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1-50 of 57,177
- Actor
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Peter Szymon Serafinowicz is an English actor, comedian, director and screenwriter, best known for his roles as the title character in the 2016 live-action series of The Tick, Pete in Shaun of the Dead (2004) and as the voice of Darth Maul in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999). He has also appeared in many British and American comedy series, and received attention for political satire videos in which he dubs over videos of Donald Trump with various comedic voices. He has also directed music videos for acts such as Hot Chip.- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Peter Stormare was born in Arbrå, Gävleborgs län, Sweden, to Gunhild (Holm) and Karl Ingvar Storm. He began his acting career at the Royal National Theatre of Sweden, performing for eleven years. In 1990 he became the Associate Artistic Director at the Tokyo Globe Theatre and directed productions of many Shakespeare plays, including "Hamlet". In 1993 he moved to New York, where he appeared in English productions. He continues to work in both the United States and his his homeland of Sweden. He resides in Los Angeles, California, USA, with his wife.- Actor
- Producer
- Stunts
Peter Dinklage is an American actor. Since his breakout role in The Station Agent (2003), he has appeared in numerous films and theatre plays. Since 2011, Dinklage has portrayed Tyrion Lannister in the HBO series Game of Thrones (2011) . For this he won an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series and a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Series, Miniseries or Television Film in 2011.
Peter Hayden Dinklage was born in Morristown, New Jersey, to Diane (Hayden), an elementary school teacher, and John Carl Dinklage, an insurance salesman. He is of German, Irish, and English descent. In 1991, he received a degree in drama from Bennington College and began his career. His exquisite theatre work that expresses brilliantly the unique range of his acting qualities, includes remarkable performances full of profoundness, charisma, intelligence, sensation and insights in plays such as "The Killing Act", "Imperfect Love", Ivan Turgenev's "A Month in the Country" as well as the title roles in William Shakespeare's "Richard III" and in Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya".
Peter Dinklage received acclaim for his first film, Living in Oblivion (1995), where he played an actor frustrated with the limited and caricatured roles offered to actors who have dwarfism. In 2003, he starred in The Station Agent (2003), written and directed by Tom McCarthy. The movie received critical praise as well as Peter Dinklage's work including nominations such as for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role at the "Screen Actors Guild" and Best Male Lead at the "Film Independent Spirit Awards". One of his next roles has been the one of Miles Finch, an acclaimed children's book author, in Elf (2003). Find Me Guilty (2006), the original English Death at a Funeral (2007), its American remake Death at a Funeral (2010), Penelope (2006), The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) are also included in his brilliant work concerning feature films.
His fine work in television also includes shows such as Entourage (2004), Life as We Know It (2004), Threshold (2005) and Nip/Tuck (2003). In 2011, the primary role of Tyrion Lannister, a man of sharp wit and bright spirit, in Game of Thrones (2011), was incarnated with unique greatness in Dinklage's unparalleled performance. The series is an adaptation of author George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, and his work has received widespread praise, also highlighted by his receiving of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series at The 63rd Primetime Emmy Awards (2011), The 67th Primetime Emmy Awards (2015), The 70th Primetime Emmy Awards (2018) and The 71st Primetime Emmy Awards (2019) as well as of the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television at [error].
Dinklage, among others, has also voiced Captain Gutt in Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012) and The Mighty Eagle in The Angry Birds Movie (2016), starred in the comedy horror film Knights of Badassdom (2013) while his tour-de-force interpretations as a multifarious "chameleon" of substantial mastery and artistic generosity also include film and TV gems such as Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), Three Christs (2017) and I Think We're Alone Now (2018).- Producer
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Sir Peter Jackson made history with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, becoming the first person to direct three major feature films simultaneously. The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King were nominated for and collected a slew of awards from around the globe, with The Return of the King receiving his most impressive collection of awards. This included three Academy Awards® (Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture), two Golden Globes (Best Director and Best Motion Picture-Drama), three BAFTAs (Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film and Viewers' Choice), a Directors Guild Award, a Producers Guild Award and a New York Film Critics Circle Award.
As a follow up to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in 2005, Jackson directed, wrote, and produced King Kong, for Universal Pictures. The film grossed over $500 million and won three Oscars®.
Jackson previously received widespread acclaim for his 1994 feature Heavenly Creatures, which received an Academy Award® nomination for Best Screenplay. Other film credits include The Frighteners, starring Michael J. Fox; the adult puppet feature Meet the Feebles; and Braindead, which won 16 international science fiction awards, including the Saturn. Jackson also co-directed the television documentary Forgotten Silver, which also hit the film festival circuit.
Jackson directed the Academy Award®-nominated The Lovely Bones, an adaptation of the acclaimed best-selling novel by Alice Sebold and produced the worldwide sci-fi hit District 9. He was a producer on Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn in 2011, with two more films set to come out in the future.
His most recent films include producer of 2018's action film Mortal Engines, based on a post-apocalyptic world where cities ride on wheels and consume each other to survive. Following Mortal Engines, he produced They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary on World War I with never-before-seen footage. BAFTA nominated the film for Best Documentary, and it won the award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing from the Motion Picture Sound Editors.
Jackson's next project is the music documentary The Beatles: Get Back, which he directed and produced, due to be released August, 2021.
Jackson works closely with partner Dame Fran Walsh, with whom he shares his writing and producing credits, as well as a family. Jackson has a special interest in WWI memorabilia and is the proud owner of several aircraft from that era.- Actor
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Peter William Krause was born on August 12, 1965, in Alexandria, Minnesota. Both his parents were teachers, and he has a sister and brother. He was raised in Roseville, Minnesota. He graduated in 1987 from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, with a degree in English literature. In 1990, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Acting from New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts.
Krause's first role was in a horror movie Blood Harvest (1987). On Carol & Company (1990), he appeared opposite Carol Burnett and Richard Kind. It was an anthology comedy series, with actors playing different characters each week. After it ended in 1991, he guest starred on The Limo (1992) as Tim, a white supremacist, and on Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990) in a recurring role. In 1995, he appeared in starring and recurring roles on two short-lived shows, The Great Defender (1995) and If Not for You (1995). He also guest starred on Ellen (1994), University Hospital (1995), Caroline in the City (1995), Brotherly Love (1995), The Drew Carey Show (1995) and Party of Five (1994). He also got a major recurring role as Cybill's son-in-law, Kevin Blanders on Cybill (1995). Around the same time, he also appeared in a romantic comedy Lovelife (1997) opposite Saffron Burrows, Bruce Davison and Carla Gugino, and in A Friend in Dick (1997).
In 1998, he appeared in three movies, including The Truman Show (1998). He also got a starring role on ABC's comedy Sports Night (1998), created by Aaron Sorkin. He played sports anchor Casey McCall, opposite Josh Charles, Felicity Huffman and Joshua Malina, until the show's cancellation in 2000. After "Sports Night", he got a another starring role, on HBO's Six Feet Under (2001), created by Alan Ball. He received three Emmy nominations and two Golden Globes nominations for his role as funeral director Nate Fisher, the son of Ruth (Frances Conroy) and the brother of David (Michael C. Hall) and Claire (Lauren Ambrose). During a break from "Six Feet Under" in 2004, he also appeared in We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004) opposite Laura Dern and Mark Ruffalo and played a part on Broadway. After "Six Feet Under" ended in 2005, he appeared in the miniseries The Lost Room (2006) opposite Julianna Margulies and Elle Fanning as the lead Joe Miller and played the lead and produced the thriller Civic Duty (2006). In 2007, he got yet another lead on Dirty Sexy Money (2007) as the lawyer of one of New York City's wealthiest families, opposite Donald Sutherland, William Baldwin and Natalie Zea. Krause was also a producer on the show, but unfortunately, it ended in 2009, after two seasons.
After "Dirty Sexy Money" ended, Krause did not stay idle long, when he received the lead on Parenthood (2010) as Adam Braverman, opposite Lauren Graham, Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia. "Parenthood" ended in 2015 after six seasons. In 2016, he was cast in ABC's crime drama, The Catch (2016), produced by Shonda Rhimes. The series lasted for two seasons and he played a con artist, who is being chased by a private investigator (Mireille Enos'), whom he defrauded. In 2017, he was cast in a leading role on FOX's 9-1-1 (2018), created by Ryan Murphy. He plays an LAFD fire captain Bobby Nash, opposite Angela Bassett. He also serves as an executive producer of the series.- Actor
- Producer
Boyish-looking Peter Sarsgaard was born on March 7, 1971, at Scott Air Force Base, in Bellville, Illinois, to Judy Lea (Reinhardt) and John Dale Sarsgaard, an engineer who worked for the Air Force and later Monsanto and IBM. He is a graduate of St. Louis' Washington University, where he majored in history and literature.
Initially trained with the Actors' Studio in New York, Peter began in comedy and became a co-founder of the comedy improvisational group Mama's Pot Roast. Such off-Broadway productions included Horton Foote's "Laura Dennis" and John Cameron Mitchell's "Kingdom of Earth."
He made his screen debut in Tim Robbins' Dead Man Walking (1995) and was given more sizable roles in Desert Blue (1998) and The Man in the Iron Mask (1998), as the ill-fated son of the Musketeer Athos, played by John Malkovich. Peter then started gracing the art-house circuit, making a violent, searing impression as a homophobic killer in Boys Don't Cry (1999) starring two-time Oscar-winner Hilary Swank as a trans-gendered teen.
Other impressionable offbeat roles for Peter that have thrilled critics from coast to coast include Shattered Glass (2003), which earned him a slew of awards including the prestigious National Society of Film Critics Award. Prior to that, he showed off his versatility with portrayals ranging from a Russian nuclear reactor officer in K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) to a drug addict in The Salton Sea (2002). Other heralded performances include Garden State (2004) and, notably, Kinsey (2004).
On TV, Peter appeared in recurring/regular roles in several critically applauded series and mini-series including The Killing (2011), The Slap (2015), Wormwood (2017) (as ill-fated Army scientist Frank Olson), The Looming Tower (2018) and Running Naked in the Universe (2019). More recent films include Knight and Day (2010), the villain in the DC Comics entry Green Lantern (2011), the Woody Allen drama Blue Jasmine (2013), Experimenter (2015), Jackie (2016) (as Bobby Kennedy), The Magnificent Seven (2016), Loving Pablo (2017), The Sound of Silence (2019) and Human Capital (2019).
In 2009, Sarsgaard married actress Maggie Gyllenhaal and have two children. He co-starred in the movie she wrote and directed -- The Lost Daughter (2021) starring Olivia Colman.- Actor
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Peter Frederick Weller was born in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, to Dorothy Jean (Davidson) and Frederick Bradford Weller, a federal judge and career helicopter pilot for the United States Army. He traveled extensively as his father literally flew around the world. Before he was out of his teens, he had attended high schools in Heidelberg, Germany and San Antonio, Texas, then enrolled the University of North Texas -- attracted by the chance of playing trumpet in one of the college's celebrated jazz bands. Music is in his family. Three generations on his mother's side were piano players and jazz is still his overriding interest. Ask him who his favorite performer in any art form is and he will say Miles Davis. It was with a B.A. in Theatre and a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts that he left Texas for New York. Two weeks after graduating, he made his first appearance on Broadway as David in Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival production of David Rabe's "Sticks and Bones", a role he repeated on the London stage.
While a student of legendary actress and drama coach, Uta Hagen, Weller appeared on and off Broadway in works like William Inge's "Summer Brave", Thomas Babe's "Rebel Women" and "Full Circle", one of the last plays directed by Otto Preminger. He began garnering critical acclaim with his portrayal of Billie Wilson in "Streamers", directed by Mike Nichols for Joseph Papp at Lincoln Center. He continued that success with his performances as Cliff in "The Woolgatherer" and as Nick in the first American production of David Mamet's "The Woods". During this period, he became a member of the highly respected Actor's Studio, under the aegis of Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg.
Weller's film debut was in Richard Lester's Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979). He then co-starred with Alan King and Ali MacGraw in Sidney Lumet's Just Tell Me What You Want (1980) and, with Albert Finney and Diane Keaton, in Alan Parker's Shoot the Moon (1982). Other film credits include Firstborn (1984) with Teri Garr, the HBO made-for-TV Apology (1986), co-starring Lesley Ann Warren, and Of Unknown Origin (1983), the film which won Weller the Best Actor award at the Paris International Film Festival for his performance as an upwardly mobile bachelor with a serious rat problem. That same film also marked his first association with Leviathan (1989) director George P. Cosmatos.- Actor
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Peter Michael Falk was born on September 16, 1927, in New York City, New York. At the age of 3, his right eye was surgically removed due to cancer. He graduated from Ossining High School, where he was president of his class. His early career choices involved becoming a certified public accountant, and he worked as an efficiency expert for the Budget Bureau of the state of Connecticut before becoming an actor. On choosing to change careers, he studied the acting art with Eva Le Gallienne and Sanford Meisner. His most famous role is that of the detective Columbo (1971); however, this was not his first foray into acting the role of a detective. During a high school play, he stood in for such a role when the original student actor fell sick. He has been married twice, and is the father of two children:Catherine, a private detective in real life, and Jackie. He was diagnosed with dementia in 2008, which was most likely brought on by Alzheimer's disease, from which he died on June 23, 2011.- Actor
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A leading man of prodigious talents, Peter O'Toole was born and raised in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, the son of Constance Jane Eliot (Ferguson), a Scottish nurse, and Patrick Joseph O'Toole, an Irish metal plater, football player and racecourse bookmaker. Upon leaving school, he decided to become a journalist, beginning as a newspaper copy boy. Although he succeeded in becoming a reporter, he discovered the theater and made his stage debut at age 17. He served as a radioman in the Royal Navy for two years, then attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where his classmates included Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Richard Harris.
O'Toole spent several years on-stage at the Bristol Old Vic, then made an inconspicuous film debut in the Disney classic Kidnapped (1960). In 1962, he was chosen by David Lean to play T.E. Lawrence in Lean's epic drama Lawrence of Arabia (1962). The role made O'Toole an international superstar and received him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role. In 1963, he played Hamlet under Laurence Olivier's direction in the premiere production of the Royal National Theater. He continued successfully in artistically rich films as well as less artistic but commercially rewarding projects. He received Academy Award nominations (but no Oscar) for seven different films.
However, medical problems (originally thought to have been brought on by his drinking but which turned out to be stomach cancer) threatened to destroy his career and life in the 1970s. He survived by giving up alcohol and, after serious medical treatment, returned to films with triumphant performances in The Stunt Man (1980) and My Favorite Year (1982). His youthful beauty lost to time and drink, O'Toole has found meaningful roles increasingly difficult to come by, though he remained one of the greatest actors of his generation. He had two daughters, Pat and Kate O'Toole, from his marriage to actress Siân Phillips. He also had a son, Lorcan O'Toole, by model Karen Brown.
On December 14, 2013, Peter O'Toole died at age 81 in London, England.- Actor
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Peter Davison was born as Peter Malcolm Gordon Moffett on 13 April 1951 in Streatham, London. A decade later, he and his family - his parents, Sheila and Claude (an electrical engineer who hailed from British Guiana), and his sisters, Barbara, Pamela and Shirley, moved to Knaphill, Woking, Surrey, where Davison was educated at the Winston Churchill School. It was here that he first became interested in acting, taking parts in a number of school plays, and this eventually led to him joining an amateur dramatic society, the Byfleet Players.
Upon leaving school at the age of sixteen, having achieved only modest academic success with three O Levels of undistinguished grades, he took a variety of short-lived jobs ranging from hospital porter to Hoffman press operator. He was still keen to pursue an acting career, however, and so applied for a place at drama school.
Davison was accepted into the Central School of Speech and Drama and stayed there for three years. His first professional acting work came in 1972 when, after leaving drama school in the July of that year, he secured a small role in a run of "Love's Labour's Lost" at the Nottingham Playhouse. This marked the start of a three-year period in which he worked in a variety of different repertory companies around Great Britain, often in Shakespearean roles. He then made his television debut, playing a blond-wigged space cowboy character called Elmer in "A Man for Emily", a three-part story in the Thames TV children's series The Tomorrow People (1973) (April 1975). Appearing alongside him in this production was his future wife, American actress Sandra Dickinson, whom he had first met during a run of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in Edinburgh. They married on 26 December 1978 in Dickinson's home town of Rockville, Maryland, USA.
Davison spent the following eighteen months working as a file clerk at Twickenham tax office. He also took the opportunity to pursue an interest in singing and songwriting, which led him to record several singles with his wife. He later provided the theme tunes for a number of TV series, including Mixed Blessings (1978) and Button Moon (1980). Davison played the romantic lead, Tom Holland in Love for Lydia (1977), a London Weekend Television (LWT) period drama serial transmitted in 1977.
Davison's greatest acting breakthrough came when he played Tristan in the BBC's All Creatures Great and Small (1978), based on the books of country vet James Herriot. It was a highly successful series, which ran initially for three seasons between 1978-1980. His success in All Creatures Great and Small (1978) brought him many other offers of TV work. Among those that he took up were lead roles in two sitcoms: LWT's Holding the Fort (1980), in which he played Russell Milburn, and the BBC's Sink or Swim (1980), in which he played Brian Webber. Three seasons of each were transmitted between 1980-82, consolidating Davison's position as a well-known and popular television actor.
In 1980, Doctor Who (1963) producer John Nathan-Turner, who had worked with Davison as the production unit manager on All Creatures Great and Small (1978), cast him as the Fifth Doctor in the series. Taking over from Tom Baker, who had been in the role for an unprecedented seven years, Davison was seen as a huge departure as he was by far the youngest actor to date. Davison announced he was taking the lead role in Doctor Who (1963) on the BBC's lunchtime magazine program Pebble Mill at One (1972) on 3 December 1980, when he discussed with the presenter a number of costume ideas sent in by viewers and was particularly impressed by a suggestion from one of a panel of young fans assembled in the studio that the new Doctor should be "like Tristan Farnon, but with bravery and intellect".
His appearance in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981), was recorded on 19 December 1980 and transmitted on 2 February 1981, by which time the viewing public were well aware that he would soon be taking over the lead role in Doctor Who. There was in fact only a month to go before he would make his on-screen debut in the series - albeit a brief one, in the regeneration sequence at the end of Logopolis: Part Four (1981).
His first full story was in Castrovalva: Part One (1982), the first story of season nineteen transmitted on 4 January 1982. Another significant change for the series was that it was taken off Saturdays for the first time, instead being broadcast on Mondays and Tuesdays. Davison was an immediate hit as the Doctor, with ratings picking up considerably from Tom Baker's final season. Several episodes from Davison's first season achieved over 10 million viewers, which would be the last time these numbers would be achieved in the original run of Doctor Who (1963). One particular success from Davison's first season was the stylish return of the Cybermen in Earthshock: Part One (1982), which became the most popular Cybermen story since the 1960s.
As the incumbent Doctor, Davison took part in the major celebrations of the 20th anniversary of Doctor Who (1963) in 1983, which included the multi-Doctor special The Five Doctors (1983). Nevertheless, Davison found himself dissatisfied with his second season on Doctor Who (1963), feeling that the writing, directing, budgets and tight recording schedules in the studio were frequently letting it down. With this in mind and fearing typecasting, he finished his tenure at the end of his third season in The Caves of Androzani: Part Four (1984). He left on a high, as it has been repeatedly voted one of the best stories ever by fans.
Davison became a father when, on December 25, 1984 (one day before the couple's sixth wedding anniversary), Dickinson gave birth to a daughter, Georgia Elizabeth, at Queen Charlotte's Hospital in London. Ten years later, however, the marriage broke down and they separated and later divorced. Most of Davison's work since then has been in the medium for which he is best known: television.
His credits include regular stints as Henry Myers in Anna of the Five Towns (1985), as Dr. Stephen Daker in A Very Peculiar Practice (1986), as Albert Campion in Mystery!: Campion (1989) and as Clive Quigley in Ain't Misbehavin (1994) all for the BBC, and as Ralph in Yorkshire TV's Fiddlers Three (1991). In addition, he has reprized his popular role of Tristan Farnon on a number of occasions for one-off specials and revival seasons of All Creatures Great and Small (1978).
Davison has returned several times to the world of Doctor Who (1963). In 1993 he appeared as the Fifth Doctor in Doctor Who: Dimensions in Time (1993), a brief two-part skit transmitted as part of the BBC's annual Children in Need Charity appeal, and in 1985 he narrated an abridged novelization of the season twenty-one story "Warriors of the Deep" for BBC Worldwide's Doctor Who audio book series. In addition, he has appeared in a number of video dramas produced by Bill Baggs Video. In 2003 and 2004 he appeared as quiet and unassuming detective "Dangerous Davies" in The Last Detective (2003), the Meridian TV adaptations of Leslie Thomas's novels.- Actor
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Peter Killian Gallagher is an American actor. Since 1980, he has played roles in numerous Hollywood films. He is best known for starring as Sandy Cohen in the television drama series The O.C. from 2003 to 2007, recurring roles such as Deputy Chief William Dodds on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Stacey Koons on the Showtime comedy-drama Californication, and Nick on the Netflix series Grace & Frankie. He also played CIA Director of Clandestine Services (DCS) Arthur Campbell on Covert Affairs.- Actor
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He was interested in directing films at the age of 19 and he made several shorts. As he wasn't admitted to the National Film School, he decided to dedicate himself to acting, and made his debut in the theatre in 1988 before moving to cinema and television. Fame came with the parts he played in such films as Riff-Raff (1991) by Ken Loach, Braveheart (1995) by Mel Gibson and Trainspotting (1996) by Danny Boyle, but above all when he won for best leading actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998 for My Name Is Joe (1998), once again by Loach. The Magdalene Sisters (2002) is the second feature-length film he has directed. He also directed a few episodes of the BBC TV series, Cardiac Arrest (1994), which earned him a best director nomination from the Royal Television Society.- Actor
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Peter Cullen is a Canadian-American voice actor who is widely known for voicing Optimus Prime in the Transformers franchise as well as the Michael Bay film series. He is also known for providing the vocal effects of the Predator from the 1987 film of the same name, Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, Monterey Jack from Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers and KARR in Knight Rider.- Actor
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Peter Facinelli was born in Queens, New York, the youngest child of Bruna (Reich) and Pierino Facinelli, a waiter. His parents are Italian immigrants, originally from Trentino, Northern Italy. He has three sisters. Peter was educated at St. Francis Preparatory School in Fresh Meadows, New York, and went on to attend St. John's University, but left after a year to follow his interest in acting at the Atlantic Theater Company Acting School, also in New York. There Facinelli was taught by such distinguished actors as Academy Award nominees William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman.
He made his screen debut in 1995, appearing in Rebecca Miller's Angela (1995) and has worked consistently ever since. Notable projects include The Price of Love (1995), An Unfinished Affair (1996) (where he met his future wife, Jennie Garth), Touch Me (1997) and The Scorpion King (2002). Facinelli has also had re-occurring roles in such TV shows such as Fastlane (2002), Six Feet Under (2001), Damages (2007) and Nurse Jackie (2009). In 2008, he won the role of Dr. Carlisle Cullen in the wildly popular Twilight (2008) and its sequels.- Actor
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Peter Hermann lived in Germany until he was age 10. He met his wife, Mariska Hargitay, on the set of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999). Before becoming an actor, Peter taught ESL and Special Ed as part of the Teach For America Program. After that, he became a fact-checker at Vanity Fair. He speaks four languages: English, German, Spanish, and French.- Actor
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Peter Capaldi was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to Nancy (Soutar) and Gerald John Capaldi. His parents owned an ice cream business. He is of Italian (from his paternal grandfather), Scottish, and Irish descent. Capaldi attended drama classes and was accepted into the Glasgow School of Art. After graduating he secured his breakthrough role in Local Hero (1983). Prior to becoming an actor he also worked as a graphic designer for BBC Scotland TV.
Peter was announced as the Twelfth Doctor in Doctor Who (2005) on 4th August 2013 on a BBC special programme. He had to hide it from his daughter who remarked to him why it is his name never came up during the buzz. It was a huge relief not to have to keep the secret anymore. His agent called and said "Hello Doctor" when informing him he had gotten the part.- Producer
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Peter Berg is an American actor, director, writer, and producer. His first role was in the Adam Rifkin road movie Never on Tuesday (1988). He went on to star in the World War 2 film A Midnight Clear (1992). Roles in Fire in the Sky (1993) and Cop Land (1997) followed, and the Tom Cruise films Collateral (2004) and Lions for Lambs (2007).
Peter has since moved behind the camera, directing films such as as Very Bad Things (1998) and Hancock (2008). He has also turned pen-to-paper and scripted many projects including Friday Night Lights (2004) and The Losers (2010). He is best known on-screen for his role as Dr. Billy Kronk in Chicago Hope (1994).- British television, film and stage actor Peter Guinness was born on May 3 1950 in Whitstable, a small English seaside town famous for its oysters. At school he revealed a talent for drawing and painting, a talent that subsequently led him to study art and qualify as an art teacher. But it was while working in a south London comprehensive, he became interested in theatre and in 1973 he auditioned for the Central School of Speech and Drama where he met his future spouse, Roberta Taylor. Graduating from Central in 1976, Guinness has been a ubiquitous presence on stage and screen ever since.
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This African American actor attended Penn Hills High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He started his junior year at 6' 5" and finished it at 6' 9"! He played basketball throughout his high-school years and won a scholarship. He averaged 18 points a game and 10 rebounds! He played basketball during college, but not when it would interfere with his major at George Washington University in Washington, DC, which was Theatrical Arts. During his college years, he met Jay Fenichel with whom he would later make musical productions. Upon graduation, Fenichel moved to Los Angeles and Hall moved to Venezuela to play basketball.
After a year, Hall lost interest and relocated to Los Angeles, California. Along with Fenichel, the duo put together two night-club acts/musicals. One was a semi-autobiographical two-man musical, "In Five," and the other was a two-man show called "The Worst of Friends," both of which played in night clubs throughout the LA area. They also had a promotional business where they did promotional acts in department stores for new products.
While working on the set of the series 227 (1985), he met his co-star, Alaina Reed-Hall, who played Rose Lee Holloway. They married--both on the set, and in real life. Predator 2 (1990) was released December 1990, and in April 1991, he died of AIDS, which he contracted through a blood transfusion a few months before.- Actor
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Often credited as the greatest comedian of all time, Peter Sellers was born Richard Henry Sellers to a well-off acting family in 1925 in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth. He was the son of Agnes Doreen "Peg" (Marks) and William "Bill" Sellers. His parents worked in an acting company run by his grandmother. His father was Protestant and his mother was Jewish (of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi background). His parents' first child had died at birth, so Sellers was spoiled during his early years. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force and served during World War II. After the war he met Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine, who would become his future workmates.
After the war, he set up a review in London, which was a combination of music (he played the drums) and impressions. Then, all of a sudden, he burst into prominence as the voices of numerous favorites on the BBC radio program "The Goon Show" (1951-1960), and then making his debut in films in Penny Points to Paradise (1951) and Down Among the Z Men (1952), before making it big as one of the criminals in The Ladykillers (1955). These small but showy roles continued throughout the 1950s, but he got his first big break playing the dogmatic union man, Fred Kite, in I'm All Right Jack (1959). The film's success led to starring vehicles into the 1960s that showed off his extreme comic ability to its fullest. In 1962, Sellers was cast in the role of Clare Quilty in the Stanley Kubrick version of the film Lolita (1962) in which his performance as a mentally unbalanced TV writer with multiple personalities landed him another part in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) in which he played three roles which showed off his comic talent in play-acting in three different accents; British, American, and German.
The year 1964 represented a peak in his career with four films in release, all of them well-received by critics and the public alike: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), for which he was Oscar nominated, The Pink Panther (1963), in which he played his signature role of the bumbling French Inspector Jacques Clouseau for the first time, its almost accidental sequel, A Shot in the Dark (1964), and The World of Henry Orient (1964). Sellers was on top of the world, but on the evening of April 5, 1964, he suffered a nearly fatal heart attack after inhaling several amyl nitrites (also called 'poppers'; an aphrodisiac-halogen combination) while engaged in a sexual act with his second wife Britt Ekland. He had been working on Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid (1964). In a move Wilder later regretted, he replaced Sellers with Ray Walston rather than hold up production. By October 1964, Sellers made a full recovery and was working again.
The mid-1960s were noted for the popularity of all things British, from the Beatles music (who were presented with their Grammy for Best New Artist by Sellers) to the James Bond films, and the world turned to Sellers for comedy. What's New Pussycat (1965) was another big hit, but a combination of his ego and insecurity was making Sellers difficult to work with. When the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967) ran over budget and was unable to recoup its costs despite an otherwise healthy box-office take, Sellers received some of the blame. He turned down an offer from United Artists for the title role in Inspector Clouseau (1968), but was angry when the production went ahead with Alan Arkin in his place. His difficult reputation and increasingly erratic behavior, combined with several less successful films, took a toll on his standing. By 1970, he had fallen out of favor. He spent the early years of the new decade appearing in such lackluster B films as Where Does It Hurt? (1972) and turning up more frequently on television as a guest on The Dean Martin Show (1965) and a Glen Campbell TV special.
In 1974, Inspector Clouseau came to Sellers rescue when Sir Lew Grade expressed an interest in a TV series based on the character. Clouseau's creator, writer-director Blake Edwards, whose career had also seen better days, convinced Grade to bankroll a feature film instead, and The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) was a major hit release during the summer of Jaws (1975) and restored both men to prominence. Sellers would play Clouseau in two more successful sequels, The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), and Sellers would use his newly rediscovered clout to realize his dream of playing Chauncey Gardiner in a film adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski's novel "Being There". Sellers had read the novel in 1972, but it took seven years for the film to reach the screen. Being There (1979) earned Sellers his second Oscar nomination, but he lost to Dustin Hoffman for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979).
Sellers struggled with depression and mental insecurities throughout his life. An enigmatic figure, he often claimed to have no identity outside the roles that he played. His behavior on and off the set and stage became more erratic and compulsive, and he continued to frequently clash with his directors and co-stars, especially in the mid-1970s when his physical and mental health, together with his continuing alcohol and drug problems, were at their worst. He never fully recovered from his 1964 heart attack because he refused to take traditional heart medication and instead consulted with 'psychic healers'. As a result, his heart condition continued to slowly deteriorate over the next 16 years. On March 20, 1977, Sellers barely survived another major heart attack and had a pacemaker surgically implanted to regulate his heartbeat which caused him further mental and physical discomfort. However, he refused to slow down his work schedule or consider heart surgery which might have extended his life by several years.
On July 25, 1980, Sellers was scheduled to have a reunion dinner in London with his Goon Show partners, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. However, at around 12 noon on July 22, Sellers collapsed from a massive heart attack in his Dorchester Hotel room and fell into a coma. He died in a London hospital just after midnight on July 24, 1980 at age 54. He was survived by his fourth wife, Lynne Frederick, and three children: Michael, Sarah and Victoria. At the time of his death, he was scheduled to undergo an angiography in Los Angeles on July 30 to see if he was eligible for heart surgery.
His last movie, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980), completed just a few months before his death, proved to be another box office flop. Director Blake Edwards' attempt at reviving the Pink Panther series after Sellers' death resulted in two panned 1980s comedies, the first of which, Trail of the Pink Panther (1982), deals with Inspector Clouseau's disappearance and was made from material cut from previous Pink Panther films and includes interviews with the original casts playing their original characters.- Actor
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Born in Montclair, New Jersey in 1965. He discovered acting in his mid 20s in New York, where he was trained at Lee Strasberg's studio. Then his deep voiced, tall and pale persona showed up on TV and films in 1990. His first leading roles were in Laws of Gravity (1992) and Clean, Shaven (1993), the latter of which got him noticed by Quentin Tarantino. The next year, he played the memorable role of the raping torturer Zed in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994).
He was then cast as the leading villain opposite Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz in The Mask (1994), and as Redfoot in highly acclaimed crime drama The Usual Suspects (1995). In addition, the same year he had a supporting role as a bad guy in the Steven Seagal film Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995).
Greene has also played memorable roles in the films Blue Streak (1999), Ticker (2000) Training Day (2002), Brothers in Arms (2005), End Game (2006), Fist of the Warrior (2007), The Bounty Hunter (2010), Once Fallen (2010), and the TV series The Black Donellys (2007).
He's made guest appearances in the TV series Hawaii Five-O (2010) and Justified (2010), appeared as a policeman in Prodigy of Mobb Deep's music video for "A,B,C's", and was the focal point of House of Pain's music video for "Fed Up".
Recently, Greene delivered an emotionally-charged performance as 'Jordan Blaine' in the season two premiere of Tim Firtion's award-winning crime drama/thriller web series, The Jersey Connection (2018). The project has garnered many awards on the festival circuit, with Greene receiving two wins and another five nominations for his acting performance.
Greene continues to work primarily as a character actor.- Actor
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Peter MacNicol is an American actor. He received a Theatre World Award for his 1981 Broadway debut in the play Crimes of the Heart. His film roles include Galen in Dragonslayer (1981), Stingo in Sophie's Choice (1982), Janosz Poha in Ghostbusters II (1989), camp organizer Gary Granger in Addams Family Values (1993), and David Langley in Bean (1997).- Actor
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A bold, blunt instrument of hatred and violence at the onset of his film career, Peter Boyle recoiled from that repugnant, politically incorrect "working class" image to eventually play gruff, gentler bears and even comedy monsters in a career that lasted four decades.
He was born on October 18, 1935, in Norristown, Pennsylvania, to Alice (Lewis) and Francis Xavier Boyle. He eventually moved to Philadelphia, where his father was a sought-after local TV personality and children's show host. His paternal grandparents were Irish immigrants, and his mother was of mostly French and British Isles descent. Following a solid Catholic upbringing (he attended a Catholic high school), Peter was a sensitive youth and joined the Christian Brothers religious order at one point while attending La Salle University in Philadelphia. He left the monastery after only a few years when he "lost" his calling.
Bent on an acting career, Boyle initially studied with guru Uta Hagen in New York. The tall (6' 2"), hulking, prematurely bald actor wannabe struggled through a variety of odd jobs (postal worker, waiter, bouncer) while simultaneously building up his credits on stage and waiting for that first big break. Things started progressing for him after appearing in the national company of "The Odd Couple" in 1965 and landing TV commercials on the sly. In the late 60s he joined Chicago's Second City improv group and made his Broadway debut as a replacement for Peter Bonerz in Paul Sills' "Story Theatre" (1971) (Sills was the founder of Second City). Peter's breakout film role did not come without controversy as the hateful, hardhat-donning bigot-turned-murderer Joe (1970) in a tense, violence-prone film directed by John G. Avildsen. The role led to major notoriety, however, and some daunting supporting parts in T.R. Baskin (1971), Slither (1973) and as Robert Redford's calculating campaign manager in The Candidate (1972). During this time his political radicalism found a visible platform after joining Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland on anti-war crusades, which would include the anti-establishment picture Steelyard Blues (1973). This period also saw the forging of a strong friendship with former Beatle John Lennon.
Destined to be cast as monstrous undesirables throughout much of his career, he played a monster of another sort in his early film days, and thus avoided a complete stereotype as a film abhorrent. His hilarious, sexually potent Frankenstein's Monster in the cult Mel Brooks spoof Young Frankenstein (1974) saw him in a sympathetic and certainly more humorous vein. His creature's first public viewing, in which Boyle shares an adroit tap-dancing scene with "creator" Gene Wilder in full Fred Astaire regalia, was a show-stopping audience pleaser. Late 70s filmgoers continued to witness Boyle in seamy, urban settings with brutish roles in Taxi Driver (1976) and Hardcore (1979). At the same time he addressed several TV mini-movie roles with the same brilliant darkness such as his Senator Joe McCarthy in Tail Gunner Joe (1977), for which he received an Emmy nomination, and his murderous, knife-wielding Fatso in the miniseries remake of From Here to Eternity (1979).
While the following decade found Peter in predominantly less noteworthy filming and a short-lived TV series lead as remote cop Joe Bash (1986), the 90s brought him Emmy glory (for a guest episode on The X-Files (1993)). Despite a blood clot-induced stroke in 1990 that impaired his speech for six months, he ventured on and capped his enviable career on TV wielding funny but crass one-liners in the "Archie Bunker" mold on the long-running sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond (1996). A major Emmy blunder had Boyle earning seven nominations for his Frank Barrone character without a win, the only prime player on the show unhonored. He survived a heart attack while on the set of "Everybody Loves Raymond" in 1999, but managed to return full time for the remainder of the series' run through 2005.
Following a superb turn as Billy Bob Thornton's unrepentantly racist father in the sobering Oscar-winner Monster's Ball (2001), the remainder of his films were primarily situated in frivolous comedy fare such as The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002), The Santa Clause 2 (2002), Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004), and The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (2006), typically playing cranky curmudgeons. Boyle died of multiple myeloma (bone-marrow cancer) and heart disease at New York Presbyterian Hospital in 2006, and was survived by his wife Lorraine and two children. He was 71.- Actor
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Peter Coyote was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA as Robert Peter Cohon to Ruth (Fidler) and Morris Cohon, an investment banker. He is an actor, known for Bitter Moon (1992), Sphere (1998) and Patch Adams (1998). Coyote was previously married to Stefanie Pleet and Marilyn McCann.- Actor
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Peter Franzén is one of Finland's most accomplished actors and has had a successful career both nationally and internationally. He was born in Northern Finland, Kemi, close to the Arctic Circle in Lapland. Peter has been true to his craft as an actor for almost 30 years and he has worked in over 50 movies earning him three Jussi Awards (Finland's national film prize) and a total of seven nominations, also international Awards.
His film credits include for example: "The Gunman" opposite Sean Penn and Javier Bardem, Finnish controversial films "Heart of a Lion" and "Open Up To Me", which was nominated for the Nordic Council Film prize. Another Feature film "Purge" was Finland's official selection for the Academy Awards. Peter's most recent feature film is "Meander" (France 2020.)
TV-credits: Franzén enjoyed tremendously working in the "Vikings"-series (2016-2019, History Channel, HBO), portraying king Harald Finehair. "Working and living and in Ireland has been one of the absolute highlights of my career." His latest TV-work includes the new series "Wheel of Time" (2019-2020 Sony Pictures Television, Amazon Studios)
In 2013 Franzén made his feature directorial debut with his film "Above Dark Waters." The film opened in his native Finland and is based on a semi-autobiographical 2010 novel of the same name. Peter also adapted and wrote the Screenplay. The film was selected as the Finnish entry for the Golden Globes, in 2013.
Franzén recently published his third Novel, "The Broken Wheel Ranch" (Särkyneen pyörän karjatila). He lives in France.- Actor
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Peter Jerrod Macon is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Lt. Commander Bortus in the Fox/Hulu television series The Orville (2017-present). Macon was raised in Minneapolis and attended North Community High School, where he acted in school plays. His mother was a teacher, and his father was a truck driver. Macon later attended the San Francisco Art Institute and the Yale School of Drama, where he earned a master's degree in acting. Macon married Lucia Brawley, an actress who also attended Yale, in 2005. Former New York City Mayor David Dinkins officiated. He divorced Lucia several years later and in 2018 married Jacquelyn Woods.- Producer
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Peter Farrelly was born on 17 December 1956 in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for Green Book (2018), There's Something About Mary (1998) and Dumb and Dumber (1994). He has been married to Melinda Farrelly since 31 December 1996. They have two children.- Actor
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Peter Ustinov was a two-time Academy Award-winning film actor, director, writer, journalist and raconteur. He wrote and directed many acclaimed stage plays and led numerous international theatrical productions.
He was born Peter Alexander Freiherr von Ustinow on April 16, 1921 in Swiss Cottage, London, the son of Nadezhda Leontievna (née Benois) and Jona Freiherr von Ustinow. His father was of one-quarter Polish Jewish, one-half Russian, one-eighth Ethiopian, and one-eighth German descent, while his mother was of one-half Russian, one-quarter Italian, one-eighth French, and one-eighth German ancestry. Ustinov had ancestral connections to Russian nobility as well as to the Ethiopian Royal Family. His father, also known as "Klop Ustinov", was a pilot in the German Air Force during World War I. In 1919, Jona Freiherr von Ustinow joined his own mother and sister in St Petersburg, Russia, where he met his future wife, artist Nadia Benois, who worked for the Imperial Mariinsky Ballet and Opera House in St Petersburg.
In 1920, in a modest and discreet ceremony at a Russian-German church in St Petersburg, Ustinov's father married Nadia. In February 1921, when she was seven months pregnant with Peter, the couple emigrated from Russia in the aftermath of the Communist Revolution. Young Peter was brought up in a multilingual family. He was fluent in Russian, French, Italian and German, as well as English. He attended Westminster College (1934-37), took the drama and acting class under Michel St Denis at the London Theatre Studio (1937-39), and made his stage debut in 1938 at the Stage Theatre Club in Surrey. He wrote his first play at the age of 19. In 1939, he made his London stage debut in a revue sketch, then had regular performances with the Aylesbury Repertory Company. The following year, he made his film debut in Hullo, Fame! (1940).
From 1942-46, Ustinov served with the British Army's Royal Sussex Regiment. He was batman for David Niven, and the two became lifelong friends. Ustinov spent most of his service working with the Army Cinema Unit, where he was involved in making recruitment films, wrote plays and appeared in three films as an actor. At that time he co-wrote and acted in The Way Ahead (1944) (aka "The Immortal Battalion").
Ustinov had a stellar film career as actor, director, and writer. Among his numerous screen acting gems were his unparalleled, Academy Award-nominated interpretation of Nero in Quo Vadis (1951) and roles in Max Ophüls's masterpiece Lola Montès (1955), Barefoot in Athens (1966), The Comedians (1967), Robin Hood (1973) and Logan's Run (1976). He also wrote and directed such brilliant films as Billy Budd (1962), Lady L (1965) and Memed My Hawk (1984). He was awarded two Oscars for Best Supporting Actor, one for his role in Spartacus (1960) and one for his role in Topkapi (1964), and received two more Oscar nominations as an actor and writer. His career slowed down a bit in the 1970s, but made a comeback as Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile (1978) by director John Guillermin. In the 1980s, Ustinov recreated Poirot in several subsequent television movies and theatrical films, including Evil Under the Sun (1982) and Appointment with Death (1988), while his cinema work in the 1990s also includes his superb performance as Professor Gus Nikolais in George Miller's excellent dramatic film, Lorenzo's Oil (1992), a character partially inspired by Hugo Wolfgang Moser, a research scientist who had been director of the Neurogenetics Research Center at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University.
His expertise in dialectic and physical comedy made him a regular guest of talk show hosts and late-night comedians. His witty and multidimensional humor was legendary, and he later published a collection of his jokes and quotations summarizing his wide popularity as a raconteur. He was also an internationally acclaimed TV journalist. Ustinov covered over 100,000 miles and visited more than 30 Russian cities during the making of his well-received BBC television series Russia (1986).
In his autobiographies, "Dear Me" (1977) and "My Russia" (1996), Ustinov revealed his observations on his life, career, and his multicultural and multi-ethnic background. He wrote and directed numerous stage plays, successfully presenting them in several countries. His drama, "Photo Finish", was staged in New York, London and St. Petersburg, Russia, where Ustinov directed the acclaimed production, starring Elena Solovey and Petr Shelokhonov. Ustinov also served as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF and a president of WFM, a global citizens movement. Ustinov served as Rector of Dundee University for six years. He was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Royal Society of Arts in 1957 and was knighted in 1990.
From 1971 until his death in 2004, Ustinov's permanent residence was a château in Bursins, Vaud, Switzerland. He died of heart failure on March 28, 2004, in a clinic in Genolier, also in Vaud. His funeral service was held at Geneva's historic Cathedral of St. Pierre, and he was laid to rest in the village cemetery of Bursins. He was survived by three daughters (Tamara, Pavla, and Andrea) and one son (Igor). His epitaph may be gleaned from his comment, "I am an international citizen conceived in Russia, born in England, working in Hollywood, living in Switzerland, and touring the World".- Actor
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Peter Jacobson was born on 24 March 1965 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for House (2004), WeCrashed (2022) and Ray Donovan (2013). He has been married to Whitney Scott since 1 November 1997. They have one child.- Actor
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Peter Wilton Cushing was born on May 26, 1913 in Kenley, Surrey, England, to Nellie Maria (King) and George Edward Cushing, a quantity surveyor. He and his older brother David were raised first in Dulwich Village, a south London suburb, and then later back in Surrey. At an early age, Cushing was attracted to acting, inspired by his favorite aunt, who was a stage actress. While at school, Cushing pursued his acting interest in acting and also drawing, a talent he put to good use later in his first job as a government surveyor's assistant in Surrey. At this time, he also dabbled in local amateur theater until moving to London to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama on scholarship. He then performed in repertory theater in Worthing, deciding in 1939 to head for Hollywood, where he made his film debut in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939). Other Hollywood films included A Chump at Oxford (1940) with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Vigil in the Night (1940) and They Dare Not Love (1941). However, after a short stay, he returned to England by way of New York (making brief appearances on Broadway) and Canada. Back in his homeland, he contributed to the war effort during World War II by joining the Entertainment National Services Association.
After the war, he performed in the West End and had his big break appearing with Laurence Olivier in Hamlet (1948), in which Cushing's future partner-in-horror Christopher Lee had a bit part. Both actors also appeared in Moulin Rouge (1952) but did not meet until their later horror films. During the 1950s, Cushing became a familiar face on British television, appearing in numerous teleplays, such as 1984 (1954) and Beau Brummell (1954), until the end of the decade when he began his legendary association with Hammer Film Productions in its remakes of the 1930s Universal horror classics. His first Hammer roles included Dr. Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dr. Van Helsing in Horror of Dracula (1958), and Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959).
Cushing continued playing the roles of Drs. Frankenstein and Van Helsing, as well as taking on other horror characters, in Hammer films over the next 20 years. He also appeared in films for the other major horror producer of the time, Amicus Productions, including Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965) and its later horror anthologies, a couple of Dr. Who films (1965, 1966), I, Monster (1971), and others. By the mid-1970s, these companies had stopped production, but Cushing, firmly established as a horror star, continued in the genre for some time thereafter.
Perhaps his best-known appearance outside of horror films was as Grand Moff Tarkin in George Lucas' phenomenally successful science fiction film Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977). Biggles: Adventures in Time (1986) was Cushing's last film before his retirement, during which he made a few television appearances, wrote two autobiographies and pursued his hobbies of bird watching and painting. In 1989, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of his contributions to the acting profession in Britain and worldwide. Peter Cushing died at age 81 of prostate cancer on August 11, 1994.- Director
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Peter Weir was born on 21 August 1944 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He is a director and writer, known for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), The Way Back (2010) and Witness (1985). He has been married to Wendy Stites since 1966. They have two children.- Actor
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Peter Graves was born Peter Duesler Aurness on March 18, 1926 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While growing up in Minnesota, he excelled at sports and music (as a saxophonist), and by age 16, he was a radio announcer at WMIN in Minneapolis. After two years in the United States Army Air Force, he studied drama at the University of Minnesota and then headed to Hollywood, where he first appeared on television and later made his film debut in Rogue River (1951). Numerous film appearances followed, especially in Westerns. However, Graves is primarily recognized for his television work, particularly as Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible (1966). Peter Graves died of a heart attack on March 14, 2010, just four days before his 84th birthday.- Director
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Peter DeLuise was born on 6 November 1966 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a director and producer, known for Stargate SG-1 (1997), Stargate: Atlantis (2004) and 21 Jump Street (1987). He has been married to Anne Marie DeLuise since 7 June 2002. They have one child. He was previously married to Gina Nemo.- Actor
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Peter Henry Fonda was born in New York City, to legendary screen star Henry Fonda and Ontario, Canada-born New York socialite Frances Brokaw (born Frances Ford Seymour). He was the younger brother of actress and activist Jane Fonda and the father of actress Bridget Fonda.
Fonda made his professional stage debut on Broadway in 1961 in Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole, for which he received rave reviews from the New York Critics, and won the Daniel Blum Theater World Award and the New York Critics Circle Award for Best New Actor. He began his feature film career in 1963, playing the romantic lead in Tammy and the Doctor and joined the ensemble cast of the World War II saga, The Victors.
Shortly thereafter, Fonda began what would become a famous association with Roger Corman, starring in Wild Angels, as the ultra-cool, iron-fisted leader of a violent biker gang, opposite Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern, and Diane Ladd. Fonda starred in Corman's 1967 psychedelic film The Trip, also starring Dern and Susan Strasberg. His next project was the seminal 1969 anti-establishment film Easy Rider, which he produced and co-scripted, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
His acting credits included the feature films Outlaw Blues, an expose of the country music business; Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry; Race with the Devil; Robert Rossen's Lilith; Split Image; Robert Wise's Two People; and the cult films Love and a .45 and Nadja. He appeared in Grace of My Heart (directed by Alison Anders), and John Carpenter's Escape from L.A., starring Kurt Russell. He made a cameo appearance in Bodies, Heat & Motion, which starred his daughter Bridget Fonda.
Fonda won critical acclaim for his portrayal of Ulee Jackson, the taciturn beekeeper in the 1997 film Ulee's Gold, earning him both a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor and the New York Film Critics Award, as well as an Oscar nomination. Following this, he published his autobiography, Don't Tell Dad, and was then seen in the NBC movie The Tempest, for which he had been nominated for another Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Mini-Series. Fonda then appeared with Helen Mirren in the Showtime telefilm The Passion of Ayn Rand, where he won the Golden Globe for outstanding supporting actor in a mini-series or movie made for television and was nominated for both an Emmy and SAG Award. He co-starred in Steven Soderbergh's 1997 film The Limey. Following this, he appeared in Thomas and the Magic Railroad for director Britt Allcroft, starring Alec Baldwin.
Fonda directed his first feature film, The Hired Hand, in 1971. A critically acclaimed western in which he also starred, the film debuted with a restored version at the 2001 Venice Film Festival; it then screened at the Toronto Film Festival before reopening in theaters in 2003. Other directing credits include the science fiction feature Idaho Transfer, starring as a gambler who wins Brooke Shields in a poker game.
Fonda co-starred in HBO's The Laramie Project, based on the true story of openly gay college student Matthew Shepard, killed in an act of senseless violence and cruelty, which attracted national attention. Fonda starred in The Maldonado Miracle, directed by Salma Hayek for Showtime Networks, and was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for his role. Fonda also starred opposite Kris Kristofferson in Wooly Boys, which was released in March 2004, and the television drama Back When We Were Grownups, opposite Blythe Danner and Faye Dunaway. Fonda was seen in Soderbergh's Ocean's Twelve and appeared in Mark Steven Johnson's Ghost Rider, opposite Nicolas Cage.
Fonda's last projects included director Ron Maxwell's Civil War-era drama Copperhead, alongside Billy Campbell and Angus MacFadyen, The Ultimate Gift directed by Michael Landon Jr., and John McNaughton's The Harvest, with Samantha Morton and Michael Shannon.
Peter Fonda died on August 16, 2019, in Los Angeles.- Actor
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Peter Lorre was born László Löwenstein in Rózsahegy in the Slovak area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the son of Hungarian Jewish parents. He learned both Hungarian and German languages from birth, and was educated in elementary and secondary schools in the Austria-Hungary capitol Vienna, but did not complete. As a youth he ran away from home, first working as a bank clerk, and after stage training in Vienna, Austria, made his acting debut at age 17 in 1922 in Zurich, Switzerland. He traveled for several years acting on stage throughout his home region, Vienna, Berlin, and Zurich, including working with Bertolt Brecht, until Fritz Lang cast him in a starring role as the psychopathic child killer in the German film M (1931).
After several more films in Germany, including a couple roles for which he learned to speak French, Lorre left as the Nazis came to power, going first to Paris where he made one film, then London where Alfred Hitchcock cast him as a creepy villain in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), where he learned his lines phonetically, and finally arrived in Hollywood in 1935. In his first two roles there he starred as a mad scientist in Mad Love (1935) directed by recent fellow-expatriate Karl Freund, and the leading part of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (1935), by another expatriate German director Josef von Sternberg, a successful movie made at Lorre's own suggestion. He returned to England for a role in another Hitchcock film, Secret Agent (1936), then back to the US for a few more films before checking into a rehab facility to cure himself of a morphine addiction.
After shaking his addiction, in order to get any kind of acting work, Lorre reluctantly accepted the starring part as the Japanese secret agent in Thank You, Mr. Moto (1937), wearing makeup to alter his already very round eyes for the part. He ended up committed to repeating the role for eight more "Mr. Moto" movies over the next two years.
Lorre played numerous memorable villain roles, spy characters, comedic roles, and even a romantic type, throughout the 1940s, beginning with his graduation from 30s B-pictures The Maltese Falcon (1941). Among his most famous films, Casablanca (1942), and a comedic role in the Broadway hit film Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).
After the war, between 1946 and '49 Lorre concentrated largely on radio and the stage, while continuing to appear in movies. In Autumn 1950 he traveled to West Gemany where he wrote, directed and starred in the critically acclaimed but generally unknown German-language film The Lost Man (1951), adapted from Lorre's own novel.
Lorre returned to the US in 1952, somewhat heavier in stature, where he used his abilities as a stage actor appearing in many live television productions throughout the 50s, including the first James Bond adaptation Casino Royale (1954), broadcast just a few months after Ian Fleming had published that first Bond novel. In that decade, Lorre had various roles, often to type but also as comedic caricatures of himself, in many episodes of TV series, and variety shows, though he continued to work in motion pictures, including the Academy Award winning Around the World in 80 Days (1956), and a stellar role as a clown in The Big Circus (1959).
In the late 50s and early 1960s he worked in several low-budget films, with producer-director Roger Corman, and producer-writer-director Irwin Allen, including the aforementioned The Big Circus and two adventurous Disney movies with Allen. He died from a stroke the year he made his last movie, playing a stooge in Jerry Lewis' The Patsy (1964).- Actor
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Peter Scolari was born on 12 September 1955 in New Rochelle, New York, USA. He was an actor and director, known for Newhart (1982), Girls (2012) and That Thing You Do! (1996). He was married to Tracy Shayne, Cathy Trien, Debra Steagall and Lisa Kretzschmar. He died on 22 October 2021 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.- Actor
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Peter Dante was born on 16 December 1968 in West Hartford, Connecticut, USA. He is an actor, known for Grandma's Boy (2006), Mr. Deeds (2002) and The Waterboy (1998).- Actor
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Peter Riegert was born on 11 April 1947 in New York City, New York, USA. He is an actor and director, known for The Mask (1994), National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) and Local Hero (1983).- Actor
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Peter Gadiot was born in Haywards Heath, in the United Kingdom. He grew up in East Grinstead, West Sussex, England.
He trained at the prestigious Drama Centre London.
In addition to acting on stage and screen he has written and directed several short films and is an active campaigner against human trafficking, actually rowing the Atlantic Ocean in support of his cause.- Actor
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Peter Ostrum was born on 1 November 1957 in Dallas, Texas, USA. He is an actor, known for Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), Sicko (2007) and Remembering Gene Wilder (2023). He has been married to Loretta Lepkowski since 1987. They have two children.- Peter Mensah has been doing martial arts since he was 6 years old, growing up in St. Albans, England, just north of London. A former engineer, Mensah came to Canada 11 years ago. He'd worked for British Gas developing gas fields at Morecambe Bay and had done theatre in school. He comes from an academic family. His father, an architect, relocated with his mother to their native Ghana. He only has two younger sisters. Mensah emigrated from Britain to see the world and it was a toss up whether his destination would be Canada or Australia. The paperwork for Canada came through first.
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Peter Onorati was born and raised in Boonton, New Jersey. He attended college at Lycoming College, where he received his B.A. degree in Business Administration. He was an NCAA all-conference wide receiver, and signed up to play in the World Football League, which quickly collapsed. He then enrolled in Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he received an MBA. He worked for Ford Motor Company and McCall's magazines. He started in comedy, and left the business world for acting. He now lives in Los Angeles, appearing in both films and television shows. He is married to writer Jeanette Collins, and they have three sons.- Actor
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Peter Firth was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in 1953. His parents owned the Waterloo Inn pub in Pudsey, Leeds and he attended Hanson Grammar School in Bradford. Firth took weekend classes at the Bradford Playhouse near his Pudsey home and by his mid-teens was playing in "Camelot" at the Bradford Alhambra. Leaving school at 16, he became a major child star in television series such as "The Double Deckers," which was shot at a number of film studios in the UK. He made his film debut at the age of 18 in Franco Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972). In July 1973 he received his big break by winning the leading role of disturbed adolescent Alan Strang in Peter Shaffer's play "Equus," which was performed by the National Theatre at the Old Vic in London. In October 1974, the play opened on Broadway to sensational reviews, with Firth playing opposite Anthony Hopkins as the middle-aged Dr. Martin Dysart. Firth returned to the play at the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway with Richard Burton as Dysart, and then starred in several other plays by the National Theatre including versions of "Romeo and Juliet" (as Romeo) and "Spring Awakening." After taking leading roles in several films such as Aces High (1976) and Joseph Andrews (1977), Firth reprised the role of Alan Strang in the film version of Equus (1977), directed by Sidney Lumet and again co-starring with Burton. Receiving a Bafta Award and an Academy Award nomination, Firth next played Angel Clare in Roman Polanski's Tess (1979). In 1981, he replaced Simon Callow as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Peter Shaffer's play "Amadeus" on Broadway, co-starring with Sir Ian McKellen. He gave other notable performances as a Russian sailor in the kitchen sink drama Letter to Brezhnev (1985), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Shadowlands (1993) and as a sinister theatre manager in An Awfully Big Adventure (1995) with Hugh Grant. In 1994, he returned to British television with a major role in the hugely popular series Heartbeat (1992). He is married with four children and is good friends with his Equus (1977) co-star Jenny Agutter, who also starred with him in MI-5 (2002). He has continued to appear in major movies, including Amistad (1997) and Pearl Harbor (2001).- Actor
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Peter Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe but born in Kingston, New York. He is the son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis, Herma (Robinson) and Borislav Bogdanovich, a painter and pianist. His father was a Serbian Orthodox Christian, and his mother was from a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. Peter originally was an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft with legendary acting teacher Stella Adler and appearing on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s he achieved notoriety for programming movies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, sometimes seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich prominently showcased the work of American directors such as John Ford, about whom he subsequently wrote a book based on the notes he had produced for the MOMA retrospective of the director, and the then-underappreciated Howard Hawks. Bogdanovich also brought attention to such forgotten pioneers of American cinema as Allan Dwan.
Bogdanovich was influenced by the French critics of the 1950s who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema, especially critic-turned-director François Truffaut. Before becoming a director himself, he built his reputation as a film writer with articles in Esquire Magazine. In 1968, following the example of Cahiers du Cinema critics Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer who had created the Nouvelle Vague ("New Wave") by making their own films, Bogdanovich became a director. Working for low-budget schlock-meister Roger Corman, Bogdanovich directed the critically praised Targets (1968) and the not-so-critically praised Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), a film best forgotten.
Turning back to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a lifelong friendship with the legendary Orson Welles while interviewing him on the set of Mike Nichols' film adaptation of Catch-22 (1970) from the novel by Joseph Heller. Subsequently, Bogdanovich has played a major role in elucidating Welles and his career with his writings on the great actor-director, most notably his book "This is Orson Welles" (1992). He has steadily produced invaluable books about the cinema, especially "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors," an indispensable tome that establishes Bogdanovich, along with Kevin Brownlow, as one of the premier English-language chroniclers of cinema.
The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by a critics as a Wellesian wunderkind when his most famous film, The Last Picture Show (1971) was released. The film received eight Academy Award nominations, including Bogdanovich as Best Director, and won two of them, for Cloris Leachman and "John Ford Stock Company" veteran Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich, who had cast 19-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film, fell in love with the young beauty, an affair that eventually led to his divorce from the film's set designer Polly Platt, his longtime artistic collaborator and the mother of his two children.
Bogdanovich followed up The Last Picture Show (1971) with a major hit, What's Up, Doc? (1972), a screwball comedy heavily indebted to Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), starring Barbra Streisand and 'Ryan O'Neal'. Despite his reliance on homage to bygone cinema, Bogdanovich had solidified his status as one of a new breed of A-list directors that included Academy Award winners Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, with whom he formed The Directors Company. The Directors Company was a generous production deal with Paramount Pictures that essentially gave the directors carte blanche if they kept within strict budget limitations. It was through this entity that Bogdanovich's next big hit, the critically praised Paper Moon (1973), was produced.
Paper Moon (1973), a Depression-era comedy starring Ryan O'Neal that won his ten-year-old daughter Tatum O'Neal an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, proved to be the highwater mark of Bogdanovich's career. Forced to share the profits with his fellow directors, Bogdanovich became dissatisfied with the arrangement. The Directors Company subsequently produced only two more films, Francis Ford Coppola's critically acclaimed The Conversation (1974) which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1974 and garnered Coppola an Oscar nod for Best Director, and Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller (1974), a film that had a quite different critical reception.
An adaptation of the Henry James novella, Daisy Miller (1974) spelled the beginning of the end of Bogdanovich's career as a popular, critically acclaimed director. The film, which starred Bogdanovich's lover Cybill Shepherd as the title character, was savaged by critics and was a flop at the box office. Bogdanovich's follow-up, At Long Last Love (1975), a filming of the Cole Porter musical starring Cybill Shepherd, was derided by some critics as one of the worst films ever made, noted as such in Harry Medved and Michael Medved's book "The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and Winners, the Worst Achievements in Hollywood History" (1980). The film also was a box office bomb despite featuring Burt Reynolds, a hotly burning star who would achieve super-nova status at the end of the 1970s.
Bogdanovich insisted on filming the musical numbers for At Long Last Love (1975) live, a process not used since the early days of the talkies, when sound engineer Douglas Shearer developed lip-synching at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The decision was widely ridiculed, as none of the leading actors were known for their singing abilities (Bogdanovich himself had produced a critically panned album of Cybill Shepherd singing Cole Porter songs in 1974). The public perception of Bogdanovich became that of an arrogant director hamstrung by his own hubris.
Trying to recapture the lightning in the bottle that was his early success, Bogdanovich once again turned to the past, his own and that of cinema, with Nickelodeon (1976). The film, a comedy recounting the earliest days of the motion picture industry, reunited Ryan O'Neal and 'Tatum O'Neal' from his last hit, Paper Moon (1973) with Burt Reynolds. Counseled not to use the unpopular (with both audiences and critics) Cybill Shepherd in the film, Bogdanovich instead used newcomer Jane Hitchcock as the film's ingénue. Unfortunately, the magic of Paper Moon (1973) was not be repeated and the film died at the box office. Jane Hitchcock, Bogdanovich's discovery, would make only one more film before calling it quits.
After a three-year hiatus, Bogdanovich returned with the critically and financially underwhelming Saint Jack (1979) for Hugh Hefner's Playboy Productions Inc. Bogdanovich's long affair with Cybill Shepherd had ended in 1978, but the production deal making Hugh Hefner the film's producer was part of the settlement of a lawsuit Shepherd had filed against Hefner for publishing nude photos of her pirated from a print of The Last Picture Show (1971) in Playboy Magazine. Bogdanovich then launched the film that would be his career Waterloo, They All Laughed (1981), a low-budget ensemble comedy starring Audrey Hepburn and the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten. During the filming of the picture, Bogdanovich fell in love with Stratten, who was married to an emotionally unstable hustler, Paul Snider, who relied on her financially. Stratten moved in with Bogdanovich, and when she told Snider she was leaving him, he shot and killed her, then committed suicide.
They All Laughed (1981) could not attract a distributor due to the negative publicity surrounding the Stratten murder, despite it being one of the few films made by the legendary Audrey Hepburn after her provisional retirement in 1967 (the film would prove to be Hepburn's last starring role in a theatrically released motion picture). The heartbroken Bogdanovich bought the rights to the negative so that it would be seen by the public, but the film had a limited release, garnered weak reviews and cost Bogdanovich millions of dollars, driving the emotionally devastated director into bankruptcy.
Bogdanovich turned back to his first avocation, writing, to pen a memoir of his dead love, "The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten (1960-1980)" that was published in 1984. The book was a riposte to Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a Playmate" article written for The Village Voice that had won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize. Carpenter had lambasted Bogdanovich and Hugh Hefner, claiming that Stratten was as much a victim of them as she was of Paul Snider. The article served as the basis of Bob Fosse's film Star 80 (1983), in which Bogdanovich was portrayed as the fictional director "Aram Nicholas".
Bogdanovich's career as a noted director was over, and though he achieved modest success with Mask (1985), his sequel to his greatest success The Last Picture Show (1971), Texasville (1990), was a critical and box office disappointment. He directed two more theatrical films in 1992 and 1993, but their failure kept him off the big screen until 2001's The Cat's Meow (2001). Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the alleged murder of director Thomas H. Ince by Welles' bete noir William Randolph Hearst, The Cat's Meow (2001) was a modest critical success but a flop at the box office. In addition to helming some television movies, Bogdanovich has returned to acting, with a recurring guest role on the cable television series The Sopranos (1999) as Dr. Jennifer Melfi's analyst.
Bogdanovich's personal reputation suffered from gossip about his 13-year marriage to Dorothy Stratten's 19-year-old-kid sister Louise Stratten, who was 29 years his junior. Some gossip held that Bogdanovich's behavior was akin to that of the James Stewart character in Alfred Hitchcock's necrophiliac masterpiece Vertigo (1958), with the director trying to remold Stratten into the image of her late sister. The marriage ended in divorce in 2001.
Now in his early eighties, Bogdanovich has arguably imitated his hero Orson Welles, but in an unintended fashion, as filmmaker who never regained the acclaim bestowed on their first major success. However, unlike the widely acclaimed master Welles, the orbit of Bogdanovich's reputation has never recovered from the apogee it reached briefly in the early 1970s.
There has been speculation that Peter Bogdanovich's ruin as a director was guaranteed when he ditched his wife and artistic collaborator Polly Platt for Cybill Shepherd. Platt had worked with Bogdanovich on all his early successes, and some critics believe that the controlling artistic consciousness on The Last Picture Show (1971) was Platt's. Parting company with Platt after Paper Moon (1973), Bogdanovich promptly slipped from the heights of a wunderkind to a has-been pursuing epic folly, as evidenced by Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975).
In 1998 the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress named The Last Picture Show (1971) to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to the most culturally significant films.- Peter Scanavino is know for his work as A.D.A Sonny Carisi JR. on Law and Order: SVU (NBC).
Other selected TV & Film work includes: Social Distance (NETFLIX), The Cold Lands, Mutual Friends, The Leftovers (HBO), Banshee (CINEMAX), and The Good Wife (CBS).
Peter made his Broadway debut in 2006 in the TONY Nominated play, Shining City, Directed by Robert Falls. Other theater work includes: Boys' Life, Suburbia, Rainbow Kiss and David Henry Hwang's play, Yellow Face.
In 2010, Peter took time away from acting to study Culinary Arts at The French Culinary Institute in NYC. He worked briefly in the kitchen of Dan Barbers Michelin starred restaurant, Blue Hill in Greenwich Village. Peter lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife and children. - Actor
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A true character actor in the best sense of the word, offbeat British thespian Peter Vaughan's hefty frame could appear intimidating or benevolent; his mere presence menacing or avuncular. Adept at playing both sides of the law, his characters usually possessed a strange, somewhat wary countenance that seemed to keep his audience slightly off balance. This veteran actor has been a stalwart presence for nearly fifty years. Born Peter Ohm in 1923, he began on the stage and didn't enter films until 1959, well into his thirties.
Married in 1952 to rising actress Billie Whitelaw, Peter was primarily in the background at first, offering a cheapjack gallery of thugs, unsmiling cops, and foreign agents in movies. An easily unsympathetic bloke, he played unbilled policemen in his first two films, then slowly gravitated up the credits list. He appeared as the chief of police in the spy drama The Devil's Agent (1962), which also featured his wife, and then gained a bit more attention in a prime part as an offbeat insurance investigator in the B movie Smokescreen (1964), a role that propelled him into the higher ranks. Noticeably shady roles came with playing Tallulah Bankhead's seedy handyman who meets a fatal end in the Gothic horror Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) [aka Die! Die! My Darling!]; his villainous roles in the spy thrillers The Naked Runner (1967) opposite Frank Sinatra and The Man Outside (1967); a German thug in A Twist of Sand (1968); and Sgt. Walker in The Bofors Gun (1968).
Divorced from Whitelaw in 1966, he later married actress Lillias Walker, who had roles in a couple of his pictures: Malachi's Cove (1973) and Intimate Reflections (1975). TV became a large source of income for Vaughan in the 1970s, particularly in his role of Grouty in Porridge (1974) on both the large and small screen, and his quirky demeanor fitted like a glove for bizarre director Terry Gilliam, who cast him as the Ogre in Time Bandits (1981) and then as Mr. Helpman in Brazil (1985). For the past few decades he has maintained a healthy balance between film (including standout roles in Zulu Dawn (1979), The Remains of the Day (1993) and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004)) and TV mini-movies, both contemporary and period. He was still performing into his 90s: his final role was Maester Aemon Targaryen in HBO's Game of Thrones (2011).
He died at age 93 on December 6, 2016, in Sussex, England.- Actor
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Peter Mayhew was born on May 19, 1944 in Barnes, London, England, to Constance Elizabeth (Yeates) and Walter Henry Mayhew. Later resident in Texas, this former resident of Yorkshire, England, was working as a hospital attendant at the King's College Hospital in London when film producer Charles H. Schneer saw his photo, literally standing above the crowd around him. Schneer cast him in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), Ray Harryhausen's special effects film.
A year later, he was offered another role. Mayhew was told it was for a big hairy beast. It was the role of Chewbacca, the faithful 200 year-old Wookiee in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) and his life was changed forever. Following the original Star Wars trilogy, he made several television commercials in the Wookiee costume.
In 1997, the 20th-anniversary celebrations of Star Wars were announced with the release of the "Special Edition" and all the conventions started. He was active on the "Star Wars" convention circuit where he signed autographs. He wrote two books, "Growing Up Giant" and "My Favorite Giant", and founded a non-profit 501(c)3 charity organization called "The Peter Mayhew Foundation".- Actor
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Outerbridge, together with two older sisters and two older brothers, grew up in Toronto, Ontario. While his father practiced law, his mother studied piano at the Royal Conservatory of Music. He comes from a family of artists, as his uncle (though not by blood) was opera singer Jon Vickers, and his cousin Billy is a regular at Stratford. In Outerbridge's own words, with his father being a trial lawyer, there were a lot of theatrics on his paternal side as well.
Outerbridge began his acting career after high school, when he enrolled at the University of Victoria to study acting. After graduating in 1988 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, he co-founded the theatre group Way Off Broadway and toured Canada with them for four years. In the early '90s, he started out in television, and his early credits include shows such as 21 Jump Street or The Commish. First feature films include Paris, France and Cool Runnings.
His talent was recognized early on, when roles in Marine Life or Chasing Cain earned him award nominations such as Genie or Gemini Awards, and more roles in TV shows, movies and features films followed. He has worked steadily ever since, on a large variety of projects. His most notable roles include young student Matt in the critically acclaimed movie Kissed, who falls in love with a necrophiliac. Also of note is his performance playing the transsexual Judy in Better Than Chocolate, or his downright creepy portrayal of sexual assailant Theodore Gray in the thriller The Rendering.
Ever since the early 90's, Outerbridge has been a steady presence not only on the silver screen but also on TV. Among many others, he played three different characters on the science fiction show The Outer Limits, had a recurring role in season three of Chris Carter's mystery spin-off Millennium, played the lead in three feature-length episodes of the 2004 version of The Murdoch Mysteries, and scored his biggest lead role to date in the same year, when he was cast as headstrong scientist David Sandström in The Movie Network's ReGenesis. The science-themed show successfully aired for four years and has been broadcast internationally in over 20 countries. ReGenesis has been nominated for several Gemini awards over the years.
As more recent projects go, Outerbridge has portrayed one of Canada's political founding fathers George Brown in the TV period piece John A.: Birth of a Country, which earned him the 2013 Canadian Screen Award in the category 'Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Supporting Role in a Dramatic Program or Series'. He's had a recurring role in The CW's modern spy reboot Nikita, and starred as special guest star on Global TV's World War II period drama Bomb Girls. If you keep an eye out, you will also be able to catch his occasional guest spots on shows such as Suits and The Listener, and the upcoming Dark Rising: Warrior of Worlds.
In 2000, Peter Outerbridge married Canadian actress Tammy Isbell, with whom he has co-starred on more than one occasion, among them The Murdoch Mysteries (2004) and ReGenesis (2004). It is said the two of them met in 1994 while shooting an episode of The Outer Limits (1995) together, in which they fittingly played a young couple. In 2004, twins Thomas and Samuel were born. Outerbridge and his family live in Toronto.- Actor
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Peter Strauss has focused on theater for the last few years. He recently performed the role of Leonardo da Vinci in "Divine Rivalry" at Hartford Stage, Ben Bradlee in "Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers" for the New York Theater Workshop, Sigmund Freud in "Sabina" for Primary Stages and in "The Outgoing Tide" as an Alzheimer's patient for the Delaware Theater and Primary Stages in NY. Recent film roles are Warner Brothers' feature "License to Wed" with Robin Williams and as the U.S. President in Columbia's "XXX: State of the Union," and two independent films "Drawing Home" and "Sugar Baby." He completed the English voiceover for Albert Lamorisse's 1953 French film "White Mane" and as the narrator for Tracey Ullman's "State of the Union" series for Showtime.
Strauss is well known for his long list of starring roles in motion pictures-for-television, including "The Jericho Mile" for which he won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Special. Strauss has also received Emmy Award nominations for his roles in the mini-series "Rich Man, Poor Man" and "Masada" as well as five Golden Globe Nominations.
Strauss was born in New York City and grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where he was introduced to the theatre via the Croton Shakespeare Festival. His summers were spent with stock companies including the Pocono Playhouse in Pennsylvania and Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine. He attended the Hackley School for Boys in Tarrytown, New York and graduated from Northwestern University in 1969, committed to an acting career.
He made his Broadway debut in Tom Griffin's "Einstein and the Polar Bear" in 1981. His other theatrical credits include the plays "The Dance Next Door", "The Mind with the Dirty Man" and "The Trial of the Catonsville Nine" at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and "A Cry of Players" at Baltimore's Center Stage.
His feature film credits include Soldier Blue (1970), The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1972), The Last Tycoon (1976), The Secret of NIMH (1982), Flight of Black Angel (1991) and Nick of Time (1995).
Strauss' many television credits include starring in the TV films Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy (1977), Angel on My Shoulder (1980), A Whale for the Killing (1981), Heart of Steel (1983), Under Siege (1986), _ Penalty Phase (1986) (TV), Proud Men (1987), 83 Hours 'Til Dawn (1990), Fugitive Among Us (1992), Men Don't Tell (1993), Thicker Than Blood (1994), Reunion (1980), The Yearling (1994), In the Lake of the Woods (1996), My Father's Shadow: The Sam Sheppard Story (1998), A Father's Choice (2000) and Murder on the Orient Express (2001), as well as the miniseries Tender Is the Night (1985), Kane & Abel (1985), Brotherhood of the Rose (1989), Trial: The Price of Passion (1992) and Texas Justice (1995). His latest mini-series appearances were Seasons of Love (1999), with Rachel Ward and Hume Cronyn, (which he executive-produced) and as La Hire in the CBS four-hour mini-series Joan of Arc (2005).
Strauss starred for one season in the CBS drama series Moloney (1996) and the PAX drama series Body & Soul (2002).
Strauss is married to actress Rachel Ticotin and lives in Ojai, California, where he also operates a commercial citrus enterprise that produces 440 tons of citrus per year.- Director
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Peter Hyams was born in New York on July 26, 1943, and attended Hunter College Elementary School. He studied art and music at the Art Students League and the High School of Music and Art as well as at Syracuse University, where he majored in music and art. Before he became a CBS News news anchor in New York at the age of 21 he had been a drummer with such important jazz musicians as Bill Evans and Maynard Ferguson and had played at Birdland, Small's Paradise and the Newport Jazz Festival. His paintings have hung in such prestigious galleries as the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hyams brought to film direction essential elements of music and painting. From music comes a special sensitivity to structure and rhythm; from painting a heightened sense of light and color. These important insights help Hyams to achieve his goal of creating films which "reach people's emotions, not their minds." Peter Hyams is 6'1" and lives in Brentwood, California, with his wife George-Ann. He has three sons: Chris, John and Nick.