Oliver Platt

A member of the "Third Culture" (primarily composed of the rootless children of diplomats, military personnel and international businessmen), Oliver Platt is one of the relatively select few not born and raised in his own culture. Well, Platt was born in Windsor, Ontario, where his father, Nicholas Platt, launched his distinguished diplomatic career in 1960 as a lowly junior consul stamping visa applications.

From ages 4 to 8, as his father rose through the ranks, the family was based in Hong Kong. By the time he was 12, they had moved on to a two-year stint in Beijing. From age 14 until he enrolled as a drama major at Boston`s Tufts University, the wandering Platt family lived and worked in Tokyo.

"I was only dimly aware that we had a kind of vagabond lifestyle and wasn`t able to appreciate it until we settled in Japan," recalls the somewhat dimpled, rumpled and crumpled 40-year-old actor. "It was very cool, though moving around is not necessarily the best for kids.

"Third Culture kids like me tend to have a lot of things in common," the immensely likable and unaffected Platt continues, "including the ability to communicate instantly with people with whom you have nothing in common. There is a kind of reaching out and I think that`s why a lot of them go into the performing arts. I don`t want to make too much out of it, but it makes sense."

Platt also had a positive performance role model in his father, an amateur singer and guitarist who was fluent in several Chinese dialects.

"My dad had a big impact on me because I remember him working with an American folk music band singing traditional Chinese songs for mainland China refugees in huge Hong Kong concert halls. They were a big, big sensation and I was very proud of him."

When Platt discovered he had a knack for acting ("It was a way of assimilating with new cultures"), there was no turning back. He made his professional debut between his his freshman and sophomore years at Tufts, hauling in $100 for an entire summer of portraying Big Daddy in a Tufts Arena Theatre production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." But he elected to stay on in Boston following graduation in 1983, while his friends moved on to New York.

"I was scared of New York, so I stayed on for a couple of years doing regional theater and doing lots of parts that I never would have had a chance to do on- or off-Broadway," says Platt. "And it turned out to be a situation where my fear was my best friend. I received a crucial part of my training in Boston while the friends calling me `chicken` were sent back in body bags. My confidence level built up, I finally gave New York a shot. I was going to act or sell real estate."

A dozen plays later, Platt made his feature film debut in "Married to the Mob" (1988) with Michelle Pfeiffer, Alec Baldwin and Dean Stockwell. Suddenly a working movie actor, he has piled up hefty credits in a couple dozen big-screen projects, including "Executive Decision," "A Time to Kill," "Postcards From the Edge," "Working Girls," "Flatliners," "Benny and June," "The Three Musketeers," "Dr. Doolittle," "Bulworth" and "Gun Shy."

TV offers have rolled in during the past decade, but Platt never took them seriously until location work was pulling him away from his wife, Camilla, and three small children - ranging in age from 1 to 6 - for months at a time. That`s when the pilot script for "Deadline" - a one-hour drama set and shot in and around his home in New York - came across his transom.

"The first script was better than a vast majority of the features I`ve been offered," he muses, "but I was surprised by how excited I got by the idea of staying home and working on something good."

And now he portrays Wallace Benton, a crusading New York newspaper columnist of the Jimmy Breslin variety dedicated to exposing skeletons in the closets of the Big Apple`s rich, poor, famous and infamous. For extra cash, the blue-blooded black sheep teaches a seminar on investigative journalism at a local university. "Deadline" also features Bebe Neuwirth as his no-nonsense managing editor, Lili Taylor as a vitriolic gossip journalist, Hope Davis as his award-winning-journalist, estranged wife and Tom Conti as a powerful media mogul.

A stickler for research, Platt started hanging out in the newsrooms of New York`s three major dailies prior to going into production on "Deadline."

"I find newsrooms incredibly addictive and intoxicating - when I wasn`t there, I wanted to be there," he laughs. "A newsroom is like a petri dish of human behavior (involving) very intelligent people who, most of the time, are smarter than the subjects they interview - and making a lot less money."

Not that Platt had to look for journalistic guidance, as his older brother, Adam Platt, is currently the restaurant critic for New York magazine and younger brother Nick Platt, now starting up an Internet business, once spent years as a reporter for Reuters wire service and wrote a weekly column for the New York Observer.

"My God parents are journalists and I grew up with reporters, because they always hang out with diplomats. I come at it from a very personal angle."

The personable actor probably can feed an endless string of story angles to the writers of "Deadline" drawn from his own experiences over the years.

"I didn`t fully appreciate what was going on when my brothers and I became the first American kids to live in China after it opened up to the West again in 1973," he recalls. "Red China, as we called it then, was a very strange place when my father was asked to open up a liaison office. It`s exciting to think about now."

There were plenty of nail-biting moments along the way, too, according to Platt.

"My father`s first ambassadorship was to the Philippines just as (Ferdinand) Marcos was ousted and (Corazon) Aquino took over as president (1986-92). Things were extremely unstable - including a couple of coup attempts - there for a while.

"One Thanksgiving, when my brothers and I were gathered in my tiny studio apartment in Manhattan, the phone rang," he continues. "It was my parents, holed up in the safe room at the embassy. My dad, who isn`t given to drama, said, `We just want you to know we`re still here and that we love you.` Uh-oh. We were happy when he moved on to Zambia and Pakistan."

If there is one certainty in Platt`s life, it is that his family will remain in New York City until the kids are off to college.

"It sounds hokey, but I love to hang around with my kids and my wife - who was Kermit the Frog`s publicist when I met her," he says. "It`s easy to get sucked into all the show business crap. My family is my grounding. They give all this stuff perspective."

(c)Copley News Service

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Author: Eirik Knutzen