O’Keefe Is Back in Courtroom

Eleven years ago, Michael O’Keefe received a best supporting Oscar nomination for “The Great Santini.”

“People kept wondering why I didn’t become the star of my generation after that movie,” O’Keefe reflects. “The potential was there in a certain kind of world, but it’s not the world the film business works in. The bottom line is that movie didn’t make a dime.”

Save for 1980’s comedy “Caddyshack,” none of his films, O’Keefe says, has made a dime. “Directors, writers and actors are interested in making movies with me, producers and movie studio people are not interested in me as they are in Kevin Costner or Tom Cruise. That’s just the fact of the matter.”

Still, O’Keefe considers himself “really lucky.” Over the last decade, he’s starred on Broadway in “Mass Appeal” and in such feature films as “Split Image,” “Nate and Hayes” and “Ironweed.” He also played an idealistic attorney in the short-lived Fox series “Against the Law.”

Since January, O’Keefe has been touring in Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed “A Few Good Men,” a courtroom drama about the murder trial of two young Marines accused of killing a fellow soldier. The play opens Tuesday at the Wilshire Theatre.

“This is my second attorney in the last two years,” O’Keefe says, laughing. “I went through a period when I did military roles and played basically someone who was unfit for military service. This could be the ultimate unfit-for-military-service military role.”

The downside of the tour is that O’Keefe hasn’t been able to accompany his wife of one year, Grammy Award-winning singer Bonnie Raitt, on her tour. “This is the first time we have both been stuck,” he says. “We have had a five-week separation. She has been in New Zealand and Japan. Usually, we have been fortunate that when I was working she wasn’t or when she was working, I wasn’t.”