Frank Langella Headed for The Gold?

Acclaimed actor Frank Langella, who recreates his Tony Award-winning performance in Ron Howard's up-coming film adaptation of Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon, is the talk of the town, said to be giving an award-winning performance in the newly released indie-drama Starting Out in the Evening by Andrew Wagner, which opened in New York and LA on November 23.

With Frost/Nixon in the can, could Starting Out in the Evening serve as Langella's vehicle to an Oscar nod?

A.O. Scott of the New York Times details Langella's performance as aging writer, Leonard Schiller: "Watching Mr. Langella's slow, gracious movement through Starting Out in the Evening, I was reminded of Burt Lancaster in Luchino Visconti's adaptation of The Leopard... concerns an old man who has outlasted the social order in which his life made sense. And what is so remarkable about Mr. Langella is that he seems to hold Leonard's intellectual cosmos inside him, to make it implicit in the man's every gesture and pause."

Starting Out in the Evening is rated PG-13 with some profanity and sexual situations.  Directed by Andrew Wagner; written by Fred Parnes and Wagner, based on the novel by Brian Morton. Running time: 1-hour 51-minutes.

Starring Frank Langella (Leonard Schiller), Lili Taylor (Ariel Schiller), Lauren Ambrose (Heather Wolfe) and Adrian Lester (Casey Davis).

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In the coming Frost/Nixon film, Langella stars with Michael Sheen, reprising his stage role as reporter Sir David Frost. According to Michael Riedel of the New York Post, filming for Frost/Nixon was completed in LA earlier this month; and will also feature Kevin Bacon, Rebecca Hall and Oliver Platt.

Frost/Nixon recouped its entire $2.5 million investment before it completed its Broadway run at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on August 19, 2007.

"How was it that a famous British talk-show host, with a playboy reputation, was the one to elicit the apology that the rest of the world was waiting to hear from a former U.S. President?," ask press notes.  "This fast paced new play, Frost/Nixon, takes audiences into the minds of Richard Nixon and David Frost and shows the determination, conviction and lengths that these two men and their closest confidantes went to as they took the stage in one of the most hard fought political interviews in history."

Frost/Nixon was produced on Broadway by Arielle Tepper Madover, Matthew Byam Shaw, Robert Fox and Act Productions; David Binder, Debra Black, Annette Niemtzow/Harlene Freezer & The Weinstein Company.

Langella received the 2007 Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for his leading-actor portrayal or Richard Nixon.  Langella won the Best Featured Actor in a Play Tony Awards for his role as Flegont in Fortune's Fool (2002) and as Leslie in Seascape (1975).  His other Broadway credits include Match, Present Laughter, The Father, Sherlock's Last Case, Hurlyburly, Design For Living, Passion, Amadeus, Passione, Dracula, A Cry for Players and Yerma.

Photo of Frank Langella by Walter McBride / Retna Ltd.