Jack Stauffer has worked professionally in the television, film, and stage industries for the past thirty-five years. As an actor, he is best remembered for creating the role of Chuck Tyler on ABC's award winning daytime serial "All My Children" and as Bojay on "Battlestar Galactica." In 2000 he moved to the Monterey Peninsula, a welcome addition to our theatre community.

There was a sense of surprise and excitement at what might have looked like the triumph of a newcomer - new, perhaps, to the area, but not to the business of performing and directing. Jack's Stauffer's career spans 35 years in professional television, film and stage work. "My graduation present from my parents was a car, so I drove home to Connecticut, parked in the driveway and heard my father ask, 'What are you doing here? You say you want to be an actor, go be an actor: get a job.’" Jack took the hint, sold the car and moved, on the proceeds, to New York City. "I shared an apartment with two other guys, slept on the floor and finally got my first commercial. "

1970

The big break came in 1970, when he landed a lead role in a classic soap opera. "Up to then, soaps weren't as big as they are today. ‘All My Children’ changed that." It was a watershed - daytime drama really took off - and Jack's acting career with it. When he married fellow cast member Renne Jarrett, about 800 people, including casts of two soap operas, crowded St. Bartholemew's Church in New York for the wedding. "We were the darlings of millions of soaps fans, so it was a pretty big deal," he admits. "Suddenly I found myself moving out of a spacious and beautiful apartment in Brooklyn Heights to a much smaller three-room for the two of us in Manhattan for $450 a month - the kind of little place that would go at something like a million these days."

The couple agreed that when their contracts for "All My Children" ran out they would pull up stakes and move to Los Angeles, where Renne had worked for Columbia Pictures and had friends and contacts. But when the contracts lapsed, the creators of "All My Chldren" wined and dined them and offered them $140,000 a year each to renew and stay on to do about 50 per cent of the show's episodes. At today's inflated rates, Jack figures that would total out in millions. "We went home and had the first knockdown, drag-out fight of our married life together. I was shouting that we had to accept what amounted to a fortune. Renne was kneeling in a corner sobbing, 'You promised - you promised we'd go to California!'"

Jack gave in - a move he still calls the most regretted decision of his life. The couple turned their back on the big bucks and the Big Apple and moved to Los Angeles. "It was like one of those ball player trades where you can only to sign the guy you want by taking on another 'player to be named.' I was the 'player to be named' in that deal.'" But Jack got steady work, became a staple in a number of Columbia television shows - "notably as the guy who always got killed," he recalls. Then in 1976, pilots for two possible series were set for production more or less simultaneously. Jack was offered the star role in both.. "The one I accepted was for Columbia - a really good, sharply written sort of forerunner of ‘E.R.’ called ‘The Steamers,’ about a mobile trauma unit. It lasted one episode . . The one I turned down was a no-brainer script from M.G.M. about some motorcycle cops." It became the long-running hit ‘CHiPs.’ "Then Renne got work in something called 'The Daughters Of Joshua Cabe' - and ran off with the director. I was so bitter, so angry! But I have always believed in soulmates - people who are destined to be together - and I realize today that Renne and her present husband really were meant to be together."

“Alex and the Doberman Gang”

Jack married again - a girl he met casually in a San Francisco bar. "She was a rabid ‘All My Children’ fan, which was a promising start for a brief, wild 1970s night of romance - and that should have been that! I knew a week later it wasn't. There was something there. I phoned Katy, and we've been married for 22 years. One of the hardest things in the world is to be the spouse of an actor - and she has done that superbly right from the start. Desirable or not, part of an actor's make-up is the need to be in the spotlight - and I don't think that is a big enough space to hold two partners in a marriage. Not comfortably. Katy, thank God, has no desire to be spotlighted. But for more than two decades she has encouraged and supported me in a way that convinces me she and I were meant for each other."

But time passes and, inevitably, your career starts to wind down, unless you're one of the really “Big Names,” according to Jack. And the television industry was undergoing changes, none of them major blessings for his television career. "I was what you would call a respected working actor of modest notoriety," he says. "And as such you fared pretty well in the old TV days of a series like ‘Streets Of San Francisco.’ In those shows the main character had a new and different adventure each week - and that meant new and different characters for every episode. ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ changed all that. Series today have anthology casts with few if any guest roles available. . . And where they are on offer, it's a question of trickle-down economics. Parts I once could hope to land now go to Oscar winners like Richard Dreifus. What's more, I had starred in two pilots, both of which had bombed. When a pilot succeeds it's the actors who get most of the credit - and when a pilot fails - well, you get the idea. . . You're like a wide receiver who drops the ball; there are always a handful of guys waiting on the sidelines to replace you. Only in Hollywood they're not a handful, there are about fifty of them. . . But, like the Captain of the Titanic, I stayed on board while the ship sank."

Jack's wife Katy, meanwhile, was a successful executive in the Los Angeles office of an insurance firm. She was asked to consider a transfer to the company's home office on the Monterey Peninsula. Would Jack agree to the move? "It meant leaving behind what was left of the passion I had felt since the age of five, deserting a place that still held at least a possibility of handing me what I had always longed to achieve. But it was also my first opportunity to be unselfish - my first chance of doing something for Katy, who hated L.A. - a hatred I was beginning to share."

To be continued.

Jack as Bojay on “Battlestar Galactica”