Jeff Bridges: A dude who zags while others zig

In "Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides," Gail Levin's affectionate

American Masters

profile airing at 9 p.m. Wednesday on WHYY TV12, the actor's colleagues, friends, and family drop in to see what condition his condition is in. "Groovy" is the general consensus. Who is Bridges, 61, the most unassuming guy to carve out an enduring career in Hollywood, to disagree?

"I did my damndest to swerve," reflects last year's Oscar-winning best actor (for Crazy Heart) and current box-office hero of True Grit and TRON: Legacy, of a 40-year screen career in which he zagged as peers zigged.

"He worked hard not to be the movie star they wanted him to be," observes Terry Gilliam, his director in The Fisher King and Tideland. For the most part, Bridges ducked obvious box-office bait and seized offbeat projects that give his filmography such character. And characters. Among them, stoners and presidents, lounge pianists and marshals, gigolos and (quoth Susan, his wife of 33 years) "fool-osophers."

Bridges is the guy who turned down the lead in Raiders of the Lost Ark to make TRON. He's the guy, notes Cybill Shepherd, his costar in The Last Picture Show, who doesn't try to hit it out of the park because he knows that "acting is like tennis, you've got to keep it on the court, hit it back and forth." He's the guy so laid back that he's practically horizontal.

Out of character, this most transparent of actors verges on the opaque. He's given to pronouncements such as, "I give people what they think I am." In Levin's profile, he is affable, raffish, protective of his inner life. And so epically unself-conscious that if you held up a mirror to him and asked what he saw, he'd no doubt describe the looking-glass frame.

He is a potter, painter, singer, seeker, father of three grown daughters. He admits to "having a bit of the Dude in me," referring to the shaggy stoner he so memorably played in The Big Lebowski. "I'm a little lazy," says the guy who has made more than 60 films in 40 years.

The middle child of a show-business family - father, Lloyd, was the star of the television series Sea Hunt, and big brother, Beau, a TV and movie lead - Bridges was, and is, uncomfortable about nepotism. "I didn't want to go into my father's business." He credits his mother for encouraging his creativity, which led him to painting, sculpture, music, and photography.

If he wasn't sold on movies, from the first the movies were sold on him. When he came to Peter Bogdanovich to test for The Last Picture Show (1971), "he got the part before hello," says the director. "You never caught him acting." The role of a small-town Texas teen earned Bridges the first of five Oscar nominations.

He credits The Iceman Cometh (1973), in which he held his own opposite Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin, with getting him to commit to acting. Working with veterans who shared his fears and respected the craft was an eye-opener.

Generous with film clips from early Bridges films such as Fat City, Cutter's Way, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Levin shows Hollywood's golden boy drawn to tarnished souls.

The most screen time is devoted to Starman (1984), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), The Big Lebowski (1998), and Crazy Heart (2009).

He created his role as the alien life form in Starman by emulating babies and birds, says his costar Karen Allen. That fight between the piano-playing Baker Boys (costarring brother Beau) resulted in Jeff's injuring Beau. Initially, Bridges was reluctant to take Lebowski because he thought playing a pothead would set a bad example for his daughters. "Dad, you're an actor," one daughter told him. "We know what you do isn't real."

(More surreal than the Coen Brothers movie itself is the actor's on-camera visit to the Little Lebowski, a tribute shop in Greenwich Village.)

Levin gives ample screen time to Bridges' extra-cinematic pursuits that help the actor recharge his creative batteries. He is a gifted photographer, master of the panoramic camera, and a singer who travels with his band, the Abiders.

Is there a link among the characters who speak to Bridges - or whom he has chosen to speak through? Lloyd Catlett, the actor's stand-in, implies that Bridges is drawn to oblivious, obstreperous types: "Rooster Cogburn [the marshal Bridges plays in True Grit] is probably the Dude's great-great-grandfather."

While Bridges is certainly greater than the sum of his parts, Levin's profile is less a summation of his career than it is a snapshot.