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David Strathairn

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David Strathairn
BornDavid Russell Strathairn
Height6' (1.83 m)
SpouseLogan Goodman Strathairn (2 children)

David Russell Strathairn (born January 26 1949) is an Academy Award-nominated American film, television, and stage actor.

Biography

Personal life

Strathairn was born in San Francisco, California. His father was a physician. He is of Scottish ancestry through his paternal grandfather, Thomas Scott Strathairn (a native of Crieff, Perthshire) and Native Hawaiian ancestry through his paternal grandmother, Lei.

Strathairn attended Redwood High School in Larkspur, California and graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1970. He studied at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Venice, Florida and worked as a clown in a traveling circus.

He is married to Logan Goodman Strathairn, a nurse, and the couple have two sons and live in the mid-Hudson Valley area of upstate New York, near Poughkeepsie, about 90 minutes by Metro-North Railroad from New York City. Their son Tay Strathairn, an actor and musician who plays jazz piano, appeared in John Sayles's films Eight Men Out (as "Bucky") and Lone Star (as "Young Sam").

Career

Some of Strathairn's best-known film roles are his portrayals of the title character in Harrison's Flowers (2000), the wisecracking blind techie in Sneakers (1992), Joe St. George in Dolores Claiborne (1995), Theseus in the 1999 version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and corrupt baseball player Eddie Cicotte in 1988's Eight Men Out. However, he is often seen more as a character actor, often appearing in supporting roles in many independent and Hollywood films. He has co-starred in Twisted as Ashley Judd's psychiatrist, in The River Wild as Meryl Streep's husband, as Tom Cruise's jailbird brother in The Firm, and as Kim Basinger's pimp in L.A. Confidential.

He has worked frequently with director John Sayles, beginning with his film debut Return of the Secaucus 7, and including the films Passion Fish, Matewan, Limbo, and City of Hope, for which Strathairn won the Independent Spirit Award. Notably, alongside Sayles, he played one of the Men in Black in Sayles's 1983 film The Brother from Another Planet

Strathairn's television work includes a wide range of roles, including "Moss", the bookselling nebbish on the critically acclaimed The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd; Captain Keller, the father of Helen in the 2000 remake of The Miracle Worker; and a far-out (both figuratively and literally) televangelist in Paradise, the pilot episode for a TV series on Showtime that did not move forward. Strathairn also had a recurring role on the hit TV drama The Sopranos.

File:Gngl.jpg
Strathairn, playing the role of Edward R. Murrow in the 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck.

In 2005, he appeared in the leading role in Good Night, and Good Luck., a theatrical biopic in which he portrayed the famed CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow in his clash with Senator Joseph McCarthy over his Communist "witch hunt" in the 1950s. Strathairn received Best Actor Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and Academy Award nominations for his performance in the film. Among his recent films are: We Are...Marshall, a 2006 film about the resurrection of Marshall University's football program after the 1970 plane crash that killed most of the team; and Hereafter, set in the aftermath of the 2004 Sumatran tsunami, directed by Michael Patwin (in pre-production).

Strathairn plays a lead role opposite Matt Damon in the summer 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum and appears in Paramount Pictures' forthcoming children's film "The Spiderwick Chronicles" (2008) as "Arthur Spiderwick".

He is also an accomplished stage actor and has performed over thirty theatrical roles on stage. Most recently, he performed several roles in stage plays by 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter. He played Stanley in two consecutive New York Classic Stage Company (CSC) productions of Pinter's 1957 play The Birthday Party, directed by Carey Perloff (since 1992 artistic director of the American Conservatory Theatre), in 1988 and 1989; the dual roles of prison Officer and Prisoner in Pinter's 1989 play Mountain Language (in a double bill with the second CSC Rep production of The Birthday Party); and Devlin, opposite Lindsay Duncan's Rebecca, in Pinter's 1996 two-hander Ashes to Ashes in the 1999 New York premiere by the Roundabout Theatre Company.

Filmography

References

  1. ^ "David Strathairn Biography (1949-)", Film Reference.com, accessed August 7, 2007.
  2. "David Strathairn Finds the Spotlight: David Strathairn Is the Kind of Actor You Know by Face, If Not by Name, But an Oscar Nomination on Tuesday for Best Actor Could Change All That", BBC.co.uk January 26, 2006, Entertainment, accessed August 7, 2007. (Includes video clip.)
  3. ^ Full biography of "David Strathairn", Yahoo! Movies, Copyright © 2007, accessed August 7, 2007.
  4. "Profile: David Strathairn", Hello!, Copyright © 2001-2007 , accessed August 7, 2007.
  5. ^ Tay Strathairn at IMDb
  6. Paradise (2004) (TV) at IMDb
  7. David Strathairn at IMDb, accessed August 7, 2007.
  8. Performance revs. by Susan Hollis Merritt, "The Birthday Party" (CSC Repertory Theatre, New York, 17 April 1988, 12 Apr. 1988–22 May 1988) and Bernard Dukore, "The Birthday Party" (CSC Repertory Theatre, New York, April–May 1988), The Pinter Review 2.1 (1988): 66-70; 71-73. (Cover photograph features Strathairn in his role as Stanley.)
  9. 1989 CSC production, HaroldPinter.org (official site), accessed August 7, 2007.
  10. Susan Hollis Merritt, "A Conversation with Carey Perloff, Bill Moor, Peter Riegert, Jean Stapleton, and David Strathairn: After Matinee of Mountain Language and The Birthday Party by CSC Repertory Ltd., Bruno's, New York, 12 Nov. 1989", The Pinter Review: Annual Essays 1989 (TPR) (Tampa: U of Tampa P, 1989) 59-84 (interview); cf. performance rev. by Francis Gillen, "Mountain Language, The Birthday Party" TPR 93-97. (Cover photograph features Strathairn and Stapleton in their roles as a prison Officer and the Elderly Woman in Mountain Language; his other role, the Prisoner, is the Elderly Woman's son.)
  11. Performance rev. by Katherine H. Burkman, "Ashes to Ashes in New York: Roundabout Theatre Company at the Gramercy Theatre, March 30, 1999" and by Susan Hollis Merritt, "Ashes to Ashes in New York: Roundabout Theatre Company, Gramercy Theatre, New York, 3 April 1999", The Pinter Review: Collected Essays 1997 and 1998 (Tampa: U of Tampa P, 1999) 154-59.

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