Don't expect 76-year-old Cliff Robertson, the charming and witty Hollywood veteran who won the 1968 best actor Oscar for Charly, to take himself or his career too seriously.

That despite shipping on board the 2002 Floating Film Festival, where he will be feted in a special tribute night hosted by New York film critic Kathleen Carroll.

"Well," Robertson tells The Sun by telephone from a friend's home in California this week, "I'm delighted. I feel it's undeserved. I've never been one to be particularly proud of anything I've done in film. But I look forward to it (the festival)."

For one thing, he loves the concept of a filmfest on a ship. "It sounds like a fascinating idea. In some of these film festivals, people have a tendency to wander. Maybe there are too many distractions. Here we have a captive audience."

He is just not sure why festival organizer Dusty Cohl and his band of cohorts want to honour him. It's not just because he is still working: Robertson has a cameo in Spider-man as Uncle Ben Parker. Cohl suggests that it is easy to look back with interest and pride at the Oscar-win for Charly and films such as Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken, Three Days Of The Condor, J.W. Coop (which Robertson also wrote and directed) and P.T. 109, in which he was then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy's hand-picked choice to play JFK as a war hero.

"I suppose so," Robertson says before turning cynical about the subject. "But I think some of it (his attitude) is a residual from those old journalist's days." Robertson set out to be a reporter, not an actor, in his early New York era.

"I have to say in all candour that I've never really been very proud of anything I've ever done. It's a degree of disenchantment. I've always felt that anything I've done I could have done better. Which, at first flush, sounds modest. But it's ego. I think it's because I think I'm better than I am.

"Also, I guess my Calvinist conscience has a way of getting in the way of taking myself too seriously. And I've never really lived in Hollywood, except for short periods of time, and I've never ever embraced the lifestyle."

What he did take joy in, however, was an audience with JFK after the shooting of P.T. 109. "A true gentleman," Robertson remembers. He remembers laughing when a White House official called him on a New York film set and suggested that the president would meet him at his convenience. "No," Robertson recalls answering, "at the president's convenience." And he felt truly honoured.

As for the Oscar, Robertson was not even there to get it. He was filming in the Philippines at the time and got no time off. He only attended the Oscars twice, once as a presenter.

"I'm not in the scene," says Robertson. I'm not in the network. Which probably is just as well. I feel for those people who can't seem to get out of the network. I just think that you've got to have a life besides this life."

That is especially true this week, Robertson says, because Oscar nominations have been announced and people are caught up in the hype. He advises people to live outside Hollywood and enrich their lives with other interests, values and even obsessive hobbies.

That includes his own interest in piloting vintage planes. His collection included a Spitfire, which he sold two years ago, and the Tiger Moths and Messerschmitt 109-E he still owns.

"That is my Walden's Pond up there," Robertson says of the rhapsody he feels soaring through the clouds. Better than being in Hollywood any day of the week. (More on: Cliff Robertson).


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