David Russell Strathairn (born January 26, 1949)
is an American actor.
Life
Strathairn
was born in San Francisco
, California
, the son of a physician. He has Scottish ancestry through his
paternal grandfather, Thomas Scott Strathairn (a native of Crieff
, Perthshire
), and Native
Hawaiian ancestry through his paternal grandmother, Lei.
Strathairn
attended Redwood High School
in Larkspur, California
and graduated from Williams College in Williamstown
, Massachusetts
in 1970. He studied at the Ringling
Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Venice
, Florida
and briefly
worked as a clown in a traveling circus.
He is married to Logan Goodman Strathairn, a
nurse.
They have two sons and live in the
mid-Hudson Valley area of upstate New
York, near Poughkeepsie
. Their son Tay, an actor and musician who
plays jazz piano, appeared in
John
Sayles' films
Eight Men
Out (as Eddie Cicotte) and
Lone Star (as Young Sam).
Career
Strathairn was Academy Award-nominated for his portrayal of
CBS newsman
Edward
R. Murrow in the
biopic Good
Night, and Good Luck, which explored Murrow's clash with
Senator
Joseph McCarthy over
McCarthy's Communist "
witch-hunt" in the
1950s. Strathairn received
Best Actor Golden Globe,
Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and
Academy Award nominations for his
performance. Other notable film roles include his portrayals of the
title character in
Harrison's Flowers (
2000); the wisecracking blind techie in
Sneakers (
1992);
Joe St. George in
Dolores
Claiborne (1995);
Theseus, Duke of
Athens, in the
1999 version of
A Midsummer Night's
Dream; and corrupt baseball player
Eddie Cicotte in
1988's
Eight Men Out.
Strathairn
is often regarded as a character
actor, appearing in supporting roles in many independent and
Hollywood
films. In this capacity, he has co-starred
in
Twisted as
Ashley Judd's psychiatrist; in
The River Wild as
Meryl Streep's husband; as
Tom Cruise's jailbird brother in
The Firm; and as
Kim Basinger's pimp in
L.A. Confidential.
He has worked frequently with his Williams College classmate and
director John
Sayles, beginning with his film debut in
Return of the Secaucus 7, and
including the films
Passion
Fish,
Matewan,
Limbo and
City of Hope, for which Strathairn
won the
Independent Spirit
Award. Alongside Sayles, he played one of the Men in Black in
the 1983 film
The
Brother from Another Planet Several years later,
Strathairn created the role of
Edwin
Booth with
Maryann Plunkett in
a workshop production of
Booth! A House Divided,
by W. Stuart McDowell, at the Players in New York City.
Strathairn's television work includes a wide range of roles:
"Moss", the bookselling nebbish on the critically-acclaimed
The Days and
Nights of Molly Dodd; Captain Keller, the father of
Helen Keller in the 2000 remake of
The Miracle Worker; and
a far-out (both figuratively and literally) televangelist in
Paradise, the pilot
episode for a TV series on
Showtime that
was not successful. Strathairn also had a recurring role on the hit
TV drama
The Sopranos.
Strathairn also starred in the second season episode,
Out Where
the Buses Don't run, in
Miami
Vice
Among
Strathairn's recent films are: We
Are...Marshall, a 2006 film about the rebirth of Marshall
University
's football program after the 1970 plane crash that
killed most of the team's members; and Hereafter, set in the aftermath
of the 2004 Sumatran
tsunami
, directed by Michael Patwin (in
pre-production). In 2006 he did a campaign ad for then
congressional candidate (now, senator-appointee)
Kirsten Gillibrand. He reprised his role
as Edward R. Murrow in a speech similar to the one given in the
film
Good Night, and Good
Luck but altered to reference Gillibrand's opponent
John Sweeney.
Strathairn plays the lead role opposite Andrew Walker in the 2007
independent film, "
Steel Toes", a film by
David Gow (writer/co-director/producer)and
Mark Adam (co-director/DOP/editor).
The film is based on Gow's stage play
"Cherry Docs", in which Strathairn starred at its American premiere
at the Wilma
Theatre
in Philadelphia
.
Strathairn also played a lead role opposite
Matt Damon in the summer 2007 film
The Bourne Ultimatum and
appeared in
Paramount Pictures'
children's film
The
Spiderwick Chronicles (2008) as Arthur Spiderwick.
Strathairn appeared in the
American Experience PBS
anthology series documentary, The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer,
(2009) a biography of the physicist.
Strathairn plays William Flynn in the lead role of "No God, No
Master". Flynn (Strathairn) is an F.B.I. agent dealing with
anarchism set in 1920's New York City. His constant struggles with
the Red Scare set him into a universe of power, greed and
corruption, forcing him to confront the very principles and values
that make him an American. This film also features a new child
star, Daniel Feltman, as a young boy in the movie.
Theater
Strathairn is an accomplished stage actor and has performed over
thirty theatrical roles. Most recently, he performed several roles
in stage plays by 2005 Nobel Laureate
Harold Pinter.
He played Stanley in two consecutive
New
York
Classic Stage
Company (CSC) productions of Pinter's 1957 play The Birthday Party, directed
by Carey Perloff (since 1992 artistic
director of the American Conservatory Theatre
), in 1988 and 1989; the dual roles of prison
Officer and Prisoner in Pinter's 1989 play Mountain Language (in a double bill
with the second CSC Rep production of The Birthday Party);
Kerner, in Tom Stoppard's Hapgood (1994); and Devlin, opposite Lindsay Duncan's Rebecca, in Pinter's 1996
two-hander Ashes to
Ashes in the 1999 New York premiere by the Roundabout Theatre
Company.
Political involvement
Strathairn narrated a biographical video that was aired to
introduce
Barack Obama prior to his
acceptance speech at the
2008 Democratic National
Convention.
Filmography
References
- "David Strathairn Biography (1949-)", Film
Reference.com, accessed August 7, 2007.
- Secret Scottish Roots Of Best Actor Nominee David -
The Sunday Mail
- "David Strathairn Finds the Spotlight: David
Strathairn Is the Kind of Actor You Know by Face, If Not by Name,
But an Oscar Nomination on Tuesday for Best Actor Could Change All
That", BBC.co.uk
January 26,
2006, Entertainment, accessed
August 7,
2007. (Includes video
clip.)
- Full biography of "David Strathairn", Yahoo! Movies, Copyright © 2007, accessed
August 7,
2007.
- History of the Bristol Riverside Theatre, at
http://www.brtstage.org/history2.html
- , accessed August
7, 2007.
- Performance revs. by Susan Hollis Merritt, "The Birthday Party"
(CSC Repertory Theatre, New York, 17
April 1988, 12 Apr. 1988–22 May 1988) and Bernard Dukore, "The
Birthday Party" (CSC Repertory Theatre, New York, April–May 1988),
The Pinter Review 2.1 (1988): 66-70; 71-73. (Cover
photograph features Strathairn in his role as Stanley.)
- 1989 CSC production, HaroldPinter.org
(official site), accessed August 7, 2007.
- Susan Hollis Merritt, "A Conversation with Carey Perloff,
Bill Moor,
Peter
Riegert, Jean Stapleton, and David Strathairn: After
Matinee of Mountain Language and
The Birthday Party by
CSC Repertory Ltd., Bruno's, New York,
12 Nov. 1989", The Pinter Review: Annual Essays 1989 (TPR)
(Tampa: U of Tampa P, 1989) 59-84 (interview); cf. performance rev.
by Francis Gillen, "Mountain Language, The
Birthday Party" TPR 93-97. (Cover photograph features
Strathairn and Stapleton in their roles as a prison Officer and the
Elderly Woman in Mountain Language; his other role, the
Prisoner, is the Elderly Woman's son.)
- Performance revs. by Katherine H. Burkman, "Ashes to
Ashes in New York: Roundabout Theatre Company at the
Gramercy Theatre, March 30, 1999" and by Susan Hollis Merritt,
"Ashes to Ashes in New York: Roundabout Theatre Company,
Gramercy Theatre, New York, 3 April 1999", The Pinter Review:
Collected Essays 1997 and 1998 (Tampa: U of Tampa P, 1999)
154-59.
- Greeley Tribune (2008). Obama uses language of hope, calls for action.
Retrieved August 29, 2008.
External links
Interviews
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