge part, but it has its effect,” Mr. Von Bargen says.

        “I loved working with them,” Mr. Von Bargen says of the Coens. “They were very much down to earth, loved what they did and were very good at doing it. ... They are guys who have stuck to their creative vision and seen it all the way through.”

        Mr. Von Bargen's acting career was hatched in high school, he recalls, “when we got a new football coach who was very, very hard. A number of us decided we didn't want to play football anymore.” A teacher then suggested he lend his already-deep voice to a school play.

        He stuck with it. “There were a lot of cute girls. And they tended, as a kid, to treat you more as an adult.”

        After studying drama at Purdue University, he joined the Trinity Square Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., where he spent eight years.

        “It really was the kind of place where people made their lives and their families,” he says. “That was what I needed, just to get to know the profession, to learn to act.”

        During the Trinity years, he married actress Margo Skinner — “coincidentally, from Middletown, Ohio” — but the marriage did not survive a move to New York.

        A return to Trinity, then work with the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., eventually led him back to the New York stage, with Larry Gelbart's satire Mastergate. His Oliver North-like role got him an agent, and movie and TV parts started to roll in.

        Mr. Von Bargen has worked with some of the best directors in the business, including Steven Spielberg (Amistad), Jonathan Demme (Philadelphia) and Woody Allen (Shadows and Fog), as well as independent upstarts, such as Morgan J. Freeman, (Desert Blue — “a low-budget, high-energy thing out in the middle of the desert”).

        Once in a while, he gets to play civilians, such as the sympathetic farmer he played in Scott Hicks' Snow Falling on Cedars, or comic characters, such as Kruger, George's lazy boss, on Seinfeld.

        “When you start becoming a commodity because of your face or your stature or whatever, those opportunities become fewer and fewer. So it's nice to get on a comedy and have people go, "You're funny!' ” he says.

        His stint playing a futuristic sheriff in The Postman was made even more memorable by the video that director-star Kevin Costner and crew helped him make for his parents' 50th wedding anniversary. (He couldn't leave the remote location in rural Washington State for their party.)

        He also earned fans among horror-film junkies playing the satanic Nix in Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions.

        “It was my first real venture into a horror genre, and I was happy that I got to work with one of the best ones in that genre,” Mr. Von Bargen said. “But the whole thing with makeup and spending three hours putting this stuff on and taking an hour to get it off ... I was usually in a foul mood.”

        Mr. Von Bargen said his favorite professional memory is not on film at all; it was an American Repertory Theatre production of Uncle Vanya with Christopher Walken and directed by David Mamet.

        “I'll always remember the review that said, "You want to see what good acting is, go see Christopher Walken and Daniel Von Bargen onstage.'

        “(Mr. Walken) taught me this kind of bravery I had never known before. His attitude was, we're out here to play, so let's play. ... It was a watershed performance for me, learning how to do it at the next level.”

        For all his experience, Mr. Von Bargen says he does not relish watching himself on film.

        “I don't necessarily like going (to the movies). It's a little nerve-wracking to see your head the size of a house. I'm getting used to it, but there's still a little uneasiness when you walk into the theater and think "Oh God, am I going to suck?' ”

        Has he ever? “Not to the degree that you run screaming from the theater.”

        But he does learn from his films: “It's mostly just refining it and understanding how little you need to do, and having the bravery to just do that little instead of feeling the need to show more.”

        After 15 years in the movie and TV business, Mr. Von Bargen is unimpressed with the machinery of star-making.

        “People magazine has no interest in me whatsoever. I like that,” he says. “I'm getting so tired of Los Angeles and all the attendant hoopla and shallowness and wannabes. It's monotonous.”

        He blames, in part, the increasing influence of global corporations that now own most studios. “That corporate influence is pervading and you see it everywhere. ... It was always this peculiar combination of art and business, and now the art seems to be entirely in the hands of the independents.”

        Though he has not done a play in several years, Mr. Von Bargen may find himself back onstage soon, with potentially long-lasting strikes by screen actors and writers likely in the spring.

        Stage work is hard work, he says, but it has enduring appeal.

        “When I get these days when I'm fed up and disillusioned with the Hollywood thing, I think, ... I could have a nice little cabin in the woods, do a few plays a year, that wouldn't be so bad.”

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