In Oregon Stage Works' production of "On Golden Pond," a 69-year-old actor playing 80ish Norman Thayer fixes Brandy Carson with the look, and there's a big laugh. The look is a deadpan stare delivered with a long, pregnant pause.

Doug Rowe, who is playing Norman, the role made famous by Henry Fonda in the movie, does not claim to have invented the look. He got it almost 40 years ago from its master, Jack Benny.

Rowe had a part in a skit in a Jack Benny TV special in which Benny played Benjamin, the Dustin Hoffman role in "The Graduate," and Phyllis Diller played Mrs. Robinson. In rehearsal, Rowe ad-libbed a line he thought was funny, Benny gave him the look, and the director broke in, saying, "Doug, this is Jack's show."

"Jack broke up," Rowe says.

These days Rowe is seen maybe once a year on local stages. He's spent a lifetime on the stage and in movies and television, and it wasn't even supposed to happen. He set out to be a ballplayer.

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Raised in Massachusetts and an avid fan of the then-Brooklyn Dodgers, he went to Bates College in Maine on a baseball scholarship. A speech class was a requirement, and a drama instructor encouraged him to try out for a play.

The ballplayer said, "Are you crazy? Like I'm gonna walk onstage in tights?"

That summer his father urged him to give drama a try, and the next term he got a part in a play.

"After the first rehearsal," he says, "I said it was what I wanted to do the rest of my life."

Half a century later, Brandy Carson, who is co-starring with Rowe in "On Golden Pond," says he's the consummate professional.

"He's intelligent and graceful," she says. "He has an eye on the good of the production, and he's funnier than hell."

When Carson read for the part of Ethel Thayer, she thought Rowe, whose approach to acting differs from hers, didn't like her.

"Because I'm out there, and he's not," she says.

Not to worry, it turned out.

"She's a piece of work," he says.

Their chemistry as Norman and Ethel looks natural. He's controlled, she's the steamroller.

Midway through the play's run, Rowe and Carson still get together Wednesdays to run through their lines and put in new things: a kiss in one scene, a Carson twirl in another.

Rowe left college (he'd later return) for summer stock in New England and quickly landed a job at a theater in St. Louis. It paid $10 a week plus a room, and it led to an Equity card, or membership in the actors' union, at the end of the season. It was 1959. His card was number 1,000. He's had it 48 years.

The Lunts — Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne — came to town to perform Friedrich Dürrenmatt's "The Visit," and Rowe and his fellow actors were invited backstage to meet the famed pair. He learned a lesson he still observes.

"They said the day gets planned around the show," he says. "They didn't get out of bed until 2 p.m. They said you have to be rested."

An avid golfer and steelhead fisherman, Rowe won't do either the day of a show.

He moved to Ashland in 1997 to play Willie Loman in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's production of "Death of a Salesman" after golfing pal and OSF actor Jamie Newcomb talked him into reading for the part.

After 20 years in Newport Beach, Calif., as artistic director of the Laguna Playhouse, he and his wife

After 20 years in Newport Beach, Calif., as artistic director of the Laguna Playhouse, he and his wife brought their two sons, who were then in elementary and middle school, and moved to Ashland.

"My wife got a job, and I retired," he says. "We'd made a deal. Somebody would always be home with the kids."

Rowe directed and played the Stage Manager in Oregon Stage Works' "Our Town."

"He's "a wonderful actor," Artistic Director Peter Alzado says. "There's an old saying, 'Everybody's a good actor until you see a good actor.' "

"He understands the language and the power of specificity. That makes him exceptional."

An example, Alzado says, is Rowe's knowing what words to bring "off the page" for an audience, and how to load the words.

"He puts what needs to be expressed through the word," he says. "It's not laid on top."

Alzado says Rowe expects a lot from himself and from others.

"He wants things done in a fashion that's going to produce results," he says. "He doesn't B.S. you."

Rowe worked with Robert Preston and Bette Davis and in TV shows such as "MASH," "Hill Street Blues," "Star Trek: The Next Generation," "Murder, She Wrote," "Northern Exposure," "ER," "Melrose Place," "Providence" and many more.

Once when he was working on Broadway for producer Joseph Papp, Papp asked him if he'd like to play Brutus to Richard Dreyfus' Cassius, but the project fell apart when the latter got a role in "American Graffiti" and went to Hollywood.

He was directing "John Brown's Body" at the Laguna Playhouse when he agreed to give a reading to a young actor down on his luck. He gave the part to the guy, Harrison Ford. The two remained friends, Rowe at Laguna, Ford struggling to break into pictures. One day Ford called Rowe and asked him over.

"He didn't have a wall on his kitchen," Rowe remembers. "The struggles he had. But he had a picture with Alec Guinness. I said, 'Wow, you did a movie with Alec Guiness?"

"He said it was a 'space western.' "

It was "Star Wars."

Rowe doesn't claim to have discovered Ford's star quality.

"Everybody saw it," he says.

Another time Rowe was living in the Dakota Hotel in New York City, courtesy of a friend. The place was exclusive, but it had the world's slowest elevator. He ran to catch it one day, stuck his arm in to open the doors and burst into an otherwise empty space with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Sure he'd committed a faux pas, he remarked that he was on eight, so they wouldn't have to make an extra stop. There was an awkward silence.

"Three floors up," he says, "we all burst out laughing."

These days, Rowe says, there's no better place to be than in a small town with world-class theater in the form of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

"Where else are you going to find anything like it?" he says.

And it was moving that enabled him to become a full-time in-home dad to boys that seem to have inherited both his loves. The younger son, Jackson, 21, is now appearing in his 12th movie. The elder one, Bill, 23, played for Oregon State University when the Beavers won the College World Series last year and is now a Major League prospect in the Milwaukee Brewers system.

"It's exciting," Rowe says. "Parenting has been by far the outstanding thing in my life."

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or bvarble@mailtribune.com.