Oct. 18—Bryan Cranston is sitting in a corner of his house in Sherman Oaks, a 1920s neighborhood in Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley and up the Santa Monica Mountains. Sherman Oaks is Old Hollywood, and Cranston’s house is a quick walk from James Dean’s final residence and from the studio Marilyn Monroe shared with James Dougherty, her first husband.
Cranston’s white French window shutters are closed but the afternoon light filters through regardless and shines in small rays on Cranston’s gray T-shirt and clean-shaved face. He’s lived in this house with his wife, actor Robin Gale Dearden, for 22 years. This is also where the couple raised their daughter, Taylor Dearden, now an actor in her own right who’s learned from her father to work hard and take chances — and to be ready when luck strikes.
Like Cranston himself, the house is elegant but unassuming: A one-family corner home, with an iron picket fence, surrounded by tall old trees and hedges for privacy, and a garage building at the back. Flowers in pots decorate the windows and also stand guard outside the fence. A sinuous Lebanon cedar towers to the left of the house and dwarfs the roof, and from behind the house, at a distance, a sole palm tree peaks through to remind us that this is golden California…