Fritz Weaver tackles a `Trying' role in Chicago.(Chicago Tribune)

Byline: Chris Jones

CHICAGO _ His craggy face rivals the hopelessly patrician topography of Sen. John Kerry's visage. His stentorian voice booms with mid-Atlantic erudition. Even at 78 years old, the lanky and genteel Fritz Weaver is the physical embodiment of blue-blood privilege _ with a style and demeanor languishing somewhere between John Kenneth Galbraith and George Herbert Walker Bush.

It is all, he says, fake.

"That patrician sensibility is bone structure coupled with mere affectation," Weaver said during a long morning's conversation, noting that he comes from Quaker parentage and was a conscientious objector during World War II. "My father was a social worker in Pittsburgh and my mother was an Italian girl."

But it's heady fakery of a high order.

The waitress at the breakfast joint brings over an English muffin, "for the man with the English accent." Weaver has heard that before.

More important, audiences at Chicago's Victory Gardens have been rising to their feet in appreciation of Weaver's complex portrayal of Francis Biddle, the attorney general under President …