For Brad Dourif, the Harkonnen Mentat PITER whom he plays in “Dune” is “my first real villain. Of course, the things PITER does appear to be a lot more evil than they are because of who he does them for and why.” Dourif sighs, “I’m always cast as the crazy or, at least, the local neurotic. I’d like to play a normal person, a healthy person, sometime soon!” It was, however, for the role of a mental hospital inmate in his first movie, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” in 1975, that Dourif was nominated for an Academy Award, received a Golden Glove and won Britain’s Oscar. Dourif slipped into his profession easily without a backward glance and with barely a ripple.
　　　Dourif was born on March 18, 1950, in Huntington, West Virginia, attended school there and had one year at Marshall University. He has two older sisters, two younger sisters and a younger brother. His natural father died when Dourif was three years old and his mother remarried. His stepfather is currently president of the United States Golf Association “and I think he has the best record in the Walker Cup Matches, he’s never been defeated.” Dourif’s mother had been an actress, “well, not a famous one, but she’d studied in New York and she was very good. She was in Tony Curtis’ class, I think, at the American Academy. Then she got married, took off to Huntington and had six kids.” Still, she continued to work in the community theatre and “I watched her performing a lot while I was growing up.” Dourif and she worked together for the first time recently, after the death of his godmother. “She’d been a very popular figure around town and we did a sort of memorial service for her. My mother and I did a scene from ‘The Corn Is Green.’”
　　　For Dourif, there seems never to have been much question about his future. “I was very bad in school, but the one thing I was good in was the plays. Always. Sure, for a while I wanted to be an painter, and then a poet, and I did a lot of writing in high school, a lot of painting and stuff, but the thing that I always most prolifically, and the best, was acting. So that was it.”
　　　In 1969, “I don’t know if this is sort of a silly story, but I was doing a political revue and this lady came to town and saw me and said, ‘What are you doing in Huntington, West Virginia?’ I said, ‘I’m wasting my time.’ She said, ‘Come to the Circle Repertory in New York.’ And so I did. As a matter of fact, I literally just showed up on her doorstep and moved in and started. I’d done a lot of technical work in theatre, lights and sound, building sets and designing them, so that’s what I began with at the Circle. And playing small parts. We got about five bucks a performance.”
　　　For some three years, Dourif worked at Circle Repertory, “going into leads pretty quickly. I mean, by the time I got there I’d probably done 30 to 35 different roles at the Greenbriar Repertory in West Virginia and some summer stock.” Among those plays in which he had leads were Stringberg’s “Ghost Sonata” and Chknov’s “Three Sisters.” He played also in “The Doctor in Spite of Himself” and in the originals, “Time Shadows” and “Not to Worry.” The most important original for Dourif, however, was “When you Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?” “Red Ryder launched me,” he says.
　　　“Red Ryder” opened at the Circle Repertory in the autumn of 1972 and a few months later moved into the Eastside playhouse, off-Broadway, where Milos Forman saw him. “From that point on, things changed. I began doing movies and television.” Although in 1969 Dourif had made a small underground movie, “split,” his commercial film debut came in 1974 in Forman’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” playing Billy Bibbit, pawn in the power struggle between fellow inmate McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) and Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). The role, with its subsequent nominations and awards, brought Dourif to wide public attention. More work followed.
　　　In 1976, in Germany, he made “Group Portrait with Lady,” with Romy Schneider; in 1978, “The Eyes of Laura Mars”; in 1979, John Huston’s “Wise Blood”; in 1980, “Heaven’s Gate”, and in 1981, “Ragtime.” His television credits include the lead in the specials, “Sergeant Matlovich Vs. the U.S. Airforce” (“about a homosexual sergeant”) and “The Guyana Tragedy.” “Dune” will be Dourif’s seventh movie.
　　　“The first time I read it was about 10 years ago, when I was about 23 or 24. I loved it. It’s a fairy story ? a very dark one. (Director) David Lynch has a unique style, almost like painting with actors. You just get a feeling of him doing strokes, very minute strokes.”
Directing, in fact, is Dourif’s own bent, “because,” he says, “being an actor is only part of the pie. I want to get dirty completely.” Dourif is teaching directing now at Columbia. “And I find, reciprocally, that teaching directing helps me as an actor. Because working with an director, in order to survive as an actor, you have to know what his or her strengths and weaknesses are. Because every director, I don’t care how good, has one problem. And you have to be able to compensate for it.”
　　　Dourif lives now in Woodstock, New York, with his wife and two small daughters. “Four sisters - - two daughters - - I’m always surrounded by women!” And his long-term battle plan extends beyond directing. “I want to try to begin developing more projects myself. Ultimately, I hope for a sort of star-producer thing. Find the project, help finance it, help bring in the production group and actors - - be one of the actors myself - - and finally put my producer had on again and finish it up! That’s really the whole pie. And that,” says Brad Dourif, “is what I really want!”
　　　Dino De Laurentiis presents a David Lynch Film, “Dune”, starring (in alphabetical order) Francesca Annis, Leonard Cimino, Brad Dourif, Jose Ferrer, Linda Hunt, Freddie Jones, Richard Jordan, Kyle MacLachlan, Virginia Madsen, Silvana Mangano, Everett McGill, Kenneth McMillan, Jack Nance, Sian Phillips, Jurgen Prochnow, Paul Smith, Patrick Stewart, Sting, Dean Stockwell, Max Von Sydow, Alicia Roanne Witt and Sean Young. The Universal Release is produced by Raffaella De Laurentiis and directed by David Lynch, who also wrote the screenplay based on the novel by Frank Herbert. Freddie Francis is the director of photography and Anthony Masters is the production designer. Mechanical special effects are by Kit West, with additional visual special effects by Albert Whitlock, creatures created by Carlo Rambaldi, special photographic effects by Barry Nolan and costume design by Bob Ringwood. Music is by Toto with the prophecy theme by Brian Eno. Anothny Gibbs is the film editor. Jose Lopez Rodero is the associated producer.