By Harvey F. Chartrand

MICHAEL MORIARTY, who starred in such classic films as Who’ll Stop the Rain and Pale Rider, exiled himself to Canada in 1995, following a nasty confrontation with U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno in a Washington, D.C. hotel room. Moriarty was invited along with network television executives and producers to hear Reno’s views on censorship of TV violence. Law and Order, one of the least violent shows on television, was cited as a major offender. Incensed by Reno's campaign to “forcibly end violence on television and trample on rights of free expression as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution,” Moriarty quit the series and left the U.S. in protest. He has been a landed immigrant in Canada ever since. Why the fateful encounter with Reno led to a radical (and seemingly overnight) transformation of Moriarty’s political views from soft liberal to hard-core conservative remains unexplained to this day. The onetime Manhattan über-liberal’s sudden shift to “gun-toting” arch-conservatism proved to be too much to fathom for his socialite wife Anne Hamilton Martin, and their seemingly ideal marriage ended after almost 20 years.

Moriarty was an up-and-comer in the early seventies. In 1973, he drew lavish praise for his back-to-back performances as a baseball player who befriends a dying teammate in Bang the Drum Slowly and as a cold-blooded Marine Duty Officer in The Last Detail. That same year, Moriarty starred in a TV-movie adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie with Katharine Hepburn. Moriarty's role as the Gentleman Caller won him an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor of the Year. Moriarty then nabbed the 1974 Tony Award in the Best Actor category for his role as a young London homosexual with a blistering razor-sharp tongue in Find Your Way Home, beating out heavyweight competitors Zero Mostel, George C. Scott, Jason Robards and Nicol Williamson.

However, Moriarty’s bid for big-screen stardom was a complete failure. In 1975, he was cast as a rookie detective who unwittingly kills an undercover policewoman in the Serpico-like drama Report to the Commissioner. The film (now hailed as a masterpiece) was shredded by the critics, especially the influential Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, who dismissed Moriarty’s acting as unbridled hysteria. Roger Ebert described Moriarty’s performance as manic: “During whole stretches of the movie, (the rookie detective) seems to be in the grip of incomprehensible tensions and fears, and Moriarty makes these so obvious we wonder why he isn’t sent in for observation. Underplaying, providing just the slightest suggestion of inner terrors, would have made the performance more convincing.”

By necessity, Moriarty made the switch to television, appearing in series like The Equalizer with Edward Woodward and starring as a German SS officer in the landmark television miniseries Holocaust, which won him another Emmy. Moriarty was also unforgettable as an aggressive professional hockey player in The Deadliest Season, one of the greatest TV-movies about hockey ever made.

Through the 1980s, Moriarty started turning up in increasingly lurid fare such as Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent, The Stuff, It's Alive 3: Island of the Alive and A Return to Salem's Lot. In 1986, Moriarty starred in the fantasy science-fiction movie Troll, playing the role of Harry Potter, Sr.! In the decades since, these films have all become cult classics. Moriarty is especially proud of his involvement in The Hanoi Hilton, a harrowing true story about the ordeal of American prisoners of war in North Vietnam’s most infamous prison during the Vietnam War.

Yet the role that Moriarty is still best remembered for is that of Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone in the first four seasons of Law and Order (1990-1994). Stone is an essentially humorless man of unflinching rectitude who believes in maximum enforcement of the law, but is open to plea bargaining if conditions warrant.

“In early 1994, I quit Law and Order and announced my departure in the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety,” Moriarty told Cinema Retro. “My employers, the mainstream press and even Wikipedia like to say that it was (executive producer) Dick Wolf who fired me and not the other way ‘round. People say: ‘Oh, well, no one fires Dick Wolf!’ Well, I did. At any rate, I had become an American dissident. I left for Canada not too long after that.”

After shedding his sleek Ben Stone persona, Moriarty moved to Toronto (and later Halifax and Vancouver) and became a radically different person – some described his behaviour as crazy or bipolar. At age 52, after a lifetime of discipline and abstemiousness, Moriarty began drinking and smoking heavily. The years of hard living were evident in the thickening of his features and a noticeable weight gain. His smooth-as-velvet voice became raspy from the constant intake of nicotine. The onetime exemplar of virtue on television even got into a few scrapes with the law. He was thrown into a Halifax drunk tank in 1997. In November 2000, Moriarty was arrested for assault after slapping his former girlfriend and manager Margaret Brychka during a drunken argument in a Vancouver bar. The charges were later dismissed in court.

The dark years passed and, through rigid adherence to the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and his abiding faith in the Roman Catholic Church, Moriarty was able to lay his demons to rest. He says he has been clean and sober since 2003.

“Canada’s AA fraternity and their infinite faith in the power of God have brought me to a calm and utterly sober joy in life I had never thought possible,” Moriarty said.

Until 2006, Moriarty continued his acting career from his home base in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, where he lives with his lady friend Irene Mettler. Since relocating to Canada, the former star of Law and Order appeared in a steady stream of movies and TV shows, notably the hard-edged police drama Major Crime, Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal, Emily of New Moon, Crime of the Century, Courage Under Fire, Children of the Dust (with Sidney Poitier), The Arrow, Earthquake in New York, James Dean (Moriarty won an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie as Dean’s father), Taken (in the UFO TV mini-series premiere episode directed by Tobe Hooper) and director Larry Cohen’s Pick Me Up episode of Masters of Horror.

Now 70, Moriarty is semi-retired from acting, mainly due to health concerns following open-heart surgery and the lingering effects of serious injuries sustained during a savage beating at a Maple Ridge tavern in 2002. Moriarty’s last completed film to date is the still unreleased The Yellow Wallpaper, in which he plays a mysterious realtor. Lensed in Georgia in 2006, The Yellow Wallpaper is loosely based on the famous horror story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

