It is wintry in New York, and here comes Harvey Keitel along West Broadway, his coat collar turned up against the bitter river wind. His face is an intense grid, the ash-blond hair tossed and spiky, but he doesn’t seem to mind the brutal weather. Keitel, after all, is a city boy, a child of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, where the winter gales howl each morning off the Atlantic. He walks with a hurried urban gait, neck stiff and straight, like a hit man late for some violent appointment. On the street, as on the stage or screen, there’s a coiled quality to the man, a dangerous edginess, as if at any moment he could erupt. On this gray afternoon, he does nothing of the sort. He’s come to talk.

“Hey, sorry I’m late,’’ he says, easing into a window seat in the SoHo restaurant, the grid dissolving into a wary smile.

“I’ve been so damned busy.”

This is a Monday, Keitel’s day off from Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind, a four-hour play in which he plays the central character. Although opinions about the play have been mixed, all the critics admired Keitel’s performance. And the Shepard play is only part of the forty-six-year-old actor’s recent run of work. After playing the burned-out actor in David Rabe’s Hurlyburly on Broadway, he then went to Italy to act in Lina Wertmuller’s Camorra: A Story of the Streets, Crime and Women, and to California for an Amazing Stories segment directed by Clint Eastwood, followed by Leonard Michaels’s The Men’s Club (directed by Peter Medak), before finishing the year with A Lie of the Mind. Clearly, Keitel is not one of those actors who brood for months on the Malibu shore waiting for the perfect project; he works. “I have no choice. I have to make a living. But also, I act to stay alive.”

Almost without notice, he has grown into one of our most daring actors, taking enormous risks while maintaining high artistic standards. At the same time, he is apparently unconcerned about the conventions of career and status. No TV series for Harvey Keitel. No mega-hits in Hollywood, either. Just a growing body of work of increasing power and accomplishment.

“Hey, I like money as much as the next guy,” Keitel says, “and sure I’d like to be ‘bankable’ out in Hollywood. But what is bankable? All it really means is that you have wider choices.”

Since Keitel emerged in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets in 1973, his choices have been extraordinarily varied. Because of his association with Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Keitel was originally typecast as another ethnic, urban, semiarticulate member of the New York school of naturalistic acting. His stammering moral confusion in Mean Streets, his ferocious sleaziness in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, his chilly heartlessness as a pimp in Taxi Driver—Keitel seemed to be the things he played, and his craft was so seamless that he had to work hard to break the bonds of the street-hard image. That meant taking risks.

I was the kind of guy afraid to venture an opinion. From lack of self-worth!’

“I’m a crapshooter,” he says. “I roll the dice.” And so we have seen Keitel in such period pieces as Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, and Ettore Scola’s La Nuit de Varennes, in which he played Tom Paine. He was a border patrolman in Tony Richardson’s The Border, a concert pianist in James Toback’s Fingers, a factory worker in Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar. He has also worked with European directors Amaud Selignac, Bertrand Tavernier, and Nicolas Roeg. In a decade of steady work, he has moved back and forth from Europe to Hollywood, from movies to the stage, and he continues to grow.

“He just gets better and better,” says James Toback, who used him in Fingers and later cast him as an international terrorist in Exposed. “He’s more domesticated now; he leads a more ordered life. But he also knows more. He reads omnivorously—Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Melville. He’s in a state of excitement, full of revelations.”

The centerpiece of Keitel’s domestication is his wife, Lorraine Bracco, who has been a model, an actress in four European films, and a producer. “She calmed him down,” one friend says. “She gave him focus, a center.”

Until he met Lorraine, his friends say, Keitel was an actor-around-town; women arrived in his life, tarried awhile, departed. It was as if they had supporting parts in a script that Keitel had written for himself. There are the usual rumors that during his wanderings Keitel made some wild scenes. Much of this is probably a result of confusing Keitel with the characters he played; everybody I talked to said he was always professional in his work, showed up on time, knew his lines. He was sometimes described as difficult; this meant that he wanted to know why a director wanted him to behave in a certain way. Toback says, “He wants to understand. Once he understands, he gives it everything.”

These days, Keitel and Lorraine share a large, airy loft in lower Manhattan. Books and records are everywhere, and the loft is often redolent with Lorraine’s cooking. The decor owes more to 1960s bohemia than to 1980s Bel Air; friends are frequent visitors, but otherwise Keitel guards his privacy with the same tenacity as his friend Robert De Niro, who lives in the same building. The loft is the center of his life with Lorraine, the place from which Keitel makes his journeys into the world. Most nights, his destination is the theater.

But Keitel did miss a performance of A Lie of the Mind the day in December when he helped his wife deliver their daughter by the Lamaze method. They called her Stella.

“No, she wasn’t named after the character in Streetcar,” he says. “Actually, what happened was this. We were shooting this scene in Lina Wertmuller’s movie last spring, in a very poor quarter of Naples. We were in a square, and Lorraine was pregnant at the time. Her daughter, Margaux, who is six, was with us, and Margaux started playing with the children of the neighborhood. I was so touched by those children, knowing they could probably never get out of that poverty. They were trapped. That piazza was in the Quartiere Stella. And there for us was the name of our daughter. Stella. Those kids, in some way, could leave with us.”

On the day after Stella was born, Keitel was still full of the experience. “I didn’t want to be at the theater. I was feeling too good. That’s not saying much for my great technique, but it’s hue. That feeling—joy—kind of overwhelmed me, and I felt like doing something else, as opposed to being Jake in A Lie of the Mind. ’ ’

Then his face changes. “But there was something else,” he says. “There was this other couple in our Lamaze class. Oh, man.” A pause. “They were having their baby the same day as ours, and they delivered it the day we left.” Another pause. “And the baby was dead. And I didn’t feel like going onstage that night either. Because I felt, There’s the truth. And maybe what I’m doing is not the truth.” He gazes out the window for a long moment. “I love A Lie of the Mind, and yet I felt a truth in what happened to that couple that I hadn’t reached yet. That maybe we, in that production, hadn’t reached yet. And maybe that’s a bunch of bullshit; other people might feel differently, and maybe I’m just being sentimental, because I’m so touched by these people and their tragedy. I don’t know if you can take what I’m saying as the gospel. It might just be the mad ravings of someone who.. .is in pain about these other people’s tragedy.”

I tell him what Toback said about his reading and his domestication, and he smiles shyly when I ask him what he’s reading now.

“The Van Gogh letters. They’re phenomenal. I think they should be required reading for actors. The strength of character the guy had, the perseverance, the courage. He speaks about always painting what is true, that that’s the thing to always be after: the truth. And he talks about how his hands are trying to paint what he imagines and how he doesn’t have it yet. That’s what craft is about—being able to bring into existence what you imagine.”

He sips a cappuccino, glances out at the traffic-clogged street. “He gets these complaints from the dealers that he’s not painting anything that sells. And he says, you know, / don’t care! I don’t care if they sell, he says, because that’s not what I’m after. You see, it’s the truth he’s after, a deeper truth. It’s a lesson to all people who aspire to something in the arts. Van Gogh makes me rethink my own sacrifices, whether they’ve been enough.”

For years, he says, he didn’t read at all, except plays and scripts. Now it’s as if all of Western culture has arrived at the door of his loft in TriBeCa.

“I don’t find that my reading has given me something I didn’t know so much as it’s made me more aware of what I do know but hadn’t permitted to enter my consciousness. Sometimes reading makes something clear to me. I’m reading Dostoyevsky, say, and I read a thought, and I say, I know that thought; that thought is already in me and he just uncovered it.” Keitel smiles his crooked smile. “I hope that doesn’t sound too full of shit. I don’t want to sound like a literary giant or something, ’cause I’m not. It’s just that I started reading the past couple of years and it’s something I wish I’d done in my twenties. My teens!”

In his teens, Keitel was a true son of Brooklyn, where his immigrant parents ran a luncheonette. Elevated trains still run along Brighton Beach Avenue, and Keitel grew up in their shadows. The cultural and economic shadows were even deeper; in that neighborhood, as in a few others in Brooklyn, the Depression lasted into the fifties, and one result was a narrowing of the sense of possibility.

“The important things to a man like my father,” says Keitel, “were having food to eat and a roof over your head— with good cause, because he had mouths to feed for twenty years.”

Today Keitel looks back with a kind of appalled fondness at the terrain of his youth. “I was fortunate; I had very close friends, kids who shared a lot of things. If we had our last buck, we would share it. There was never any hiding anything.” And he picked up certain basic values: “I remember once when I was a young punk—and I mean punk in the days when it wasn’t a compliment, it meant being a wise guy— and I was in our luncheonette on Avenue X. I was acting like a big shot and a jerk. The Avenue X Boys were pretty tough and used to hang out in the luncheonette too. And one night my mother sat down next to me and said something to me and I said ‘Oh, man’ to her. And one of the older guys gave me a smack in the back of the head and said, ‘Don’t you talk that way to your mother!’ Well, that was a lesson that I never forgot. He embarrassed me, and he was right. I knew I was being a jerk.”

It was the Brooklyn style then to be a tough guy, to be “good with your hands” in street fights, to wear a D.A. haircut as an act of defiance; the poolroom was a neighborhood institution, and Keitel’s was on Brighton Beach Avenue and Brighton 5th Street. Small-time hoodlums hung out in the place—bookmakers, Runyonesque horseplayers—and some of Keitel’s friends got into trouble. Too many wasted their lives.

We need heroes, they say, and I agree. The question is, what kind of heroes? The hero that sprays the village with bullets?’

“There was no involvement in the arts at all,” Keitel remembers. “Zero. They were taught they could not be something different. Now I know how much talent there was on that comer. Talent that was never fulfilled, because of the way one was brought up. They’d say, How could / be a writer? How could / be a director? How could I be anything but what my father was? There was so much talent among those guys, so much energy, power, drive, wit—wit? Forget about it! Nothing like it!”

The public schools of the 1950s didn’t help. Keitel remembers teachers who were rigid, indifferent, even contemptuous of the students.

‘ ‘There were so many guys that never had that one teacher, that one word that would’ve guided them towards something other than the lot they thought was theirs. If only they’d had that!” Keitel had one teacher who saw in him something of value, but it didn’t happen soon enough; he transferred from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach to Alexander Hamilton vocational school (now called Paul Robeson High School) in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and by the time he met his teacher—a history teacher whose name he doesn’t remember—it was already too late.

“I had a very good average, but I was absent too many days. They called me down and told me they were going to throw me out. This history teacher went to bat for me, but he couldn’t do a thing about it. The dean at the time was a jerk, because he didn’t pay attention to what was going on with his students’ lives, one student being me. To this day, it’s something that irks me.”

It was not unusual then for a white — kid, even a Jewish white kid like Keitel, to drop out of high school. Some became construction workers, tradesmen, skilled workers; others drifted. As a teenager, Keitel was probably saved by two things: the United States Marine Corps and the movies.

“Marlon Brando and James Dean. I guess most people of my generation had a strong identification with them. I’d have to add John Cassavetes to the list, and Elia Kazan, and in a different way Frank Sinatra. I never thought I could do what they did, by the way. I was just glad someone was doing it— the ‘it’ being something so personal and so revealing that it gave me some hope of understanding myself. At a time when I was lying to myself with such ferocity. They somehow penetrated my defenses, stirred things up.”

At seventeen, in 1956, Keitel joined the Marines. “I had a feeling that I was beginning something that would be good for me, and I was right,” he remembers. “I don’t advocate that people leave school and join the Marines. But for me at that time it was a good move. It broke the roll I was on, the roll of neighborhood, poolroom, family; it cut the cord. When I went away, I was on my own, completely on my own. I was close with a bunch of guys from Brooklyn, Irish guys, a couple of Italian guys; I was the only Jew. I don’t want to sound like a recruiting poster, but there was a camaraderie about the Marines, a spirit, that could’ve been brought home into private life, a spirit that seems to be lacking in most civilian institutions and ways of life. I wish we had more of it. I’m not talking about killing. I’m not talking about war. I’m talking about being there for someone. It says, There’s a chance you’re going to get hurt and I’m gonna be there for you. I’ll get hurt with you if I have to. That spirit is unmatched as far as what I’ve seen in this life.”

In 1958 he was sent to Lebanon, where the only action he saw involved an Arab who made a remark about a Jewish star Keitel chose to wear (“I grabbed him by the neck, and that was that”). Then he came back to Brooklyn. This would be a neater story if it could be said that Keitel immediately set out to be an actor; it didn’t happen that way. He was at loose ends—sold shoes in a Manhattan store, worked for his parents at a concession in Atlantic Beach, moved into a bachelor apartment with a friend. Someone from the neighborhood suggested he become a court stenographer; the working conditions were good, the pay was steady. He went to school, mastered the craft, went to work at Manhattan Criminal Court.

“I was just looking to be left alone, really,” he says now. “Something about the aloneness of it attracted me. Even now I have this fantasy when I pass office buildings at night, or banks, and see a solitary worker in there. I feel it’s a job I might like to have.”

He would work full-time at Manhattan Criminal Court for eight years (and freelance for another four). “It was all tragedy,” he says now, “and it was interesting, but I can’t say that it helped me as an actor in any way.”

He remembers one morning when he was working in the drug section. “They would bring in about twenty drug defendants and arraign them all at one time. I was sitting there taking the arraignments. And all of a sudden I look up and spot a black guy I was in the Corps with. This was a guy who came home with me when we were boys, seventeen, just out of Parris Island. Someone asked me to move to the front of the bus—this was the South in the fifties—and I wouldn’t. And we stopped for coffee someplace, but there was a sign that said WHITES ONLY and he couldn’t come in. Later we stopped at another place and he said, You can’t come in here, and I said, Why not? And he laughed and showed me a sign that said BLACKS ONLY. We laughed, ’cause we were from Brooklyn and we didn’t know what the hell all of this was. And here’s this guy, years later, busted on a drug rap. I couldn’t talk to him, because I was up there working. On the break I went back to the bull pen to see him, but he was gone. Gone.”

Another court stenographer changed Keitel’s life. He suggested that they take some acting classes. Soon Keitel was in Frank Corsaro’s class (later he would study with Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler and join the Actors Studio, of which he remains an active member). He continued working in the courthouse, often with a script open beside him, which he studied during breaks in trials. He had no vision of either becoming a movie star or starving for his art.

“I had no idea of anything,” he says, ‘‘except a need. A need to do it.”

It wasn’t easy; Keitel remembers himself as “stiff and rigid.’’ He couldn’t explain his growing enthusiasm for acting to the young men from the neighborhood; his family didn’t encourage him. But he persevered.

‘‘I had such an awakening in Cassavetes’ film Shadows,” he says. ‘‘A group of guys goes up to the museum, and they’re standing in the garden looking at a piece of sculpture. And they’re saying, ‘What the hell is this?’ and one guy is embarrassed to say what he thinks. Then another guy says, ‘It is whatever it is to you.’ He says, ‘That to me is art.’ I know what that scene was about, because I was the kind of guy afraid to venture an opinion. From lack of self-worth! But after that I had to know what this was all about. One little comment like that, in Cassavetes’ movie, opened an avenue of thinking to me that was closed before. Imagine!”

Slowly he began to shift from Brooklyn to Manhattan. “It’s not like I was thrown into Manhattan and there was culture shock. It was more gradual. I was so strict, stiff, set. But I began to meet these other guys, men and women, and we were always discussing things. Not just acting. Everything. In people’s houses, over a cup of coffee or a beer. ’ ’

The sixties had begun; theaters were opening in storefronts and lofts; the argument over Vietnam had started. At first Keitel supported the war; at least one woman stormed out of a restaurant in flight from his hawkish views. Then a friend gave him Senator William Fulbright’s The Arrogance of Power, and he changed his mind. By the end of the decade he was demonstrating against the war. He was also an actor.

“There was this black guy I used to work with in class,” he remembers, “and we’d always do scenes together. I’d play the black guy and he’d play the white guy. And he said to me once, ‘Harvey, you’ll never be an actor unless you leave Brooklyn.’ ”

He was probably right. Keitel acted in summer stock and in Off Off Broadway shows (including one called Up to Thursday, by a young writer named Sam Shepard) while he continued his labors as a court reporter. Then in 1965 he answered an advertisement placed by a twenty-two-year-old student director from New York University who was looking for actors to appear in his first movie. The movie was Who’s That Knocking at My Door? and the director was Martin Scorsese.

“The best directors know how to provide an environment in which you can nourish, develop, become the character,” Keitel says. “They’ll shape the play, the movie, through and around what you do, as opposed to imposing the character on you. I’ve been lucky. Scorsese was one who allowed that growth, that development, that nourishment, who provided that environment.” A pause. “Marty is a comrade. He’s like those Marines I talked about.”

Keitel has obviously thought long and hard about his craft. “Actors are their own instruments,” he says. “Their emotions, their physical beings are the instrument. There is no pen, no paper, no piano, no keys. We are the piano. We are the strings to the violin. And directors help by supplying the environment. The trust.”

Keitel has what he describes as “a pretty set way” of working on a performance. It always begins with the text, which he reads, studies, absorbs.

“Then you’ve got to do your homework. I’d say that 90 percent of it is homework and the other 10 percent is bringing your ideas to life in a rehearsal. It’s always a painful process. I haven’t yet been in a situation where it wasn’t painful. Painful.” He does a lot of research into his roles. “I’m always surprised when I read somewhere that such and such an actor went there to study for a part. What a marvel! He went away for a whole month and studied the scene that he’s acting in, the people he’s trying to be. But every actor should do that! It should be the rule, not the exception. Because a kind of a synthesis takes place, an exchange, a metamorphosis. You begin to touch things and feel things, and they become a part of you and something happens.”

He feels that more actors should become directors, and is full of praise for Robert Redford’s work on Ordinary People and Warren Beatty’s on Reds. But he has no immediate ambitions to be a director himself. He looks at the movie business with a skeptical eye: “Do we need movies that cost $40 million? I’d answer yes, but only in a very exceptional case. Do we need them in the amounts that we’ve had? Hell, no. They could divide that money up, give it to directors who have ideas they want to film; they’d make more money that way. Today, when they want to make a movie, they start saying, ‘Let’s get these two stars.’ Not the best actors. Two stars. They are ‘bankable,’ they say, and will do good at the box office. There’s no thought given to providing a deeper truth, to making something that will feed us, help us deal with the feeling of being lost in the world.”

Keitel takes out a small cigar, leans forward, lights it. He’s on a roll now.

“Goddamnit, all this violence that’s around us: where does it come from? Does it come from an opening up of one’s spirit? No! It comes from a closing of the spirit, so that it’s kicking inside your guts till finally you gotta pick up a chair and hit someone in the fucking head or put a gun to his head or rape someone or explode an atom bomb! It doesn’t come from the openness of one’s being. That’s why I’m so outraged at some of these projects being done in cinema, in television. The people who make this stuff are more interested in reputation, in image, in money, than in discovering what it is we are.”

He is not a fan of the Rambo-Chuck Norris school of brainless action movies. “I have a lot of respect for what Sylvester Stallone has accomplished, and I read something about Chuck Norris that made me think he’s a decent guy. But they must take more responsibility for what they do! The people who make the money won’t change them; they have to take it on themselves. They can’t make it seem that bullets don’t hurt! When you stand up and spray twenty of the enemy with bullets to rescue a couple of guys and nobody gets hurt, that’s a fucking lie! We need heroes, they say, and I agree. The question is, what kind of heroes? The hero that sprays the village with bullets and people topple over like cardboard figures experiencing no pain? We must depict the suffering and the horror of that reality in order to grow a real hero. We don’t need those heroes—those are lies! We need heroes who will stand up to reality. Not to make it like bullets don’t hurt! What the fuck is that?”

Keitel says he wishes the men who run Hollywood would get out more and see the world; read more; experience other kinds of lives. ‘‘I wish they could come to my house, with my friends, and have a cup of coffee. Spend some time in the Actors Studio, meet people like Kazan. There comes a time when you have to talk to somebody who is outside the smelly little orthodoxy. You can’t do that by insulating yourself with money and cars and fancy houses. You can only do that over a cup of coffee. Looking in another soul’s eyes.”

Keitel’s own journey has been a difficult one; he certainly hasn’t chosen many easy roads. “Father Zossima in Karamazov says something like, You must learn to love yourself, respect yourself, because if you don’t you will never be able to love anybody else. I believe that’s absolutely true. To understand anything is a cumulative process, not a snap of the finger. It takes time, struggle, pain, love; it takes friendships.”

Keitel says his friendships have sustained him in the face of various disappointments—parts he didn’t get, movies that have failed. When he was fired from Apocalypse Now (for refusing to sign a seven-year contract with Francis Coppola), his friends stayed true. “There’s nothing I would exchange them for. Nothing.” And what is a friend? “He or she is faithful, loyal. It’s like the Marines: Semper fidelis. Friends don’t judge you. They’re there for you, to listen, to help you understand. They don’t go off somewhere when you’re in pain. They help you get through it.” A pause. “I don’t think anything would have a real meaning to me without my friendships.”

The future? Keitel shrugs.

“I need to take more chances,” he says. “To be like Van Gogh, who had the courage to face his own anxiety. That means being scared, being tired, being lonely, being hungry, being uncertain, being exhausted: suffering. It means trying to be more.” He smiles his crapshooter’s grin. “It means being the most you can be.”