Dreyfuss' 'close encounters' with history
Washington Examiner
03/18/09 12:05 PM EDT
Played one on TV
Who knew the man who took on Jaws was such a history buff?
“I like to tell my friends I was born in 1812,” actor Richard Dreyfuss said Wednesday at the National Press Club. Dreyfuss, whose latest role is spokesman for the Civil War Preservation Trust, was there to announce the nation’s 10 most endangered Civil War battlefields.
A frequent voice against the Bush administration and the war in Iraq (he was happy to portray an evil Cheney in “W.”) has a different opinion when it comes to the war fought on our country’s turf.
“I’m for the preservation of this war, the preservation of these battlefields that show us at our best and us at our worst,” the Academy Award-nominee said. “The American Civil War is easily the most defining act in American history — the world stopped and looked at us in awe. They were stood both horrified and in wonder.”
Dreyfuss not only played a teacher on screen in “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” but he has also been a longtime supporter of the need for civic education. He said he believes battlefields can act as classrooms. “The irony of America is that everyone else knows what America means except Americans themselves,” he said.
Later in the day, Dreyfuss was scheduled to lay a wreath at the African-American Civil War Memorial along the U Street Corridor.
-Ryan Freeman contributed
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