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Wallace Shawn (born November 12, 1943) is an American actor and writer. Ubiquitous on film and television, where he is usually cast in comic roles, he has pursued a parallel career as a playwright whose work is often dark, politically charged and controversial. He is known for talking with a lisp, and his humourous, high pitched, and somewhat obnoxious, voice.

Biography

Shawn was born in New York City, where he still lives. He is the son of William Shawn, longtime editor of The New Yorker, and journalist Cecille Lyon Shawn; his brother Allen is a composer.

Shawn attended The Putney School (a liberal arts high school in Putney, VT), and then graduated with a B.A. in history from Harvard University, and studied economics and philosophy at Oxford, where he originally intended to become a diplomat; he also traveled to India as an English teacher. Since 1979, he has primarily made a living as an actor.

Shawn's longtime companion is the writer Deborah Eisenberg.

Acting roles

His involvement with theater began in 1970 when he met Andre Gregory, who has directed several of his plays. As a stage actor, he has appeared mostly in his own plays, as well as several other projects with Gregory.

He made his film debut playing Diane Keaton's ex-husband in Woody Allen's Manhattan in 1979, in which Allen's character, a short, balding, bespectacled ectomorph, dismisses the short, balding, bespectacled Shawn as "a homunculus." Arguably his best-known film role is as the evil Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987) ("Inconceivable!"). Rare non-comic film roles include two collaborations with Andre Gregory, filmed by Louis Malle: the philosophical and semi-autobiographical dialogue My Dinner with Andre, and a production of Uncle Vanya titled Vanya on 42nd Street.

Shawn is a widely-used character actor on television, where he has appeared in many genres and series. He has had recurring roles as the Ferengi Grand Nagus Zek on Deep Space Nine, a comic ex-reporter on Murphy Brown, the Huxtables' neighbor on The Cosby Show, a psychiatrist on Crossing Jordan, and on many other shows. He is also an accomplished voice actor, appearing especially in animation (including Toy Story and Toy Story 2 where he played "Rex the Green Dinosaur" as well as two episodes of Family Guy playing Stewie's half-brother Bertram) and commercials. In 2005, he appeared in the second season of Desperate Housewives.

Writing

Shawn's early plays, such as Marie and Bruce (1978), portrayed emotional and sexual conflicts in an absurdist style, with language that was both lyrical and violent. In the conversations with Andre Gregory that became My Dinner with Andre, Shawn later referred to these plays as depicting "my interior life as a raging beast". Critical response was extremely polarized: some critics hailed Shawn as a major writer, while John Simon called Marie and Bruce "garbage" and described Shawn as "one of the worst and unsightliest actors in this city". His play A Thought in Three Parts caused a minor uproar in London in 1977, when the production was raided by a vice squad due to allegedly pornographic content .

His later plays became more overtly political, drawing parallels between the psychology of his characters and the behavior of governments and social classes. Among the best-known of these are Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985) and The Designated Mourner (1997). Shawn's political work has invited controversy, as he often presents the audience with several contradictory points of view: in Aunt Dan and Lemon, which Shawn described as a cautionary tale against fascism, the character Lemon explained her neo-Nazi beliefs with such conviction that some critics called the play effectively pro-fascist. The monologue The Fever, originally created by Shawn to be performed for small audiences in apartments, was dismissed by some critics as "liberal guilt"; it describes a person who becomes sick while struggling to find a morally consistent way to live when faced with injustice, and harshly criticizes the record of the U.S. in supporting repressive anti-communist regimes.

Three of Shawn's plays have been adapted into films: The Designated Mourner (basically a film of David Hare's stage production), Marie and Bruce, and The Fever. As of 2005, the latter two had been screened only in festivals.

Shawn has also written political commentary for The Nation, and in 2004 he published the one-issue-only progressive political magazine Final Edition, which features interviews with and articles by Jonathan Schell, Noam Chomsky, Mark Strand, and Deborah Eisenberg.

Shawn is credited as translator of The Threepenny Opera, which opened at Studio 54 in Manhattan on March 25, 2006. He appears briefly in voiceover during Song about the Futility of Human Endeavor.

Plays

Selected film and television roles

References

  • King, W.D. (1997). Writing Wrongs: The Work of Wallace Shawn. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ISBN 1566395178

External links

1943 births | Living people | Family Guy actors | American film actors | Jewish American actors | Stargate actors | Star Trek: Deep Space Nine actors | American television actors | American dramatists and playwrights | Members of The American Academy of Arts and Letters | American character actors | American voice actors | People from New York City

Wallace Shawn

 

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