I've been a fan of Raul Julia for YEARS. But ran across this episode of _American Masters_ just tonight, while scrolling through the Guide on FIOS to see if there was anything worth watching at the beginning of Labor Day Weekend 2022....
Trying to remember the first thing I ever saw him in -- might have been him as Edmund in the taped production of _King Lear_ starring James Earl Jones. No -- it was on Broadway in the Andre Serbin production of _The Cherry Orchard_ that had started in Chicago and moved to NY. I think I was in middle school or high school and there was a bus trip to a matinee performance. (He played the peasant who buys the orchard, and Meryl Streep had a small part as the maid....). Then, years later, I dragged my husband to a pre-Broadway run of the revival of _Man of La Mancha_. And I loved that this episode of _American Masters_ included footage from the Joseph Papp "Shakespeare in the Park" production of _The Taming of the Shrew_ (why that production WASN'T recorded in full and aired on TV is a travesty of justice -- I would have KILLED for tickets). And to this day I remember him being interviewed in his dressing room saying that when he first went to drama school he thought you had to do Shakespeare with a British accent -- but that no, you could do it with a Puerto Rican accent and it still worked because the language was THAT GOOD. I was unfamiliar with that early TV amateur show he was on -- but even back then (early 1960s) you could see where his portrayal of Gomez Addams came from. So, a number of movies and tapes of Shakespeare productions and I got to see him on the stage twice in my life. But it's not enough -- we lost a great actor too soon.... I think the most amazing thing was that KEVIN KLINE understudied a role he was in on the stage....