Tony Goldwyn is carrying on a hallowed Hollywood name. But unlike his grandfather and father, he's doing it as an actor.
His latest role cast him with Jim Belushi and Lorraine Bracco in the new murder mystery, "Traces of Red.""I had seen the script because my wife (Jane Musky) was hired as production designer," he said. "I thought it was an interesting part, and she said, `Go for it!' My agent said `No way."'
After months of trying, Goldwyn wangled an audition, but he was rejected. Filming started with the role uncast. The producers reviewed audition tapes and decided they liked the tall, blond actor's sympathetic approach to the role after all.
In the film, Belushi and Goldwyn play Palm Beach detectives looking into a series of murders of beautiful women. Both cops become suspects in the course of the investigation.
When producer Samuel Goldwyn heard that his son was being considered for a role in a Goldwyn movie, his reaction was: "Oh, no!"
"It's not that I didn't think Tony's a good actor," the elder Goldwyn said. "I just thought that it would be better for him not to appear in one of my pictures. But my people convinced me otherwise."
"My father and I have had a sort of tacit understanding from the time I became an actor," the younger Goldwyn said, "that I would do it my way and he'd do his thing, and never the twain shall meet. That was the way we wanted it, and we were real good friends.
"At first it was because of the nepotism thing. When I was struggling, I never wanted to put him in the position that he had to give me a job and to compromise himself. I didn't want to feel that I got a job just because someone gave it to me. I needed to feel I got it on my own merit.
"As I became more successful and it made more sense from a business point of view, I didn't want doing business together to interfere with our relationship."
His grandfather lent his name (but not his participation) to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and reigned as the top independent producer for decades. His films included "Wuthering Heights," "Pride of the Yankees" and "The Best Years of Our Lives."
Samuel Goldwyn Sr. died in 1974 when Tony Goldwyn was 14.
"Our relationship was grandfather-and-grandson; I didn't know him as other people did," he said. "We were very, very close. Of course he never knew that I wanted to be an actor. If he had, he would probably have been much more difficult than my father was."
Knowing the perils of the acting life firsthand, his father did nothing to encourage him. Goldwyn Jr. and his wife, Jennifer Howard, an actress and daughter of screenwriter Sidney Howard of "Gone with the Wind" fame, kept their children removed from the Hollywood milieu.
"It was a real family rule that we were not to be immersed in the movie business," Goldwyn recalled. "I didn't know a lot of movie stars. We didn't go to Hollywood parties. The only people in the business I knew were close friends of my parents. There were some famous people there, but not part of the Hollywood scene.
The acting urge struck him midway through college.