Elliott Gould biography

In 1957, at the age of 18, Gould phoned a Broadway producer and impersonated an agent singing the praises of some kid named Elliott Gould. Miraculously the ploy worked, and soon after Gould received a call from the producer offering him a spot in the chorus of the Broadway musical Rumple.

Marriages

After Rumple, Gould hung around the fringes of Broadway, but failed to find consistent acting work. He developed a gambling addiction and worked odd jobs—as a nighttime elevator man and rug cleaner salesman—in order to pay off his debts. Then, in 1962, Gould landed the leading role opposite rising star Barbra Streisand in the Broadway musical I Can Get It For You Wholesale. The two quickly fell in love and married a year later, in 1963. "Marriage to Barbra was a fantastic experience," Gould recalls. "It had a lot of chocolate soufflé and things like that, but it was also like a bath of lava."

But while Streisand's career skyrocketed, Gould's stagnated. He struggled with depression and self-esteem issues as he was often referred to in the press as "Mr. Streisand." "It must have been very difficult for him," Streisand says. "Marriages between people who are self-involved is hard. It's safer for actors not to be married to one another." Gould and Streisand separated in 1969, and divorced in 1971. By that time, Gould had already begun a new relationship with a young woman named Jennifer Bogart. Gould and Bogart had two children, Molly and Samuel Gould, before marrying in 1974. However, Gould's relationship with Bogart ultimately proved as volatile as his previous marriage to Streisand. Gould and Bogart divorced in 1976, remarried in 1978 and split ways again in 1979.

On the Silver Screen

At about the time Gould's relationship with Streisand began to deteriorate in the late 1960s, his professional career finally began to take off. Gould's breakthrough performance came as a swinger and philanderer in the 1969 free-love comedy, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Boosted by that role, he landed a leading role in the iconic 1970 film, M*A*S*H. Gould's character, Captain "Trapper" John McIntyre, an irreverent medic in the Vietnam War, quickly became an icon of the anti-Vietnam protest movement, and Gould won an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance. He followed M*A*S*H with roles as a sexually unsatisfied husband in I Love My Wife (1970) and as a radical graduate student in Getting Straight (1970), catapulting Gould to national celebrity and solidifying his status as an icon of the youth counterculture.

In 1971, Gould starred in Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's first English-language film, The Touch, and in 1973 he delivered what may be his defining performance as Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's famous novel of the same name. Gould continued to act throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but none of his later performances could match those he turned in during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and he gradually faded back toward Hollywood anonymity.