The book is “Moondust-The Men who Fell to Earth” by Andrew Smith. He mentions going to a Star Trek/SF convention in Las Vegas to meet an astronaut who was signing autographs there. Smith further mentions encountering a number of actors there. Most he names, but two he does not. The first he describes as a “drunken lech who looks like Bruce Willis”. (Easily identified as the late Jerry Doyle.)
But the other is described as “a serial SF villain who tells us about his painful divorce from his actress wife and the difficulty of paying child support since 9/11 knocked the bottom out of the WASP malefactor market.” No idea who he’s talking about there. I thought of Richard Lynch and John Colicos but neither of them had actress wives. The guy would have to be a major narcissist to talk about 9/11 in terms of how it affected his career. The convention was probably held in 2001.
True about Ansara’s marriage to Eden, but he typically wasn’t playing WASPy bad guys, due to his complexion – he was Lebanese, and played an awful lot of Native Americans (and a Klingon on Star Trek, of course). Also, his one child (with Eden) had died in 2001, at age 36, so the child support comment doesn’t really fit him, either.
Dennis Hopper? His career was going down then, but it was because he was getting up in years (and actually, wouldn’t live much longer). Blaming not getting roles he liked on something external sounds like something he’d do-- he had a reputation for a big ego, although I get that from some people I know who worked with him; I never met him myself.
He was married and divorced several times, and once was to a fairly prolific actress, Katherine LaNasa, with whom he had a child who would not be 18 yet in 2001-- unless the child was born before their wedding date. I’m not seeing that information.
Hopper did get plenty of roles after 2001, but he slowed down, and I didn’t look carefully, but if memory serves, he was playing more “crazies,” and fewer “true evils” in his last few years. But I have no idea what he liked to do, nor how he saw himself.
He seems to check a number of the boxes (and a friend of mine, who’s a teacher at a private school in the LA area, had one of Hopper’s kids as a student in the early-mid 2000s; looking at LaNassa’s Wikipedia entry, I think that it was their son Henry, who was born in 1990).
But, I’m not sure that he fits the “serial SF villain” descriptor; looking at his filmography, there’s not much there that feels SF.
After further thought, I was going to rescind my Ansara post but was foiled by the edit window. The OP’s John Colicos comment threw me for a loop as he seems a contemporary of Ansara’s. Didn’t know about Ansara/Eden’s child dying so young. I’m going to go lie down now.
Quite possibly so; the book to which the OP is referring was published in 2006, so the convention in question would likely have been in the 2002-2005 range.
Though, even that broader time range probably wouldn’t have changed any of my guesses on guys who it likely wouldn’t have been.
You’re right. I was thinking “villain,” and not so much the “SciFi” part, because I don’t watch that much SciFi, and he definitely registers as a plain ol’ villain to me.
He could potentially fit; he apparenty wasn’t actually married to Lorraine Bracco, but they did have a daughter together in 1985, and Wikipedia indicates that they had a bitter custody fight over the daughter when they broke up.
OTOH, he was still working steadily in the years after 9/11, and as a fairly high-profile actor, I’m not sure how often he would have been attending science fiction conventions.
Gary Oldman? With his first wife, actress Lesley Manville, he had a son who would have been about 13 in 2001. He played villains in Dracula, The Fifth Element, and Lost in Space, all released before 2001.
I agree, Oldman seems to check most of the boxes. (Five wives? Wow.)
I also agree that the question is whether a pretty high-visibility “serious” actor (who, yes, has done quite a few “genre” movies, too) would be doing appearances at science fiction conventions. But, a few moments of googling here shows me that Oldman has, indeed, appeared at a few cons in the past few years.
