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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
When it comes to artists, ambition is a tricky business. Whereas stockbrokers and politicians may labor with certain realistic goals in mind--greater riches, a Cabinet seat--artists' rewards are more elusive. The artist, possessed by the desire to perfect what can never be perfected, lives in a kind of uneasy truce with his given medium, hammering away at his blessing and his curse: his talent.
Happily for us, the thirty-nine-year-old actor and director Liev Schreiber, despite numerous successes onstage and onscreen, still seems to dwell in that anxiety-infused state of aspiration. As Naomi Watts's feckless, emotionally sleazy lover in last year's screen adaptation of Somerset Maugham's "The Painted Veil," Schreiber had a passion and a coldness that were practically clinical; the performance was a deep study in shallowness. Onstage last summer, as the star of the Public Theatre's "Macbeth," Schreiber served up not the character we've come to expect--all manly flaws and epaulettes--but an almost childlike wannabe king, with the power he craved dangling before him like a longed-for Christmas present. Though in recent years Schreiber has frequently been cast as a villain (he picked up a Tony Award for Best Actor for his performance in the 2005 revival of David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen...
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