Hector Elizondo: In His Stride

|  There’s more than one reason to call Hector Elizondo a character actor. There’s his role as the flinty hotel manager with a soft spot for Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. And legions of 10-year-olds call him Joe, the clever head of security in The Princess Diaries and The Princess Diaries II.

But he’s also an actor with character. No hilltop mansion, swimming pool, or fancy cars for this Emmy-Award winner. Elizondo, 70, isn’t blinded by what he calls “bells and whistles.”

“What I do have,” he says, “are good friends and my sense of wonder, that ‘What is my place in this world?’ ”

In embracing his place in the artistic world, he lives by the credo that art must be done for art’s sake.

“If I had to choose, I would do only stage and radio,” says Elizondo, who in 1974 helped found L.A. Theatre Works, a company that produces audio versions of plays. Yet he has nearly 100 movies to his credit.

Elizondo met director Garry Marshall in the 1980s, and the two developed a tight friendship. Marshall has called Elizondo his “lucky charm.”

“Hector is the most reliable and versatile actor I’ve had the pleasure of doing 15 films (and some plays) with,” says Marshall.

Elizondo has appeared in The Celestine Prophecy, Runaway Bride, and Tortilla Soup. He starred in Chicago Hope, for which he won the 1997 Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Dramatic Series, and appeared in episodes of The West Wing, Kojak, and other hit television shows.

When it comes to movies, he says, “I love movies, but they don’t pay me to work; they pay me to wait.” He most recently waited inside a trailer in Cartagena, Colombia, between takes for his role as Don Leo in an upcoming film version of Love in the Time of Cholera, based on Gabriel García Márquez’s novel. The movie features Javier Bardem in the lead role of the love-stricken Florentino, who waits five decades for the chance to be with the woman of his dreams.

Can there be such unwavering love? Or do you call it plain old obsession?

Psychological issues definitely plague Florentino, says Elizondo, who plays the wealthy, eccentric, but loving uncle. “The character I play is nonjudgmental about his nephew,” he says. “In fact, he is somewhat delighted that insanity runs in the family.”

The actor explains: “Sometimes insanity can lead to creativity. Great artists are people who are great adventurers, people who won’t take no for an answer. There is good insane and bad insane, I suppose.”

But insane love is something Elizondo doesn’t put much faith in. He has been with the same woman, a book artist and publisher, for 38 years.