Joseph Bottoms, authentic child of Santa Barbara !
By Alena Prime, Télé Star, 1988	Home   Cette page en Français

Authenticate native of Santa Barbara, Joseph Bottoms was really designated to play in the show named like his town. He is a man who know what he wants and his three brothers too. The other day, during a live televised interview, the four boys began to squabble and they had to be separated. "With us four at home, my mother always had a lot to do", admits Joseph, that everyone calls Joe.

In 1970, with the assistance of his brothers, he helped his parents to build a big mountain cabin with logs, at the top of one of the hills which dominate Hollywood : "There is place for everyone and we go there to be all together as often as possible", he says. Because in spite of its spectacular arguments, the Bottoms family is very united. "This cottage is a little the sanctuary of the tribe, affirms while laughing Betty, the mother. All the roads the children follow in their life always pass by there at a time or another..." The children are Timothy, thirty seven years old; Joseph, who is thirty four; Samuel, thirty three and Benjamin, twenty six. They are all four actors ! "To be in the spectacle, explains Joseph, is a thing that I wished all my life. For me, I never thought of another career. When I was sixteen, the great actor John Ireland came to make a speech in my school for our small festival at the end of the year. I was filled with wonder. I immediately desired to become like him..."

In his most insane dreams, Joe thought himself in a big blockbuster. But the most marvellous, it is that thirteen years later, his dream get actually realized for a TV movie. Joe became a friend of Liz's and it was even question at one moment that he could marry her daughter, Liza Todd. Actually, Joe get married only in 1980, with the producer of a film he was making in Toronto, Canada. He had madly fallen in love during the shooting and they began husband and wife before even before the end of the movie. All that in spite to the fact that the bride was ten years old more than her husband, and two children from a preceding marriage, whose elder one was already eleven years old.

The couple now lives in Los Angeles a pretty house located on the hills, which recalls a little to Joe the hills of his childhood. The children of Delilah, his wife, are divided between California and Canada, where their father lives : "It was a little like this on our premises, Joe says. Our parents were not separated, but my father was a substitute professor and we often had to live in other cities during a few months, the time of a vacation. So, I know what it is to be lugged from a place to another..." That did not prevent his career from beginning as soon as he had finished his studies.

Of course, his big brother Tim was already in the job and that helped him a little. Tim introduced his brother to producers and, in 1972, Joe had his first role in the TV movie Trouble Comes to Town. Two years later, he made his first film. And nobody forgot his touching interpretation of Rudi Weiss, the only survivor of the mini series Holocaust. For Santa Barbara, it was easy. The producers wanted him for a long time, but Joe hesitated to bind himself for a too long time and he was right, because just after, he made a film he could not have accepted if he was still playing in the show. And this film was the one which allowed him to meet his wife...