Who Is Clark Rockefeller?
The kidnapping, false identity and potential double-homicide situation that captured the nation’s attention in the summer of 2008 is back in the news – this time, starring a TV favorite.
The real Clark Rockefeller (left) and Eric McCormack as Clark Rockefeller (Lifetime)
Eric McCormack portrays the alternately charming and alarming faux aristocrat in the Lifetime TV movie Who Is Clark Rockefeller?, premiering Saturday at 9 p.m. ET/PT. It revives the drama of those hot-weather months, when Rockefeller, who not just trumped up his name but his credentials, led authorities for a tense manhunt under the East Coast to get him and the 7-year-old daughter Reigh, known to her parents as Snooks.
“He loved that baby,” the Will & Grace Emmy winner, 46, tells PEOPLE by way of explaining Rockefeller’s motivation – and also desperate father’s life-altering decision to shed his fancy veneer and assume a humble, new life together with his child. “When you become a father,” says McCormack, himself parents of the 7-year-old, “everything changes.”
Meanwhile, only last week the “real” fake Rockefeller, a German national identified by FBI as Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, was denied the latest trial in kidnapping situation, reports the Boston Herald. Currently serving a four- to five-year state prison term for abducting his child and assaulting her bodyguard, Rockefeller (who has also been known as a person of interest in a double-homicide that took place in the mid-’80s in California) is supposed to launch in 2012.
“I don’t think he was that crazy,” says McCormack, who likens Rockefeller to “the ultimate Method Actor,” believing without a doubt he was the character he created. “He was driven. But, like Hamlet, at some point, he crossed the line. He looked from the mirror and he saw Clark Rockefeller.”
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[...] is appealing his sentence for kidnapping his 7-year-old. The recorded kidnapping false identity aClark Rockefeller – BOSTON A German man who called himself Clark Rockefeller and who spun fantastic stories about his [...]