Wallace Shawn
Although you may know him from his acting in movies and television shows, Wallace Shawn is one of America's most significant writers. Born in New York in 1943, Shawn's father was the editor of The New Yorker magazine. His brother, Allen, is a composer. Shawn graduated from Harvard, where he studied history, and then continued his studies at Oxford. He taught in India as a Fulbright Fellow. Returning to New York, Shawn became part of the new Off-Broadway movement. Shawn's program bios made note that he made a living working in a copy shop for his first two plays, The Hotel Play and Our Late Night, the latter directed by André Gregory. Gregory became one of Shawn's closest collaborators. Shawn's other plays include A Thought in Three Parts, Marie and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever, The Designated Mourner, and a new translation of The Threepenny Opera. His plays can be as searingly funny as they are determined to make an audience question their own political positions. In 1981, Shawn and Gregory turned their theatre and life experiences into the film My Dinner with André, directed by Louis Malle. They thought it would be a small film that might play for a few weeks in a tiny cinema in New York. Instead, the film became extremely popular, and is still shown in movie theaters, on television, and with subtitles around the world. Shawn, Gregory, and Malle also collaborated on the film version of Gregory's staging of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, with Shawn as Vanya, titled Vanya on 42nd Street. Shawn has appeared in All That Jazz, Atlantic City, Cosby Show, The Princess Bride, Clueless, The Moderns, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (as Grand Nagus Zek), Sex and the City, Murphy Brown, Crossing Jordan (as Dr. Howard Stiles), and in three Woody Allen films: Manhattan, Radio Days and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. His recognizable voice is heard in Toy Story (Rex), The Incredibles (Gilbert Huph), Family Guy (Bertram), Chicken Little (Principal Fetchit), and Happily N'Ever After (Munk).
