His name is Mandy Patinkin, prepare to enjoy

He slips into it so easily, it's hard to believe it has been almost 40 years since he played the role.

Mandy Patinkin is talking about his favourite line by his iconic character Inigo Montoya, the vengeance-seeking swordsman in the 1987 comedic fairy tale The Princess Bride.

Suddenly, the American accent is gone, replaced by a soft, Spanish inflection, and Inigo Montoya is on the other end of the phone line.

"You know, I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it's over, I do not know what to do with the rest of my life."

Patinkin said the line meant little to him at the time. But all that changed after seeing the film again in his 60s.

"And it just hit me like a ton of bricks that Inigo spends his whole life trying to get the six-fingered man who killed his father, and he kills [him] — and he did not get his father back," Patinkin said.

"And we are living in a time right now where we are witnessing … acts of vengeance and revenge of unspeakable proportions, and nobody's going to get their loved ones back.

"And the only solution to the disappointments that life throws in our face is peace and kindness and learning to live with discomfort," he said.

He doesn't even know if the screenwriter, William Goldman, "knows the wish and prayer that he wrote down, but I can tell you that Mandy Patinkin learned, 30-some years later, what those words meant."

Tony winner for Evita

Patinkin has had plenty of opportunities to learn in his career, one that spans six decades.

At 25, he won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Che Guevara in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita on Broadway.

He made his first mark on Hollywood in the early 1980s when Barbra Streisand cast Patinkin, then a relative unknown, as her leading man in Yentl.

In recent years, audiences likely know him best from television dramas, with starring roles in Chicago Hope, Criminal Minds and the critically acclaimed Homeland.

But music and the theatre stage have always pulled him back.

'I want my audience to have a good time'

Now 71, Patinkin has gone through his repertoire of nearly 14 hours of songs to create a new one-man show.

He said in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, he had only one aim.

"I called my piano player, Adam Ben-David, and I said, 'I'm ready to get back on the road. How about you?' And he said, 'Yeah, yeah.'

"But I want it to be fun … I want to have a good time. I want my audience to have a good time."

And while the pandemic provided the impetus for the decision to steer clear of darker material, it's likely not a stretch that Patinkin's epiphany around that line William Goldman penned for his character played a role, too.

"I think I never realized that my job was a service job, and I never thought of it as that until this time," Patinkin said.

"And I realized that the service that is at the top of the list is that we need to be together again … and be a community, and that is a privilege that I get to be a part of that."

Good advice and luck

Gratitude is a big part of Patinkin's life these days. He said the breadth and longevity of his career in entertainment is likely due to a lot of hard work, a lot of good advice and a fair bit of luck.

He even struggles to explain how he ended up cast in his best-known role, in a beloved movie he calls The Wizard of Oz "of my generation and other generations."

"It's one of those things I pinch myself, even at this moment going, 'I can't believe I got to be in that film and play that guy.'"

Patinkin said people often ask him why The Princess Bride is so special to so many people, and he struggles to answer them.

But he said the film's director once offered as good an example as he's heard.

"I called Rob Reiner up and I said … 'The Princess Bride is about so many stories … How would you put that into one sentence, for God's sake?'"

"And Rob didn't miss a beat. He said, 'That's easy. A little boy is sick. His grandpa comes over to read him a story to tell him the most important thing in life is true love.' And if you think about it, every single character in that movie, villain or hero, their quest is for true love."

Mandy Patinkin: Being Alive will play at the Imperial Theatre in Saint John on April 6.