Every Day Is Special: October 29 – Happy Birthday, Richard Dreyfuss

October 29 – Happy Birthday, Richard Dreyfuss

Posted October 29, 2017

One of my favorite actors, back when I was a young adult, was Richard Dreyfuss. I'd seen him in some of the big movies of the time - American Graffiti, Jaws, Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, The Goodbye Girl. I also liked some of his smaller movies, like The Big Fix and Stakeout.

Dreyfuss, who was born on this date in 1947, in Brooklyn, New York, has won plenty of awards for his acting, including an Oscar for Best Actor. But I often think of him for two other non-acting reasons:

Writing:

I really like science fiction, which is sometimes called the literature of "What if?" What if we meet intelligentaliens? What if we destroy civilization with thermonuclear war? What if we invent a way to instantly transport people and things vast distances in just seconds?

One sort of "What if?" I don't often find is what could be called "alternative history." Richard Dreyfuss and cowriter Harry Turtledove wrote a novel that asked the question, "What if the United States didn't revolt against England in the late 1700s?" It's a book called The Two Georges. Pretty fun!

Activism:

Dreyfuss is convinced that civics is largely untaught in the U.S. educational system, and he thinks that it should be carefully and thoroughly taught. He has created The Dreyfuss Civics Initiative to encourage civics education, and he makes a lot of speeches about the topic. He has also studied and done research on civics at Oxford University.

Here are a few snippets from Dreyfuss:

"...[T]he notion that the ruler and the ruled could be one thing, which is the real revolution we triumphed in, and gifted to the world."

"...[Because of this, we] became the most free and most wealthy country in history..."