The Actor — Niven Busch

Dan Prader is “the perfect figure of a man.” A has-been stunt man and actor looking for the way back into a profession for which he was once flawlessly suited. Few remember him, but among those who do is his neglected and bitter son, Harold, overshadowed since childhood by the sheer size and charisma of his once famous father.

Dan is still deeply loved by his wife, Jill, who though confounded by her husband's capricious spending and wandering eye, holds fast to her marriage and dreams that the chasm between father and son will one day be bridged.
Harold has achieved great success of his own, and father and son are at last thrown together when Harold must direct a movie for which his father is the only stunt man willing to take a risk with death-defying odds. For Dan, it is a last leap of faith into an ocean of possibilities.

At a time of life when “the years went up and down the street with a dusty broom,” the stories of the players―husband and wife, father and son, lost loves and dreams―intertwine and overlap in a moving story about the fight for success in the gold-drenched realm called Hollywood.