Daniel Davis: The Butler Did It
Daniel Davis: The Butler Did It
Chances are, if you watch The Nanny, and there's a gag to be had or
a great one-liner to be delivered with a stone face, it's the butler you'll see do it!
First there was Mr. French. Then came Benson. These days, our TV
butler du jour is Niles, the oh so outspoken, irreverent and veddy,
veddy English character, brilliantly portrayed by actor Daniel Davis on
the CBS sitcom The Nanny.
"The thing about the character of Niles that makes doing it so interesting
and attractive to play," Davis admits, "is number one, he is a character
that has its roots all the way back in Roman comedy. This character is
as old as the drama itself. The notion of a servant with a sharp tongue
has been around for about 3,000 years. Niles and those of his ilk are
instantly likeable characters because they get to say what everybody
else wishes they had the nerve to say."
One of Davis' favorite scenes so far in the series' run was his take-off on
Tom Cruise's underwear dance in the film Risky Business. "I had the
best time doing that," he admits.
"We get the new scripts on Friday night as we're leaving, and I usually
read them on Saturday morning. I read the script and I just couldn't
believe they were going to let me do it. All week long, I kept thinking
that they were going to take it away from me. It is so uncharacteristic
and that's what really worked about it," explains Davis.
"It was one of those moments you find out something about a
character... a side to them that you have no idea exists. In some ways,
Niles works best the less you know about him. You don't really want to
blow too much knowledge about him at this point or maybe ever,
because he really works best when he comes in and does something
completely surprising."
And speaking of surprises, most viewers are unaware that Davis himself
is not exactly who we think of him to be. At first glimpse, there is no
mistaking the fact that Daniel Davis must have been, to coin a phrase,
"To the manner born."
In reality, though, the Shakespearean trained actor, whose dulcet tones
and impeccable speech could rival even an Olivier, was actually born in
Little Rock, Arkansas! "I think that that's probably the biggest surprise
people have about me," states Davis. Both viewers and critics alike are
constantly confusing the All-American actor whose roots are planted
"way down south of Dixie" with the English character he portrays.
"When we first got some reviews in on the show when it first began,"
recalls Davis, "Charles Shaughnessy (who plays Maxwell) and I were
laughing about the fact that one of the critics commented that he wished
Charles' accent was as authentic as mine, which is hilarious, because
Charles is the only Englishman between us."
"I was born in a really small town in Arkansas called Gurdon. It was a
railroad town where all of my people sort of settled and my mother and
father were born and grew up. I moved to Little Rock when I was 11,
and Little Rock sort of became the place I did spend most of my
formative years."
As a young child, Davis went through all the normal fireman, doctor,
astronaut aspirations, but soon realized that everything that he really
wanted to be was somehow an excuse to the theatrical. "I wanted to be
a lawyer if I could be Raymond Burr on Perry Mason. I wanted to be
an evangelist if I could be Billy Graham. I wanted to be a scientist, but
only if I could be Albert Einstein or Albert Schweitzer. It was all bigger
than life; it was always about being enormous," he says.
"And that's the wonderful thing about being an actor. You get to be
everything you ever wanted to be without having to go through any of
the heartache of being it. It is the advantage of being in this profession."
One professional disadvantage, if he were to succeed in theater, was the
necessity of losing his southern dialect. "One of the first requirements of
working in the theater was that you rid yourself of any sort of
regionalism, so that's kind of something I worked on very early."
"I was born in the mid-40s and in the late 40s and early 50s, we were
taking what were called elocution lessons, so I actually started getting
rid of my southern accent pretty early on. By the time I actually got into
formal training in my late teens and early 20's, there really wasn't that
much to lose."
"During the course of my career in the theater, I've played so many roles
in Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekov, Gibson and Shaw. In all that sort of
literature of the European theater, the absolute rule is to always use what
we mistakenly used to call a mid-Atlantic accent, which is really just sort
of American speech without any regionalism."
"So that is kind of what I have in my normal speaking voice now. But
when I get into a character like Niles, who is very proper, I sort of go
into a theatrical British accent-theatrical being the operative word
because you can't pinpoint it to any particular sound or region in
England because it really doesn't exist. Yet I have English actors all the
time asking me how long I've been over here."
His very earliest training came when he worked on a local TV program
for children in Arkansas, starting at the age of 10. "I got a lot of
background and training from the actual on-air experience. We were
sort of guided along by a woman who was hostess and ran the show.
She taught us all singing and dancing and skits, and we made little 8mm
films, so that was my earliest experience and background...and for some
reason, I developed a taste for working in the theater before I ever
knew what it was. I'd been in plays before I'd ever seen them."
"Once I left the program as a child, I never thought about television and
film again until much much later in my life. I was totally dedicated to the
idea of being an actor in the theater, and I don't even really know where
that notion came from, but it seemed to me there was something pristine
and pure about the notion of being that kind of actor. If you could
conquer or at least come to grips with the great material of the theater,
anything."
"I put everything else aside and devoted myself to the idea of just being
a theater actor. I based myself in New York. That city was about
competition and it wasn't about working. It was about always going up
against somebody else who had more celebrity or more fame or more
something - and always losing to those people."
Early on, he had agents who told him that he should remain in New
York. "I'd say, 'but I'm staying in New York to be on unemployment,
and I'm being asked to come to Cincinnati to play Hamlet. You tell me
which one makes the most sense.' So I would go, in spite of their
objections. I ended up going off and doing regional theater for like 22
years."
The longest stint Davis had in any one endeavor was at the American
Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. He went there to do one play
and ended up staying for seven years and doing 40 plays.
"That became the most productive, creative and important period of my
life in terms of growth as an artist," claims Davis, "because we were in a
conservatory situation as well as being in a professional theater
program."
"There was also a school attached, so the school used our services as
actors and we were called upon to teach, direct and deal with student
actors. It forced us every day to deal objectively with what we were
used to only normally dealing with subjectively as performers."
"It was necessary to get up in front of eager young minds and say what
you knew about the work and process. As a result, it really made you
focus on your own process because in order to sell somebody on the
idea, you had to have a pretty good one. That was a very crucial part of
my training and also the time in which I did the most significant roles and
significant work on a consistent basis."
When he made the decision to leave ACT, he gravitated back to New
York rather than Los Angeles because he still didn't feel any sort of call
to do television or film. "Film for me was like something I would never
be able to do. I don't know why I had it in my mind, but I would go to
the movies and be swept away and captivated and got lost in the
movie."
He thought if he went ahead and pursued the genre, he would no longer
be entertained by it anymore. In fact, he has similar thoughts about the
theater.
"I became a very hard audience for plays and still am," Davis admits. "I
hardly ever go to the theater because I'm almost always wanting too
much from it and it almost never gives me what I want. I haven't learned
to go without expectation yet. I go to the movies with no expectations
whatsoever and so they almost always entertain me. I thought I wouldn't
television as well."
Fate, however, was to intervene when he went back to the East Coast.
The first two auditions he had were for the play Amadeus and for a
soap opera. He got offered both jobs and accepted them both, doing
the play in the evening and the soap during the day.
The lure of television kind of reeled him in because it was paying more
money per day than he had ever made in a week's work in the theater.
"I know it's boring to talk about that which we do for money," he
admits, "but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out after a
while."
"And at the time, I was approaching 40 and was looking for long term
instead of short term stuff, and suddenly I thought for the first time in my
life, I've got to make a conscious career decision and that's about
coming to L.A. and trying to get the very thing, that I suppose in the long
term, will enable me to go back to the theater. It's boring to say that it
was an economic decision, but that's what it was and for a lot of actors,
that's what it turns out to be."
He did lots of guest roles in such shows as Cagney and Lacy before
garnering his current hit TV series. As we've noted in the past, many
television pairs of key players are lefthanders, such as Jerry Seinfeld and
Jason Alexander, Tim Allen and Richard Karn, Ken Kimmons and
Georgia Engle, Daniel Davis and Fran Drescher.
"Maybe we all have a sort of empathy with each other that's sort of an
unspoken thing like 'Children of the Damned' or something," he joked.
"I've always heard of that left brain/right brain controlling areas of
creativity and it turns out that there are an enormous number of
performing artists and creative types who are lefthanded."
The only lefthander in his family, Davis considers himself an anomaly.
"As I mentioned before, I was born in the mid-40s and I know, because
I've had conversations with my parents about it, that they were under
some pressure from their parents to try and change me."
"They all really believed in the whole notion of sinister, and being
lefthanded you were somehow marked by Satan. I don't mean to make
us out as booga-booga type people, but there was pressure. When I
first got to school, my first grade teacher was kind of questioning my
choice of picking up the pencils and crayons with my left hand."
"It's funny because when I was growing up and was trying to be active
in sports, I went to the baseball mount and instinctively batted
righthanded. And when I went to play golf, I approached the tee
instinctively from the right to drive and putt as a true righthander does."
And when I play tennis, I have the tennis racket in my left hand, but my
forehand is completely weak and my backhand is like killer because I
can do a two-handed backhand. The racket in my left hand becomes
like a baseball bat when I move it over for the backhand. It becomes a
very powerful backhand, but anybody that plays my forehand will win
immediately."
It would seem that sometimes there is no winning when it comes to
doing lefthanded tasks on the set of The Nanny. "On the show, with the
amount of serving and household things that they have me doing, there
are many times where if I'm doing it with my left hand, it's not good for
the camera, so I have to do it with my right hand."
"It becomes very awkward for me and I have to go around and check
all of my props before we do a scene to make sure that the prop people
have remembered to set everything up with the handles facing the left.
They're all righthanded people and just as soon as I get them trained,
they move on to another job and somebody else comes in and it takes
half the season to get the new ones trained."
"As someone who sees himself on television, I look at myself sometimes
and think 'I've got that in the wrong hand.' Or I'll think that I've
arched my right eyebrow and it's really my left eyebrow that's arched,
and I'll think that eyebrow is on the wrong side of my face."
"That's not how I see it, so that throws me once in a while because I
think I'm looking at something I think the director has shot from one side
and it's actually coming from the other side. And I think, 'Oh, if I had
realized it was coming from that side, I would have chosen to play
that a little bit differently.' It's very funny sometimes to see myself the
way the rest of the world sees me."
"I've never found lefthandedness to be a liability in any way that I can
think of. I think, 'My god, I've been lefthanded for such a long time
now that it is something I don't think about much anymore,' but
during an interview such as this, it's funny to get pulled up a little bit and
have to think about those things once in a while."
While most southpaws don't give their handedness much thought on a
regular basis, we sometimes sense that the righthanded world does pay
us more than a little attention. "I'm loathe to think that in this day and
age, people are still giving us a hard time about being 'sinister.' It's a very
interesting and confusing thing sometimes if you start getting too hung up
on it."
But as with every cloud's silver lining, there's usually a logical solution -
and Daniel Davis' thoughts on surviving as a southpaw in a handed
world are quite inspirational.
"I think what it takes to get by," he surmises, "is to consider that this is
really a lefthanded world, and there just happen to be a lot of
righthanded people running around in it."
by Marla Brooks
The Lefthander Magazine
Vol. 21 No. 2
March/April 1996
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