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Soap Villain 'Prey-ing' on Prime Time"


'One Life to Live's' Roger Howarth doubles up with role on new series... These days, you can hate him day and night..... Roger Howarth rises each morning about 7 a.m., has a light breakfast, kisses his wife and kid goodbye, leaves his Greewich Village apartment,catches an uptown IRT, and then works a grueling 11 hours at being one of the most despicable characters on daytime television. "I play a horrible, horrible guy," says Howarth, the 29-year-old actor who portrays serial rapist Todd Manning on ABC's "One Life to Live" and is now also starring in the new prime-time ABC drama "Prey." "On 'One Life,' I play a rapist, so it's a tricky situation for me. I'm not amazed at how many people watch it, but the same people who watch it so religiously. They don't miss a day. The target audience is women between 18 and 40 and they get it; they understand that I'm just an actor playing a role. But because I play such a horrible guy, it sometimes botherms me when some people aren't able to understand that it's just make-believe. "So it's also very important that the writing is responsible. Right now, I'm proud to be part of a story that shows that sexual violence is a real problem and not a joke."

Howarth, who won a Daytime Emmy in 1994 and is voted by viewers as the best soap opera villain almost every year, is one of the top five male soap stars, with a salary of $4,000 a day. Howarth is guaranteed three days a week and usually works five. "I get to the studio at about 8:30 in the morning," he says. "We do a rehearsal with just the actors and the director, in our street clothes. Then at 10 o'clock we go upstairs to the studio and we rehearse for the cameras. Then we have lunch. At 1 o'clock, we tape the show, which takes about six to eight hours. And except for some added music, what we shoot is what you see on TV. There's a cliché in daytime TV that goes, 'We do here in a day what would take a feature film eight months.'

'A different show every day'
Soap actors perform before three cameras, recording the show on videotape in a process that Howarth says is close to his theatrical roots as screen acting can get. "I love that we do a different show every day," he says. "We shoot between 70 and 80 pages of dialogue for a 44-minute show in a single day. Then at about 7:30 in the evening, I take the subway home. If it's still nice out, I'll take my 5-year-old son to the park or a friend's house, or have some of his friends over. My wife Cari and I think New York is the best place in the world to raise a kid."

Howarth was born and raised in Tarrytown, the son of a former New York World Telegram reporter who packed in the news business after the JFK assassination to teach drama in high school. "So I grew up around acting, but I tried to resist it," he says. "I took political science in college but kind of felt like I was cheating, that I was preparing myself to fail as an actor. So I signed up for apprenticeship programs in regional theaters inMassachusetts and spent as much time as I could watching, selling brownies during intermission and carrying spears. And finally got a couple of shots on stage."

With soaps, you clean up....
An agent noticed him, and when Howarth moved to New York City, and 10 years ago he landed a role in a play at the Public Theater. "It was a nice play to start," he says. "I never had to wait a table. Good thing too, because I would never have figured out the math." Howarth married writer/actress Cari Stahler, and eked out a living in theater. When Cari became pregnant in 1992, Howarth turned to daytime television. "Cari was supporting my acting habit," he says. "I was doing an eight-week show at the WPA Theater on 23d St. Someone who was on 'As the World Turns' got sick, and so I understudied for his part on that soap for one day. And I realized I made as much dough in that day as I did in the eight-week run of the play. So we did the math and I started auditioning for soaps. And soon he was one of the hottest stars on daytime TV.

Shootouts & car chases Howarth became so popular on soaps last year ABC cast him in the lead male role opposite Debra Messing in the new prime-time sci-fi thriller "Prey." "I shot 12 episodes of 'Prey" at the same time I was doing 'One Life to Live,' " he says, "flying back and forth from New York to Los Angeles. The difference was remarkable. To begin with, we get like a week or more to shoot an episode. And instead of 80 pages of dialogue a day, we shot about six. And you get out of the studio, to do shootouts and car chases, and all that neat stuff. "It was a crash course in film acting. And I'm playing an equally sinister character, although he has a different sense of humor than the one I play in the soap."

If "Prey" doesn't make it to next season, ABC has a development deal with Howarth to come up with another primetime show. "ABC has been very nice to me," Howarth says. "They've let me out of school to go play with the other kids in prime time. As much as I enjoy coming to work to do the daytime show, it was a real thrill to do something in another setting." While still getting paid to make people hate him.

 

OLTL head writer Michael Malone on Roger Howarth

 

Question: Whose decision was it to flesh out Todd from Marty's gangrapist into the character he ultimately became at the end of your run? If it was someone else's decision, how did you feel about it? If it was your decision, what reaction did it get from the higher-ups?

Malone: One of the things I love about daytime writing (which makes it very different from the solitary creation of novels and more like the communal creation over decades of a great medieval cathedral) is that the story-telling is a genuine collaboration, not just among writers but by the actors. Directors, producers, and audience have their input as well. In the creation of Todd Manning, no one played a larger role than the remarkably talented Josh Griffith, first associate head writer, then co-head writer, during my stay at One Life. Josh loved, lived and breathed Todd and fought passionately for his position on the show.


Second, Todd never would have evolved from "first frat boy" to the major cast member he became without the powerful talent of Roger Howarth. Because of Roger's ability to convey the complexity of Todd (the hurt as well as anger, the insecurity as well as bluster, the brains, yearning, manipulativeness, sexiness, tenderness, nastiness) we were able to explore both the deeply dark side of this character (the effort to destroy Marty to cover the rape, the attempted revenge on his lawyer Nora, the attack on Luna) and at the same time slowly uncover his growing struggle (usually a failed struggle) towards some kind of redemption. Romantic leads have often begun their careers playing villains (Valentino, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart among them). These characters appeal because they make women feel both the thrill of the "bad" and the lure of the hidden "good": they can lead the man to change through love. "I'll save him!" Fans loved Todd from the beginning because he always had that appeal. The network was therefore happy to have him return to Llanview whenever Roger would come back, and happy to have him move into story in major ways.


The spiritual journey that a man like Todd might make towards being offered forgiveness and being able to accept forgiveness (sometimes the harder task) always intrigued me as a story-- and particularly so because Roger was too honest an actor ever to make the journey an easy one for a character as dangerously wounded as Todd. Any reformation of Todd of course had to lead to a re-confrontation with Marty. That's why he had to risk his freedom after his prison break to pull her from the car wreckage, and even donate to her his blood. That's why later he did what he could to help her and Patrick Thornhart. But nothing could ever make Todd feel less twisted about the crime he had committed against Marty, and nothing could balance the scales for Marty until she had found a way to

HOWARTH WOWS BROADWAY
From Soaps In Depth magazine


Roger Howarth (ex-Todd) is taking the Great White Way buy storm! The actor, who, beginning Thursday, March 11, will appear alongside Laurence Fishburne … and Stockard Channing on Broadway in The Lion In Winter, is giving a performance that has been described as "amazing." " Roger's audition completely blew everyone - including Stockard Channing - out of the water," Amy Christopher, casting director for the Roundabout Theater Company, tells SID. "He had a completely unique and different take on it than anyone else we'd ever seen."

The Lion in Winter dramatizes the deliberations of mediaeval monarch Henry II (Tony and Emmy winner Fishburne) and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine (Tony winner and Emmy and Academy Award nominee Channing), over possible successors to the English throne, one of whom is King Philip, played by Daytime Emmy winner Howarth. Interestingly, though, the actor entered auditions last fall with a different role on his mind. "It's one of those fairytale casting stories," recalls Christopher. " We auditioned Roger for the part of Richard the Lion-Hearted three times, and everyone was really intrigued with him--no one knew that he used to be on a soap. He came back and came back and never disappointed. He was amazing. On the last day of the auditions," she continues. "we had a sort of epiphany, and decided to read him for Philip.." The end result, Christopher says, was a majestic match made in heaven. "Roger has incredible intensity, and none of us knew he could handle this type of language. He was just wonderful. He completely captured the role in a way that no one else did."

Hardly a stranger to the stage, Howarth studied at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and has performed at many prestigious regional theaters, most notably the Williamstown Theater Festival. Additionally, he appeared in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Macbeth, and in the WPA's The White Rose. Besides past television work on OLTL, and the short-lived sci-fi series Prey, Howarth can be seen in the upcoming Spike Lee film, The Summer of Sam.


As Christopher describes the personalities of both Philip and Richard, it's easy to see why Howarth - who was brilliant as OLTL's viciously volatile yet coolly calculating Todd - was suited for both roles. "Philip is cerebral and much more intellectual," she explains, "while Richard, on the other hand, is a warrior and there's more danger to him."

Originally premiering on Broadway in 1966, playwright James Goldman's The Lion in Winter was adapted into an acclaimed 1968 film which netted Oscars for Goldman as well as Katherine Hepburn for her turn as Eleanor. Though Timothy Dalton portrayed Philip in the film, Christopher instead likes Howarth to a different cinema icon. "He's almost like Montgomery Clift, someone like that," she offers. "Roger is so intense, but he's got the drop-dead gorgeous looks as well." One former OLTL co-star sure to catch Howarth's performance is Kale Browne …. "I can't wait," says Browne. "I've done this play, and I love this play, so I think Roger will be spectacular in it. He has yet to mine the treasure that's inside of him. He's a hell of an actor."

Howarth is King
March 28th, 1999

As for Roger Howarth's performance as King Philip, the reviews are positive to neutral, seeming to depend on whether the critic liked the play overall. According to nytheather.com, "Roger Howarth is excellent as the young King of France, who arrives in Henry's court with some treacherous plans of his own, one of which is to seduce the bisexual Richard the Lionheart into betraying his father. (This seduction scene, the climax of Act One, is splendidly done.)" Donald Lyons of The New York Post also had a positive opinion of Howarth's performance, "As the French king Philip, Roger Howarth moves convincingly from a boyish clumsiness to a power-hungry maturity more worthy of Henry than any quality in his own sons."

According to the magazine Soaps in Depth, Howarth originally auditioned several times for the role of one of Henry II's sons, Richard the Lionhearted, before they thought of auditioning him for the role of King Philip. "Roger has incredible intensity, and none of us knew he could handle this type of language. He was just wonderful. He completely captured the role in a way that no one else did.", said Amy Christopher, casting director for the Roundabout Theater.