It may surprise you to learn the next recipient of the annual Chaplin Award, which Film at Lincoln Center will bestow April 29 at Alice Tully Hall, has a career almost as long as that of Charlie Chaplin himself. Jeff Bridges, 74, has spent 73 of those years before the camera, debuting at the age of 4 months as a squalling infant at a train station in the arms of Jane Greer in The Company She Keeps. When he missed his cry cue, his mother, Dorothy (who was in the film, along with his older brother, Beau), prescribed a little pinch. It worked, and he’s been screen-acting ever since.

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When he and Greer crossed professional paths again, it was in 1984’s Against All Odds, a remake of her noir classic Out of the Past. That time out she had a cameo, he had top billing.

Life has (mostly) smiled on Jeff Bridges through the past seven decades. He has accumulated an Academy Award (as the alcoholic country singer at the center of 2009’s Crazy Heart) and another six nominations, two Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. To which he’ll shortly add Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Award.

“I don’t quite know what to say about getting this award,” Bridges tells Observer. “So much is going on right now, I haven’t figured out what to say about it.” That includes wrapping season two of his FX series The Old Man (likely to air later this year) and shortly heading off to make another movie (that’d be next year’s Tron: Ares, the third installment of the sci-fi cult classic he kicked off in 1982). As if that wasn’t enough, he and Sue (his wife of 48 years) are moving into a new house designed by the youngest of their three girls.

“I guess I qualify as the right guy to play The Old Man, alright,” Bridges says of his FX show, in which he plays a former CIA operative trying to stay off the grid. “My memory isn’t what it used to be, and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. I went through a lot of challenging things last year, but I don’t spend much time thinking about it—that, or I just don’t remember much about it.”

Considering all he’s gone through, this salute by Film at Lincoln Center is tantamount to strolling blissfully into some blinding sunlight. Somehow, Bridges survived the near-fatal one-two punch of cancer and Covid-19, and he’s as surprised about that as anyone. “I was in that place where I said, ‘Oh, this is how I’m going to die.’ My doctors kept telling me, ‘You gotta fight. You gotta fight.’........

© Observer