SAG's Man of the Evening

``Most of the actors that I see today, they don't listen. Or they listen for their next line. Most of them have never done stage or plays. You have to do stage. It's imperative.''

That pithy bit of wisdom came from the actor guaranteed of taking home a trophy Sunday night at the SAG awards.

No, not Clooney or Day-Lewis or Christie or whoever takes the statues. I'm talking about Charles Durning, the guild's Life Achievement Award recipient.

Admittedly, Durning offered up his thoughts on the importance of stage acting some four years ago when he trod the boards in an ill considered revival of Mary Chase's "Harvey." He played Elwood P. Dowd for the late director Charles Nelson Reilly. The production at the Laguna Playhouse was supposed to go to Broadway. Mercifully, that never happened.

Durning, a lovely man with a salty wit and great stories, was -- at 80 -- too old to play Dowd. Indeed, the actor seemed considerably spryer when, a year later, he was one of a quartet of elder statesmen in "Golf with Alan Shepard" at the Falcon Theatre, another misfire.

Only one man's opinion, of course. Plus, I'm balancing Durning's work in those two lesser efforts against his Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" way back in, gulp, 1990 opposite Kathleen Turner and Polly Holiday. He won a Tony award for that role.

The man is in his fifth decade of performing with more than 130 movies and TV roles to his docket sheet. And a heck of a lot of stage work as well.

Congrats on the SAG laurel, Mr. D. You've more than earned it.