I am an American character actor, best known for my work, often in classic films, with distinguished film directors, including Peter Bogdanovich, Mario Monicelli, Richard Benjamin, Carl Reiner , Peter Medak (five times) and Alan J. Pakula (twice); Academy Award winners Ethan and Joel Coen, Paolo Sorrentino, Michel Hazanavicius, Steven Spielberg, Delbert Mann, Blake Edwards, Stanley Donen, Sydney Pollack, Ron Howard and Robert Redford (twice); and many others. My films include, among many others, HAIL, CAESAR!; RIO, I LOVE YOU; ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN; CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND; THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN; NIGHT SHIFT; MY FAVORITE YEAR, and Academy Award winning Best Pictures ORDINARY PEOPLE and THE ARTIST. I have worked with fourteen Oscar winning actors: Sophia Loren in Lady Liberty, Gene Hackman and Liza Minnelli in Lucky Lady, Dustin Hoffman and Martin Balsam in All the President's Men, Jason Robards in All the President's Men and Comes a Horseman, Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Christopher Plummer in "The Moneychangers", Mary Steenburgen in Pontiac Moon, Jane Fonda in The Electric Horseman and Comes a Horseman, Christopher Walken in Communion and The Milagro Beanfield War, Renee Zellweger in Down With Love, J.K. Simmons in 3 Geezers! and Jean Dujardin in The Artist. I also appeared with Oscar winners Philip Seymour Hoffman in Culture; Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People; George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Frances McDormand in Hail, Caesar! and Shirley MacLaine in The Last Word, but shared no scenes with them. I worked with two Oscar winning actors in films for which they won the award, Jason Robards in All the President's Men and Jean Dujardin in The Artist. I am one of only two actors who has worked four times with actor/director Robert Redford, twice with Redford as an actor and twice with Redford as the director. Jane Fonda is the only other actor who has worked four times with Robert Redford, with Redford as an actor but never as the director.
I'm a long-time private acting teacher and coach, also a frequent guest lecturer and teacher at prestigious academic institutions, including (among many others) the American Film Institute, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the University of Southern California, Confederation College in Canada and the Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in Beirut, Lebanon.
In 2008, I returned to Beirut as a U.S. State Department Cultural Envoy to Lebanon to teach acting and directing at the University of Balamand's Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, Lebanese University, Notre Dame University and St. Joseph University's Institut D'Etude Sceniques Audiovisuelles et Cinematographiques.
I am a former member of the Board of Directors of Screen Actors Guild and the Fine Arts Advisory Council of Loyola Marymount University. I am a member of both the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
I am also the author of the acting textbooks, "Cold Reading and How to Be Good at It" and "Acting and How to Be Good at It" (and The Second Edition) with a foreword by SydnePollack.
