Former Northwest suburban 'beatnik' makes name for himself in New York

Richard Pinter still remembers his teen years in Mount Prospect as difficult ones.

The director of the acting department at New York City's famed Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre and one of three alumni to be honored at its 80th anniversary celebration last fall, Pinter hasn't lived in Illinois for many years.

Now 66, he is an actor-turned-acting teacher who is friends with Diane Keaton and has taught successful actors Chris Noth ("Law and Order: Criminal Intent") and Jennifer Grey of "Dirty Dancing," among others.

Pinter was 23 in 1965 when he left the Midwest for good and went to New York. Years later, he recalls he didn't fit too well into the suburban scene of the late 1950s.

"I was raised in an apartment in the city until I was 12," said Pinter, who was born Richard Pinkos, the son of Bruno and the late Irene Pinkos, "and then we moved to this wonderful house in Mount Prospect.

"I remember being impressed by the whole situation. It was very upscale ... we lived only three blocks from the country club and I really wanted to fit in."

But he couldn't. He realized later it would have meant erasing parts of his personality. So Pinkos and his friend, John Ford, stuck together on the edge of teenage society, cruising around Mount Prospect and Arlington Heights, eating "wretched little hamburgers" at a place in Mount Prospect called The Golden Point and feasting on $1 cheese pizzas at a place whose name he can't recall.

"We wanted to be beatniks and grow beards, but, of course, they wouldn't let us do that back then," Pinter said. "So we read edgy authors like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and we went into the city and hung out in coffee shops."

After an uneven high school experience - he recalls three teachers who helped him develop his own, unique interests, the most memorable being Mr. Fife, the literature teacher - Pinkos graduated from Arlington High School.

After a year at Southern Illinois University he transferred to Marquette University in Milwaukee, expecting to major in literature or psychology. But he left there four years later with a degree in speech, thanks to a chance encounter with an unorthodox priest named Father Walsh.

"When I was a junior, I went to see a show the theater there was doing and I was so impressed that afterward I sought out the director," Pinter said.

"He had me read a scene for him and was very encouraging and invited me to join some acting classes he was teaching, separate from the university, on Sunday nights."

Pinter had always been drawn to drama but was too intimidated at Arlington High School to try acting. But at Marquette, he decided to take a chance.

Two years later he had a degree in speech. As he neared graduation, Fr. Walsh encouraged him to go to New York, setting up an interview for Pinkos with the regional representative for the Neighborhood Playhouse because he was familiar with the work of its director, Sanford Meisner.

"I started to take classes and I immediately felt very comfortable. It felt 'right' there," Pinter recalled. "I learned so much from Meisner and I met some extraordinary people during the two years I was there."

In fact, Pinter calls meeting Fr. Walsh and studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse the two most influential events in his life.

And it was Meisner who told Pinkos to change his last name to Pinter.

"One day he handed me a sheet of paper with three names on it and told me to choose one. I have been Richard Pinter ever since."

Pinter graduated from the theater school in 1967, acting in off-Broadway shows and in regional theaters like Cincinnati's Playhouse in the Park.

"It was a miserable and a happy time," he recalled. "I was like every young actor. I had no money but I was doing what I wanted to do."

Fate stepped in a few years later when a fellow actor asked him for some help with her scenes. After several weeks of helping her, her boyfriend suggested that he start his own acting classes because he was such a skillful teacher.

An old friend, Diane Keaton, who had been his classmate at the Neighborhood Playhouse, immediately started talking up Pinter's acting classes. Before long, Pinter was subletting a little studio in North Chelsea and teaching 10 or 12 people at a time.

Eventually his former teachers at the Neighborhood Playhouse heard about his success, and in 1977 they recruited him to teach there.

Pinter has been a fixture at the school ever since and professes no regrets about teaching instead of being on stage, on television or in films.

"I am far more comfortable teaching acting than acting, " he said. "From the beginning, I felt deep down that I would be successful. I am a much better father than child and since all actors are children ..."

Pinter relishes the successes of his students and friends. It is just a job to all of them, he explained. They have all known each other too long to be star-struck.

To aspiring young actors, Pinter had some advice: "If you really love acting, be single-minded about it and don't quit. It is irrelevant what the people around you say if acting is what is going to make you happy.

"If you can find yourself in this art somewhere, go for it."

"But if you just want to act because you want to become rich and famous, get out."