Even as a child, Geoffrey Johnson, C'52, felt the lure of the theater. When other kids fantasized about becoming firefighters or cowboys, he wanted to be an actor. Johnson is a founding partner in the independent casting firm Johnson-Liff Associates Ltd. The walls of their Broadway offices are lined, ceiling to floor, with framed posters from some 150 plays, musicals, television shows, and films they have cast, including such Broadway megahits as Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Les Miserables, Dreamgirls, Amadeus, and Equus. As leaders in the casting field, it was not surprising when Johnson and his business partner, Vincent Liff, received the Casting Society of America's Hoyt Bowers Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Casting Profession. The award was presented last November at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles at a gathering of over 1,000 directors, producers, and casting directors.

During his days at Penn, however, Johnson was only interested in casting himself in an actor's role. As soon as he came to campus, he joined the theater group Penn Players. By senior year he was committed enough to apply to the Yale Drama School, where he learned not only the craft of acting but also about production and directing. Like most aspiring stage actors, Johnson went to New York after graduation and supported himself with temp jobs between acting stints. "I acted occasionally off--and once on--Broadway and did some brief bits on television and film," he says. "Not a lot of exposure, but when you consider the odds of ever getting an acting job, it wasn't bad."

When acting jobs were slow, he took stage-managing jobs and ran auditions for David Merrick, the top Broadway producer of his day. Someone commented that he would make a good casting director, a profession of growing importance at the time, since he was by then familiar with the New York acting pool. He went to work for Merrick as an assistant casting director, which demanded long hours of work. "I don't know how I did it; I had no life, but I learned a great deal."

One of the highlights of Johnson's career was time out to work as the U.S. representative for Nöel Coward. "I was brought up on Nöel Coward--I acted in Blithe Spirit at Penn," says Johnson. "I met everybody in the theater--Lunt and Fontaine, Katharine Cornell, Dietrich, Burton, Taylor, and so on. All the greats ended up meeting with Nöel Coward at one point or another. They'd be in Switzerland or London or at Coward's house in Jamaica, and I'd be there listening to them talk. It was really an unforgettable experience."

Johnson becomes impatient when asked who he has "discovered." Casting directors, he insists, give actors the chance to audition; actors get parts because of their talent. Take the case of Kelsey Grammer. Johnson saw him perform when Grammer was in Julliard and gave him a chance to audition for a production of Macbeth at Lincoln Center. He got the part. "I brought him in because I thought he was good," says Johnson. Then, while Johnson was casting a weekly sitcom called Kate and Allie, Grammer landed a comedic role. "Our telephones started ringing with queries from Los Angeles about who he was. From there, he became a regular on Cheers and then a television star with the spin-off Frasier."

Both Johnson and Liff stress that while it sounds glamorous, being a casting director is mostly very hard work. They count their successes quietly with personal pleasure in seeing talent receive recognition. Colleagues in the casting profession and the board that selects recipients of the Hoyt Bowers Award understand.