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From Community Theatre to Hollywood Judge Reinhold
by Bill DeYoung Entertainment Editor -The Stuart News
Judge Reinhold is one of the stars of the comedy “Checking Out,” (2005) which premieres at the Palm Beach International Film Festival on April 21st Fast times at Martin High: Reinhold’s Treasure Coast Connection Improbably, Judge Reinhold’s acting career began in Martin County. Reinhold, a co-star of the beloved 1982 comedy “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and all three “Beverly Hills Cop” movies, was born and raised in Virginia. In 1974, just before he was to begin his junior year in high school, his family uprooted and moved to Palm Beach. “It was a little too affluent for me, chuckles the 47-year-old during a phone interview form his home in Los Angeles. “I wanted more of a laid-back scene. So I moved to Jensen Beach and did my junior year at Martin County High School. The deal was, my father would pay my rent as long as my grades stayed up.” Reinhold – whose real name is Edward Ernest Reinhold – remembers very little about his Stuart schoolwork. “I was so wrapped up in the acting,” he says, “that I really wasn’t much of a student there.” (Reinhold’s attorney father gave him the nickname Judge when he was a tot. “My father,” he chuckles, “had a questionable sense of humor.”) A co-star (with Peter Falk, David Paymer and Laura Giacomo) in the new comedy “Checking Out,” Reinhold will attend the Palm Beach International Film Festival April 21 to introduce it. He’d caught the drama bug in Virginia (besotted with a girl, he’d enrolled in acting class to be close to her, then found that he like it.) In 1974, “acting” in Martin County meant The Barn Theatre. “The first show I was in was ‘Dracula’ in 1975.” Reinhold remembers. “The actor was wonderful; he was about maybe 300 pounds, and we called him ‘Transylvania Fats.’ I think he was probably the largest Dracula in the history of the play.” The young, long-haired Reinhold played Renfield, the count’s crazy, insect-eating accomplice. Reinhold also recalls working in several independently produced plays at the Lyric Theatre. After returning briefly to Virginia, where he graduated high school in 1976, the young thespian returned to the Treasure Coast and got his very first Equity (professional actors’ union) paycheck working at the Manatee dinner Theatre in Port Salerno, a project bankrolled by Burt Reynolds (the Manatee would lead to Reynolds opening his own facility in Jupiter in 1979.) “We served a lot of alcohol at the dinner theater, especially if the play was bad,” Reinhold says. “Inevitably, somebody would want to know where Burt was. And Burt wasn’t there that often. “They’d get inebriated and they’d get loud, ‘Where’s Burt!?’ And my job was to get that person out of the theatre as quickly as possible. I figured out the quickest way to get them out without any kind of scene was to run up and say, ‘Mr. Reynolds is next door at the bar – he’d love to buy you a drink. Please come with me.” “And they’d be all flustered and follow me right out of the theatre. I’d get them to the bar next door and just keep ‘em in drinks until the show was over.” In 1978, he left for California and started getting roles in low-budget teen comedies. Bill Murray’s “Stripes” (1981) was his first major film. I’m really glad I had the chance to live in Jensen Beach and Stuart before everything exploded,” Reinhold says. “I’m always going to be fond of that area.” “For me, it was a sleepy little fishing town, and it kind of represents what Florida was before the development explosion.” bill.deyoung@scripps.com
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Address: P O. Box 1894 2400 S.E. Ocean Blvd. Stuart, Florida 34995
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