Little seems impossible for Barbara Bain.
Now 92 years old, the Emmy-winning star of the original “Mission: Impossible” TV series currently sits in the director’s chair at the Actor’s Studio West, based out of the historic Hart House in West Hollywood.
She’s helming “Santa Quits,” an original Christmas comedy featuring some of the Studio’s young acting luminaries as an assortment of fairy tale characters (Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, et. al) ambitiously vying for Old Saint Nick’s suddenly vacant job.
“Santa quits because the kids are too busy on the phone,” Bain said. “They don’t write letters anymore. There’s no fun anymore. So he quits. And that’s a disaster, but a bunch of other folks want the job. They get pretty ugly with each other.”
The stage is where she began and where she feels most at home.
“First of all, I love being around the theater,” she said. “Films, I don’t have that same passion for film.”
But it wasn’t the spotlight that drew her there.
“I was not one of those kids who entertained the family. I was a reader, much of my life. So later on all those characters I so loved as a kid were part of me. I thought I knew them all. I really thought I knew them all. It was a little spooky when I found out they were really in fiction. It took me a minute to adjust.”
She remembers a librarian forbidding her from reading “Dr. Doolittle” because it was an adventure book — “and we weren’t supposed to have adventures,” she recalls. “I read Tess of the D’ubervilles, for instance: the girls cause trouble, and the boys were heroes.”
“That’s where the use of imagination came. That’s where what I found out after I became an actress and I had a right to my own imagination. Never mind what this teacher said or that person said or told you to be quiet, particularly with girls in the corner — cross your legs, hold your hands and be nice, be pretty, quiet, don’t say anything, don’t have an opinion, just cook. That’s the generation I came up in and I was chomping at the bit. And I found my way first through dance.”
At the University of Illinois, she discovered a dance group called Orchesis, whose very name — that of a Greek dancer goddess — left her spellbound. Her studies with godmother of modern dance Martha Graham led her to acting classes. She landed in Los Angeles on the last leg of a touring Broadway play in the late 1950s, and the burgeoning television industry beckoned with a wealth of job opportunities for her and her husband, actor Martin Landau, who oddly found himself in demand because of his ability to ride a horse in an era where westerns were popular, she said.
For Bain, Los Angeles was beguiling, “this weird place that had the sky on the ground,” she remembers.
“No big buildings, palm trees, no rain for years. Living in Los Angeles became very interesting to me because you had to reach to find anything. It doesn’t come to you. It’s very self-defining, this place, because you have to make a decision and go somewhere. And that’s very, very strong for a person’s development, really more so than being in New York where it comes to you.”
In a world of technology far more advanced than anything dreamed up on “Mission Impossible,” Bain still believes theater fulfills a crucial need for mankind.
“I think it is there for people to share and try to understand our ourselves, to ask ‘What am I?’ And we find that out by going to the theater. And we need to be together to find that out and we have a place in the theater to be safe, and watch all our bad and good instincts without actually carrying them out. Thank you very much and finishing all the rest. So, I think it since the beginning of time we got around a circle and told story. We need to tell each other’s stories. The need is very strong.”
“I would have been a teacher when I was a kid, or a librarian. I was happy in both of those. So, there’s a bit of a teacher in me, always has been, and it was Williams who said, ‘We are what we hand down.’ Well, I had something to hand down. And I enjoy doing it. I love to see these kids getting better and better and better here. It thrills me.”
“Santa Quits” runs at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 16, and Sunday, Dec. 17. Tickets are free but attendees must RSVP to [email protected] The Actors Studio West is located at 8341 DeLongpre Ave., West Hollywood.
Barbara Bain is classy and intelligent and very under the radar as far as classic era tv celebrities go. I respect her for not needing be in the spotlight and for taking raising her children seriously. She’s truly a legend, and still beautiful.
I’m looking at an episode of In Plain Sight with Martin Landau making an appearance. It made me think of Barbara Bain. It is wonderful to see that she is staying busy doing what she enjoys the most. She looks great. God bless her.
This is the kind of stuff that makes West Hollywood and indeed Los Angeles so special.