And yet, despite his stature as a famous actor, none of the passers-by really takes much notice. Garcia has spent his professional career avoiding the flashbulbs of the paparazzi, keeping his personal life personal and focusing on independent projects he found appealing rather than high-profile studio blockbusters.
His latest film, City Island, is one of these and the reason he was in Ghent last weekend. At the International Film Festival of Flanders, he was given the Joseph Plateau Lifetime Achievement award before the screening of the film.
Garcia says he has now “come full circle”: 22 years ago, he arrived at this same festival to present the film The Untouchables. It was his very first festival invitation as an actor. He tells me that being invited back to receive the prestigious award is “very touching.”
He repeats the sentiment to a packed crowd at the cinema that evening. “Ghent is where I lost my virginity – in terms of film festivals,” he joked. “It shows that you take one step at a time, and you keep doing your work, and you wind up back in Ghent.”
Garcia was born in 1950s Havana and fled the Castro regime, which had confiscated his family’s property, when he was just five. The family settled in Miami, Florida, where he studied acting before heading to Hollywood. He quickly landed small parts in TV and film, until he got his “big break” – the role of Agent George Stone in Brian De Palm’s The Untouchables. His part in the film’s climactic moment – a slow-motion scene on a staircase that served as an hommage to the classic 1925 Russian film Battleship Potemkin – was star making, and the roles came fast and steady after that.
With nearly 50 films behind him, Garcia continues to bounce between big studio productions, like When a Man Loves a Woman and Ocean’s Eleven, to smaller projects with which he feels a strong connection, like 1996’s The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca (he played Lorca) and 2004’s Modigliani (he played Modigliani).
“Sometimes they want to throw a big bucket of money at you, but you kind of say to yourself ‘why do I want to be in this movie?’,” he explains. “I’ve got to do something that I’m stimulated by. My nature is not to walk through something. If I’m not stimulated, I just don’t belong there.”
Still, he admits, it’s a balance. “Sometimes you do something that might afford you the ability to do a City Island.” The independent comedy was written and directed by Raymond De Felitta (who Garcia calls “the Italian Woody Allen”) and stars Garcia as Vince, a working-class husband and father with two very big secrets. In fact, everyone in Vince’s family is full of secrets – the revelation of which propels the script along until the end, when everyone’s skeletons are ripped from the closet.
“Everyone has secrets; it’s part of human nature,” the 53-yearold actor says. “But I share all my secrets – everything I am is in everything I do. So my secrets are public. Every actor – at least the ones I value – is sharing their most intimate pains and joys and secrets in their work.”
The Italian family in the film live on City Island, a little fishing village that is part of the Bronx borough of New York. A prison guard by day, one of Vince’s secrets is that he’s taking an evening acting lesson. It doesn’t sound like much, but to a tough guy like Vince, telling his wife he wants to be an actor is beyond embarrassing.
Does Garcia understand that feeling? “Of course!” he answers. “In the environment that I grew up in, to say ‘I want to be an actor’ or ‘I want to go to Hollywood to work in the movies’, it’s like saying you want to be a farmer on Mars. I mean, there is just no relationship with it. I was doing community theatre and stuff, but my family and friends saw it as a hobby.”
Garcia has been married for 27 years and is the father of four – his eldest daughter also plays his daughter in City Island. (Her secret is that she is paying her college tuition by stripping at a club).
Garcia, also a pianist and percussionist, has only been back to Cuba once – for a benefit concert for Cuban refugees at Guantanamo Bay in 1995. He didn’t leave the naval base. “Once in exile, always in exile,” he says. “You can’t escape that; it’s always with you. My Cuban heart has a hole in it.” He won’t return to the island until the regime ends. “I’ve been critical of that regime, and I will be critical of it until it falls. I want my country – the country I was born in – to be free.”

City Island opens in Belgium in February

www.cityislandmovie.com

Lisa Bradshaw

City Island (2009) Trailer