The education of Richard Dreyfuss

In his new role: The actor fields questions about Middle East peace prospects and civil liberties at Bunker Hill Community College last month. (Aram Boghosian for the Boston Globe)

Before speaking at Bunker Hill Community College last week, Richard Dreyfuss asked media members in attendance to consider his talk off the record. He wanted to speak freely, the actor-activist explained, without worrying his remarks might be trimmed to fit some prefabricated agenda.

"I'm not an interview, I'm a book," said the 59-year old Oscar winner, looking bookish, all right, in khaki pants and corduroy sports coat, a pair of glasses roped professorially around his neck. Call it Mr. Holland's outfit.

Dreyfuss then commanded the stage for an hour of uninhibited and often spicy conversation with his audience, a dialogue whose theme might be described as: What we don't know -- or refuse to learn -- about our country and the world could kill us.

He won't be quoted here. A deal is a deal. But his topics suggest where his priorities lie. And why one of Hollywood's biggest stars of the 1970s and '80s has mostly quit the silver screen to play a much different role in public life.

Dreyfuss fielded questions about peace prospects in the Middle East and civil liberties at home in the post-9/11 era. The quest for certainty in modern life came up, as did confronting midlife change. Describing himself at one point as a secular, agnostic Jew, Dreyfuss said he was more attracted to people who think about God than people who don't. Notwithstanding some pointed remarks about right-wing news commentators, he aggressively rejected the "Hollywood liberal" label as -- no surprise -- too agenda-defining.

Having largely set aside acting for other pursuits, including teaching and studying at Oxford University, Dreyfuss showed more passion for his latest project, an initiative to teach civics in public schools, than for a movie career that has brought him fame and fortune but not, to hear him, a great deal of inner peace.

"I've been rich and famous. And I've been broke," Dreyfuss later said during an interview at the Charlestown offices of Eons, an online resource for graying baby boomers like himself. "I've had love and success. I've had all the money in the world. I've questioned everything I've had so far. I have no regrets about being a movie star, but I'm at a different place in my life now."

Dreyfuss was joined by several Eons staffers and a reporter. Launched by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor (who was not around for Dreyfuss's visit), the website has a retool-you r -life-after-50 mission with which the actor clearly identifies. Still, he didn't hesitate to critique the site .

"Eons has to have higher ambitions," Dreyfuss said genially, if rather pointedly. "When you're closer to death than high school, it's more than a marketing mantra, more than a Land's End catalog. It's about the courage to transform your life."

His own goals were set by age 12, he continued. To become an actor, movie star, and politician -- and maybe history teacher, too.

"I'm the only one I know who knew with such monolithic certainty what he wanted to do with his life," Dreyfuss said. Only in his mid-50s, after experiencing every high and low from red-carpet stardom to drug rehab, did he "start having the doubts that others had when they were younger."

One low point, he said, was being fired from a London production of "The Producers" in 2004 for not being physically up to the part of Max Bialystock . (Dreyfuss was replaced by Nathan Lane. ) Yet at the moment he felt the least confident about his acting and writing, along came the offer to join the Oxford community as a senior associate member of St. Antony's College, studying democracy and its underpinnings. Why Oxford? "Because I was in England looking for something to do, and because they asked me," said Dreyfuss, who gave a formal lecture at St. Antony's on the 2004 US presidential election while in residence.

"I'll still take an acting role, but only for the money," continued the actor, whose latest film was "Poseidon." "I do it to support my family and a certain lifestyle level. I like to travel. I like to buy books. But I drive a Honda, not a Rolls Royce."

To meet Dreyfuss is to see why Steven Spielberg cast him as the steady-handed hero in "Jaws" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Dreyfuss may be hammy and meandering when discussing his career, with all its ups and downs. But he's thoughtful and uncanned in his responses. Too many people are afraid to say, "I don't know," he's fond of observing, and it's not a fear he seems saddled with .

He doesn't look like a nip ped -and-tucked movie idol, either, with his protruding paunch and white hair. But his resume is pure platinum: more than 40 film roles, including critical favorites "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" and "Mr. Holland's Opus "; a best-actor Oscar for "The Goodbye Girl," which made him the youngest actor to be so honored at the time ; and numerous stage and TV roles, from an all-star Broadway revival of "Sly Fox" to the CBS series "The Education of Max Bickford," which aired during the 2001-02 season.

While he's been through divorce and rehab, and talked publicly about suffering from bipolar disorder, he never sounds as though he's reading from a Dr. Phil script. Married for the third time, Dreyfuss has three children aged 16 to 26 and lives in the San Diego area when not on the road.

His activism is no act, either. A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, Dreyfuss has been closely aligned with progressive and civil libertarian causes for years. In 2003, he helped organize a Geneva conference attended by hundreds of prominent Israelis and Palestinians hoping to broker an unofficial peace treaty. A year ago he called for President Bush's impeachment in a speech at the National Press Club, after news reports surfaced of a warr a ntless surveillance program being conducted by the National Security Agency. Organizations with which he's been closely affiliated include the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and Council on Foreign Relations .

Years ago, Dreyfuss began contemplating ways of teaching schoolchildren the fundamentals of citizenship in a modern democracy. His first notion, a two-hour TV show, never got off the ground. His Oxford studies kept the idea alive, though, and last year Dreyfuss began work on a public-school civic s curriculum. He hopes to have a pilot program up and running on Martha's Vineyard next fall.

The Vineyard connection harkens back to "Jaws." A mutual friend who worked on the film with Dreyfuss introduced him to Robert Tankard , a local teacher and school administrator. The two struck up a friendship that deepened over time.

"We talk about government and education, not acting," says Tankard, currently a Vineyard school committee member. "Richard is extremely passionate. He loves this country but feels it can do a better job educating our kids how to become better citizens."

Over lunch with Tankard in Boston last May, Dreyfuss outlined his idea for a rejuvenated civics curriculum. The two met again on the Vineyard in July, this time bringing Vineyard school superintendent James Weiss into the conversation. Those talks led to a December conference on the island, at which educators, historians, and other professionals discussed what such a curriculum might look like -- and why it was needed.

Dreyfuss assured attendees that his bias was neither liberal nor conservative but toward such values as debate and dissent, which he called "pre-partisan."

"I am speaking as an American who wants to hand to his kids the country he learned about," Dreyfuss said.

Details are still being worked on, Dreyfuss said last week, but one priority will be teaching students how to debate issues civilly . What if hot-button topics such as teaching "intelligent design" were introduced? Local school boards are political creatures, he acknowledged, one reason the program will focus on historical issues and not current events. Meanwhile, he's approached "Star Wars" creator George Lucas's staff about making the curriculum more technologically exciting. Not every educator could do that, but Dreyfuss can. And means to.

"Civics is boring, but it doesn't have to be," he said. "We need to make it the most exciting hour of the school day."

Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.