Being tagged a "pretty boy" gives him a tickle, but this
scene-stealer from Scarface is downright jubilant about his giant-sized
role in Thief of Hearts - and his marriage to a sprightly blond actress.
It takes some doing to steal
scenes from Al Pacino. An astonishing thing happened, though,
as audiences watched the movie Scarface. Eyes kept shifting to
the tall, sexy unknown who plays Pacino's right-hand man. Steven
Bauer didn't remain unknown for long. His charismatic Scarface
performance instantly made him a star on the rise. Next time out,
he graduates to romantic lead in Thief of Hearts, which hits the screen
this month.
Bauer has one unusual advantage
over other actors who are zooming to the top. He's privy to personal
and career advice from a master, his friend Warren Beatty. "I
shouldn't tell you this," Bauer says with a mischievous smile, "but
Warren advised me, 'Never, never, never sleep with your leading lady.
If you stop, the film will go down the drain. She won't be able
to stand in front of the camera because she'll think something's wrong
with her.' And Warren added, 'You'll do it anyway, but resist, resist,
resist.' "
Bauer foresees no such romantic
complications. He has his own real-life leading lady, actress
Melanie Griffith, Tippi Hedren's daughter. Married two years,
Bauer glows when he talks about her. It was through Melanie that
Bauer met Beatty. "Warren has guided Melanie since the early days
of her career," Bauer says. "He's been like an uncle to her.
Uncle Warren."
The twenty-seven-year-old actor
adds that Beatty also advised him to make certain that he gets the right
roles. When Thief of Hearts came along, Beatty said, "Take it".
Bauer plays Scott Muller, a streetwise art thief. Enthralled by
the portrait of an interior designer (Barbara Williams), whose house
he robs, he plots to insinuate himself into her life. Bauer sees
something of himself in Scott, particularly in the way the character struggles
to break out of his private world. "Although now I'm at ease in relationships,"
he notes, "as a child I was introverted, an observer."
He also had something in common
with Manny, the character he played in Scarface - his ethnic background.
Bauer was born in Cuba as Steven Echevarria and fled with his family
to the United States when he was three - too young to understand why
the trip was made in such stealthy haste. Steven grew up in Miami,
where he became interested in acting at Miami-Dade Junior college, and
subsequently appeared in plays at the University of Miami and in a bilingual
TV series, before hitting the trail to Hollywood.
Does all the talk about his looks
make him worry he'll be tagged a pretty boy instead of a quality actor?
"That would only happen if I focused on glamorous parts and sought that
sort of publicity. But I must admit it gives me a tickle."
There's a recent role Bauer gets
a special kick out of - his cameo in Melanie's new movie, Body Double,
directed by Brian De Palma. In one scene, Melanie, who plays porn-star
Holly Body, is in her dressing room wearing a racy black leather bikini.
In walks Steven as her assistant director. "I was prepared to bare
all," Bauer insists, "but the scene stops when she unzips my pants."
Bauer enthusiastically predicts
a shiny future for his talented wife, although he freely admits that
her career has had its down side. He also acknowledges that her
personal life was messed up, that she had slipped into dependency on booze
and, to a lesser extent, drugs. (She found help at Alcoholics Anonymous,
he says.) Bauer gets angry, though, at intimations that she was
once promiscuous. "Melanie had relationships of varying duration
with older actors, and she would get the short end of it. She
was used, but she was never a swinging single."
As for the Hollywood rat-race,
he observes: "It really scares me to see young would-be actresses
stressing looks and charm. They concentrate on meeting producers,
not on going to acting class and working hard." Together, Steven
finds that he and Melanie give each other strength. "I provide calm
and a certain kind of security," he says pensively, "and her fortitude and
resiliency have helped me to get in touch with myself." Besides,
he hated being single. "It's hell for a guy - if he has a conscience,"
he declares. "Really, I felt guilty about calling the shots.
It's not fair. If you give a part of yourself, and then stop, you're
messing with someone else's emotional life.
