Armand Assante laughed at my claim that he's the guy on screen who makes men want to cross the street to stay safe, and women want to take to bed.

"Well, I wish they would come out and tell me they want to go to bed
with me," the 59-year-old actor said. "That's the problem; they keep it a big secret. And I find out
from people like you."

I assured Assante that I would not go to bed with him. He appeared to take it well.

Assante is visiting Tampa this weekend - and other places when he's driving a rental car and misses his exit as he did Thursday, winding up somewhere in St. Petersburg. He's starring in The Steam Experiment, a Gasparilla International Film Festival entry, and will receive a career achievement award Sunday night.

"I suppose if you live long enough, eventually they throw you something," Assante said modestly. "I'm very grateful. The truth is that most of us out there are workaday people chasing paychecks.

"The bulk of an actor's life - certainly my life - is that 70 to 90 percent of the year is literally spent studying to see if there's anything worth doing. I was never an actor competing with the major stars. I was a working stiff, a journeyman. I don't care how big the star is; you don't do it alone.

"People ask me what was my favorite project. I don't think about projects, I think about the incredible people, all over the planet, whether it's people like Sidney Lumet (1990's Q&A with Nick Nolte) whose talent is renowned, or people who have been basically unrecognized, unobserved.

"On the plane today, I saw in the New York Times that one of the directors who first broke me out into large studio films just passed away. It was Howard Zieff, who did Private Benjamin and another film with Dudley Moore and me, Unfaithfully Yours. Howard and I were very close friends. That was a great relationship that manifested itself on the screen. He was like a big brother or a father to me.

"You only have a handful of those vital relationships that somehow propel things exponentially in your life. You manage to get a few opportunities in your life to have these immensely creative relationships. You ride the wave of those experiences, very unusual and unforgettable. Nothing is ever done alone."