Populated by slumming movie stars, scripted by razor-witted Harvard graduates and audience-tested within a sliver of its existence, US television is today replete with slickly engineered "quality" programming. How might Dirk Benedict, the creosote-tanned ham fondly remembered as The A-Team's styrofoam heart-throb, Templeton "The Face" Peck,
have fared in a post-kitsch medium boasting highbrow fare such as The Sopranos and The West Wing? Chances are Benedict would never have made it past the casting director, denying us a career strewn with deliciously naff performances. Bad acting? This guy elevated it into an art.
Secluded in a Midwest ranch, Benedict today scorns his 20year stretch as a journeyman TV star and minor off-Broadway player. Renouncing stagecraft, he makes a passable living as an author and scriptwriter. Littered with dusky Western cliches and delivered in the tumbleweed patter of a John Wayne hero, Benedict's novels read like clunky Louis L'Amour parodies.
His charismatic 1991 autobiography, Confessions of a Kamikaze Cowboy, may have been florid and pompous, but sift through the ripe prose and there emerges a compelling tale. Born in the parched Montana hamlet of White Sulphur Springs, Benedict stumbled into show business, auditioning for a college production of Showboat as a dare. He landed the lead and abandoned a promising football career. In 1975, having starred in a spate of musicals and fronted his own Dixieland jazz outfit, Benedict departed for Sweden to make the commercially disastrous but critically lauded antiwar feature, Georgia Georgia. A fling with Miss Sweden and conversion to a gruelling macrobiotic diet followed.
Later that year, Benedict, then just turned 30, developed bowel cancer. Returning to the US, he rejected conventional medical treatment, entrusting his fate to macrobiotics. The gambit worked and, cancer defeated, Benedict moved into television with a run of guest appearances in Hawaii Five-0.
In 1978, schlock-TV svengali Glen A. Larson cast him as roguish space pilot Starbuck in the tawdry but still-loved Star Wars rip-off, Battlestar Galactica. Sporting a 50-watt Donny Osmond leer, Benedict's Starbuck was a silly and utterly loveable creation. He reworked the role for The A-Team, but his lazy-faced charm stuttered next to George Peppard's sub-Steve McQueen schtick and Mr T's cuddly thug routine.
Abandoning acting in the wake of The A-Team's belated mid-1980s demise, Benedict locked himself in a cabin in Montana and started to write. His self-imposed exile yielded a script (the recently filmed Cahoots) and the bones of Kamikaze Cowboy. From an inanely self-regarding website, Benedict today holds forth on plans for a "Dirk Benedict and Friends" Caribbean cruise and motivational seminar, departing Fort Lauderdale, Florida on January 20th, 2002. Now you won't catch Martin Sheen doing that.
More on Benedict at www.kamikazecowboy.com