Dennis Franz Of `NYPD Blue': A Star Behind A Badge

He has played so many cops he could carbon-date his career by them. Or, as his friend Joe Mantegna says, "He's more cop than a cop."

Mantegna is one of Dennis Franz's oldest friends, the one who can tell the story about how they used to hang out at cop bars in Chicago and drive around in Franz's old Chevy scaring hoods into thinking they were plainclothesmen when they were really just acting.

Now they both live in Los Angeles. Mantegna's a movie star. And Franz is still playing cops, only this time he's a major presence in the most controversial, and most successful, of the season's new TV shows, "NYPD Blue."

It's got him a home in Bel Air and his picture in Newsweek. He figures prominently in tomorrow night's episode, in which his relationship with Sylvia the D.A. and his sobriety both are tested.

Franz glances at his watch. He has only one line in the scene they're filming.

" `Hey, Sharon,' is the only thing standing between me and a long weekend," says Franz, who is interrupted by propmaster Stuart Watnick arriving on the set with a plate of tuna noodle casserole. "Hey, Dennis," Watnick says, nodding around the room at the other crew members balancing paper plates. "Great casserole."

The guy can cook. All week, crew members had been pitching in, making lunch for 200 in order to turn the canteen's budget over to a local food bank. Franz did his bit with four pans of tuna noodle casserole, his own recipe. If that seems incongruous given the actor's reputation for playing bad-tempered, intimidating cops - more than two dozen - it is also proof of what colleagues and friends say is the true spirit of the man. "All the actors on the show are great, but Dennis is especially great," Watnick says.

Spend any time with the 49-year-old actor and it becomes obvious that Franz is a mature, generous actor who brings a refreshingly unneurotic attitude to his career.

"It is a testament to Dennis that he is totally unlike Sipowicz," co-star David Caruso (Detective John Kelly) says during a break in the filming. "Dennis is easily one of the most likable guys you'll ever want to meet."

Franz is a kind of natural authority figure. Back at Proviso East High School in Maywood, a blue-collar Chicago suburb, one of the nicknames for the 180-pound 6-footer was "The Peacemaker." He moved easily, he says, among the cliques - "the tough guys, the greasers and the social climbers. I could talk my way past all of them."

On the set, Franz is quietly commanding. He has an inherent taciturnity, as if long ago he answered life's difficult questions.

In his trailer, spearing tuna casserole off a paper plate, Franz chats on - about his golf game (handicap: 10), his cooking skills ("I do a lot of `Fun With Chicken' and `Fun With Pork' on the barbecue") and his expatriate Chicago friends now in Hollywood: Mantegna, Richard Gilliland, Meshach Taylor, among others.

Franz is far less garrulous when it comes to his career. When asked about his predilection for playing cops, he shrugs. "The obvious answer is, I guess, I carry myself like a cop."

Friends and colleagues say Franz's affinity for playing men in blue goes beyond his patently blue-collar looks. The actor has an empathy for salt-of-the-earth types that springs from his own life. He was the only son of German immigrants; his father worked at the post office. He arrived at fame the hard way, ridiculed by his dad, who mistrusted his son's artistic ambitions. He spent a year in Vietnam. "It changed me," he says, his voice quiet but steady. "I became a much more serious person."

Today Franz is quietly conservative, an anomaly among the rest of liberal Hollywood embracing politically fashionable causes. He doesn't look fashionable, either; he looks like a cop.

"Dennis just looks right, doesn't he?" says Steven Bochco, creator of "NYPD Blue," who first spotted Franz in 1984, in a routine casting call for "Hill Street Blues." Bochco wanted a "blue-collar-type guy." Franz, he recalls, "just jumped out at me . . . He was a knockout, totally riveting."

Bochco says for "NYPD Blue" he envisioned Franz playing "an urban everyman, a guy who's had some serious struggles." The contrast between Detectives Kelly and Sipowicz is striking - the sensitive, angst-ridden Kelly and the older, more experienced and embittered Sipowicz.

Caruso's Kelly has emerged as a sex symbol. Franz has the more daunting task of transforming one of TV's most believable heavies into the series' ballast.

"Basically, Andy is a good guy, but life has slipped away from him," says Franz. "I think you can't help but feel for the guy, but I was concerned that nobody would like him."

That sparked the actor to make several suggestions to the show's writers to improve Sipowicz's "vulnerability," among them the addition of an on-screen relationship with his estranged son and a slowly blossoming romance with the attorney he chewed out in the show's pilot, played by Sharon Lawrence.

Franz has few illusions about his career. He's pleased that his agent is getting calls from producers and directors. He even treasures a small hope that he might be nominated, finally, for an Emmy. He hopes that the visibility of an acclaimed TV series will bring him a broader range of roles.

But he's not counting on it.

"You know who tried once?" Franz says, brightening for a moment. "David Mamet. He wrote a pilot for me for CBS one time. I was still a cop, but I was softer, more likable.

"They turned it down. They didn't see me as that guy."

(Copyright 1994, by Hilary de Vries. Distributed by Tribune Media Services.)