The blonde, green-eyed actress, chain-smoking as she talks, says, "My husband and I live as simple a life as the complicated people can live."

     She is Barbara Bain, who has played everything from femmes fatales to simple country girls, in everything from Dobie Gillis to Empire. Her husband is actor Martin Landau, who is in the cast of 'Cleopatra', with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Rex Harrison.

     Some of the complications in the simple married life if this talented pair have included:

     The necessity of translating everything their 13-year-old daughter, Susan, said to her father. While they lived in Rome during the making of 'Cleopatra', the little girl learned to speak the few words she could speak in Italian. Landau does not even speak that much Italian.

     Having the neighbors in Rome shout out their windows each morning as Landau left for work, 'You won’t see him again. Leet-za will get him!' And then when he did come home at the end of the day, hearing them say, 'Ah, your husband really loves you. Leet-za don’t get him.'

 

 

Not really Hollywood-type people

 

     But aside from such disconcerting incidents, this marriage of and actor and an actress shows more signs of stability than the average Hollywood alliance, possibly because Miss Bain and Mr. Landau are not really Hollywood people at all, although they are now looking for a house and plan to settle there.

     "Our friends are mostly people we knew in New York who have come our here," she says. "In fact, some of us almost starved together in New York. But even when we weren’t working, we were always doing something – we’d meet and talk about scenes and act scenes and eat scenes."

     When Barbara Bain and Martin Landau were married on Feb. 10, 1957, they were so busy – although they were both out of work – that they had to rush away immediately after the ceremony. She had to go to a private acting class conducted by Lee Strasburg and he to a rehearsal at the Actors‘ Studio, where they had originally met.

 

 

She danced with Martha Graham

 

     "Neither of us worked for six months after we were married," she says. "That’s when the group of us would get together and work on projects. Shelley Berman wanted to be a serious actor – he still does – but he began making up comedy routines in his spare time. He’d invite us over for a party. Then when we got there, we’d find it wasn’t a party at all. He just wanted to try out a new routine."

     Barbara Bain came to New York from her native Chicago to study dancing with Martha Graham. She financed her dancing lessons and acting courses by doing fashion modeling.

     "By the time I got married, the modeling was beginning to fall off. Then, after six months, Martin and I got parts in 'Middle of the Night' with Eddie Robinson. We toured with that – it was our honeymoon – and finally ended up in Hollywood. After I had sent our trunks back to New York, we decided to stay out here."

     Concerning their married life, Miss Bain says, "Our interests are the same. We both read a lot. The fact that we both act doesn’t affect our marriage – we have 'Be Kind to Whoever’s Working Weeks'. When we are both working, we just do the best we can."

     She concludes with a side light on marriage which may be worth noting by couples everywhere: "We spend a lot of time laughing."