To Hell and Back With Rod Steiger : Recovery: Appearing at UCI, the actor talks about his career and how it almost ended because of clinical depression.

IRVINE —  Picture Rod Steiger. The Oscar-winning actor is still solidly built, powerful looking, at age 69. His head is shaved clean. His brown eyes come at you like magnetic tractor beams out of a jowly face that softens magically when he smiles. But don’t picture him smiling. Picture him as “the kind of guy who goes into a bar and everybody tries to sneak out the back.”

Is this a role that the star of “On the Waterfront,” “The Pawnbroker” and “In the Heat of the Night” has taken on? No. This is the person Steiger says he probably would have become, if he hadn’t become an actor.

Or picture him unshaven, unwashed, unspeaking, sitting in a stupor staring at the ocean day in and day out for years. This is the Rod Steiger who suffered from clinical depression, before drug therapy rendered his disease manageable and allowed him to live again.

On stage at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Saturday night, Steiger shared these and many other visions of his personal life and creativity to benefit the UCI Brain Imaging Center, which produced “An Evening with Rod Steiger” in association with the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD).

Steiger first came to be associated with the BIC last year when he received its Silver Ribbon Award for his unstinting efforts to eliminate the stigma of mental disease. He has testified before Congress. He has spoken candidly many times on television and on stage.

Few audiences could have been better primed to receive his message than the one at the Barclay, where silver ribbons glinted from nearly every lapel. It was a crowd of psychiatrists, researchers, nurses, activists, fans, but more than anything else, a gathering of people whose personal lives had been rerouted by the tragedy of mental illness. They gave Steiger a standing ovation when he came in, to which he quipped: “I didn’t know I had that many relatives.”

Answering questions from Prof. Richard Brown, who hosts an interview program on the American Movie Classics channel, Steiger amply embodied his own definition of an actor as a mobile poet. Ensconced in an armchair, he nonetheless communicated passionately, humorously and articulately on his life. His powerful voice threatened to overwhelm the audio equipment.

Picture Rod Steiger as a member of Spanky and Our Gang. As Spanky himself, in fact. There was a national competition for the role into which young Rod was entered, “in a big straw hat, a diaper and a giant pin. And I won!” he boomed, looking surprised. “I was supposed to go to Hollywood the next day, but I had a big boil on my rear end. I fell down some stairs and burst the boil, got a fever and couldn’t go. They used the runner-up, and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me . . . Or you!” he added, fixing the crowd with his laser-lock eyes.

It wasn’t until years later, after a stint in the military, that he stumbled into his calling.

He told of filing used checks in a civil service office, a block-long building that employed thousands. He and the boys found out where all the good-looking girls were spending their Thursday nights. There was a social program, a little theater group. “Need I say how we descended?” Steiger growled, rising from his chair, his hands extended like great bear paws. “I didn’t want to be an actor. I wanted to do something else.”

Fate had plans for him, however--a cheap rooming house in Manhattan, acting lessons, and eventually stardom. Fate also pulled him into the “stinking, icy swamp” of chemical depression.

After a heart bypass operation in 1979, something went wrong. He has a “private theory” that the anesthesia given him during the surgery may have triggered the depression he has suffered ever since.

“My mind is so impressionable,” he said, shaking his head. “The man said to me, ‘You might have a small depression.’ ” Steiger looked at the audience. “You think I do anything small?” he asked to a roar of laughter. This is an actor who has played Capone, Napoleon and Pope John. “Small” is not an adjective that springs to mind.

He said he loves playing historical characters. Far from being intimidated by comparison with the original, he said, he relishes the opportunity for a kind of spiritual fusion. “Suppose you’re playing Beethoven. If for even a split second you can feel the way Beethoven felt--that is such a high! There’s no narcotic can match it.”

Researching these roles, he added, has given him a better education than most people have, in spite of his one year of high school. “When I was a kid, we had to go to art appreciation. Rembrandt,” he sighed. “I was from Newark. I thought Rembrandt was a delicatessen downtown. Yeah, next to Gauguin, the clothes place.”

He grew to become an actor whose performances would synthesize paintings, symphonies, poetry. Picasso’s “Guernica” inspired the famous “silent scream” in Steiger’s majestic performance as a Holocaust survivor in “The Pawnbroker.”

“I saw ‘Guernica’ years ago in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Picasso has those women in profile and their tongues come out about this far and they’re sharp, like tacks. That was the loudest damn scream I had ever heard.”

When the time came to shoot the scene, and the script said “he screams,” “I put my head back and I thought of ‘Guernica’ and my instinct said ‘Don’t you make a sound. It’s the loudest damn scream you’ve ever done.’ ”

That scene, one of several in a series of clips that started the program, epitomized a very different kind of silence from the one which engulfed Steiger for eight years in the depths of his depression.

He didn’t want to get out of bed. When he would come downstairs, he said, he would mutter “good morning” to his wife, sit and stare at the tea and bagel she would bring him, lose himself in the view of the ocean for eight hours, then mutter “good night” and go back to bed.

Fueled by a sense of survival, he sought help. “I did one-on-one (therapy) for a while . . . then a group.” Neither helped very much. “I was doing a picture and waking up every morning with icy perspiration. I didn’t think I could act anymore. I couldn’t talk to anybody, because the worst thing you could do in this town is admit weakness.”

Finally, he discovered psychopharmacology. He takes medication now, nightly, “whether I like it or not.” But he says it’s “only oil on the water. There are always some days that are scary--when the water pops through the oil.

“I was lucky,” he pointed out. “I had the money to bounce around for a while. I don’t know what poorer people do.”

He then recalled that a doctor once told him what poorer people do: “They kill themselves.”

Steiger said he was donating his services to the BIC/NARSAD fund-raising effort because they are doing the kind of research and producing the kinds of drugs that have kept him and many others from seeking that desperate solution.

“It’s a big disease,” he said.

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He recalled reading a poem about it before a congressional committee and later on the air for CNN where he dared them to keep the camera on his face for the whole five pages. “And I warn you,” he had challenged them, “I can barely get through it. I break down.” Afterward, he said, they received more than 100 phone calls per hour for days.

He said the cause has come to mean more to him than his acting does. But again, fate has her plans. Steiger’s career is going through a rebirth. He is on his way to Toronto to shoot a film about Margaret Sanger in which he plays her nemesis, a religious fanatic. His film “The Specialist,” in which he co-stars with Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone and James Woods, is due in October.

“ ‘The Specialist’ is like a $60 million commercial for me,” he chortled. “ ‘Hey,’ it’s saying, ‘He’s still alive.’ ”

“Alive.” It’s too small a word for the likes of Rod Steiger.