LOS ANGELES — At 61, Jacob “Jack” Frankel was a college president, distinguished engineering professor and lifelong academician.
Then he decided he would rather be an actor.
His last stage appearance had been as an eighth-grader at his temple’s Sunday school in Philadelphia, so he realized he had some catching up to do.
The tall, silver-haired and handsome Frankel enrolled in an improvisation class, scanned the trade magazines and answered cattle calls for bit parts in small, non-profit theaters.
One of his first roles was in a play called “Knock on Wood,” in which the urbane, sophisticated scholar played a straw-chewing Montana farmer. The Los Angeles Times judged the play as “hapless” and “terrible,” and the cast frequently outnumbered the audience.
How did the president of the California State College in Bakersfield find himself in such a role and place?
“I always had a bent for drawing, so I thought I would become a cartoonist or painter,” reminisced Frankel, now a 73-year-old great-grandfather. “But growing up during the Depression, my father wanted me to go into a more stable field, so I became an engineer.”
After serving as a naval officer in the Pacific during World War II, Frankel earned degrees at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA, finishing up with a Ph.D. in metallurgical engineering and physics. He started his teaching career at UCLA in 1947.
Over the next 36 years, Frankel worked at the Livermore National Laboratory (“I didn’t know they were making nuclear weapons”), taught at Northwestern University, became a consultant in Indonesia, served as associate engineering dean at Dartmouth, and advanced to dean of faculty at Harvey Mudd College. From 1974 to 1983, he was president of the 6,000-student Cal State Bakersfield campus.
Encouraged by a bitter row with the Bakersfield faculty, Frankel quit at age 61. He quickly realized that his retirement pay didn’t quite stretch far enough. He didn’t want to return to academe, and for a while he occupied himself with painting and writing.
During that period, “I realized that I had lived all my life on the intellectual level and now wanted to develop my intuitive side,” he said.
One day, Frankel went to a Chinese restaurant and when he opened the fortune cookie, it read, “Don’t Debate — Art Is Your Fate.” He interpreted that as a sign to become an actor.
Frankel has lived in New York for the past seven years and his name has not lit up any Broadway marquees. But he has appeared in a score of plays, usually as a distinguished-looking judge, senator, British aristocrat or general. He has had small roles in a dozen television shows and theatrical films, and has done numerous commercials.
During the last few years, while still acting, Frankel has concentrated on writing seven plays. The most notable is “Murphy,” revolving around a Jewish grandfather (played by Frankel), who takes care of his AIDS-stricken grandson with the help of a homeless black man.
A review in Town and Village praised the author’s “excellent touch for realistic and expressive dialogue and he knows how to develop characters. He is a comer.”
These days, Frankel, who paid little attention to his Jewish roots during his academic career, has become intensely involved with the Holocaust.
He is currently writing a play about four Auschwitz survivors, who meet again 10 years after their liberation. Another work in progress is a black comedy about another set of concentration camp survivors, a project that “scares me,” he said.
Yet he has almost no regrets about giving up the security and prestige of academe or the genteel retirement of a professor emeritus.
“My only regret,” he said, “is that I didn’t start out earlier as an actor and writer.”