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| Birth Name(s) : William Hall Macy Jr. |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Married
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Partner:
Felicity Huffman (1997 - present) 2 daughters |
| Profession:
Actor |
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Full William H. Macy Biography
William Hall Macy, Jr. (born March 13, 1950) is an Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated American actor. He is also a teacher and director in theatre, film and television. Macy has described his screen persona as "sort of a Middle American, WASPy, Lutheran kind of guy... Everyman".
After graduating from Allegany High School in Cumberland, Maryland, Macy entered Bethany College of West Virginia to study veterinary medicine. By his own admission, a "wretched student," he transferred to Goddard College and became involved in theatre. It was at Goddard that he met the playwright David Mamet, who was only a couple of years older than Macy. He moved to Chicago, Illinois, after graduating in 1971 and got a job as a bartender to pay the rent. Within a year he and Mamet, among others, founded the successful St. Nicholas Theater Company, where Macy originated roles in a number of Mamet's plays, such as American Buffalo and The Water Engine.
After spending some time in Los Angeles, California, he moved to New York in 1980. While living there he had roles in over fifty off-Broadway and Broadway plays. His first on-screen role was as a turtle named Socrates in the direct to video film, The Boy Who Loved Trolls (1984), under the name W. H. Macy. He has appeared in films that Mamet wrote and/or directed, such as House of Games, Things Change, Homicide, Oleanna (playing a role he reprised after originating the role in the play of the same name, and more recently, Wag the Dog, State and Main, and Spartan.
Macy has also had a number of roles on television, the most recent being a guest appearance on The Unit as the President of the United States. In 2003, he won two Emmy Awards, one for starring in the lead role and one as co-writer of the made-for-TNT film Door to Door. Door to Door is a drama based on the true story of Bill Porter, a door-to-door salesman in Portland, Oregon, born with cerebral palsy. The film is composed of several stories, each taking up a whole period between commercials.
His work on ER and Sports Night has also been recognized with Emmy nominations. His character in ER, David Morgenstern, is responsible for a sage piece of advice that has been handed down throughout the series. In the pilot episode, when Juliana Margulies' character, nurse Carol Hathaway, is brought to the hospital with a drug overdose, Morgenstern tells Dr. Greene (Anthony Edwards) that he needs to "set the tone" to get the unit through the difficulty of treating one of its own. "You set the tone" is repeated several times in the series, once jokingly by Doug Ross (George Clooney) to Greene and at two other key moments. When Greene, dying from a brain tumor, leaves the ER for the last time, he tells Dr. Carter (Noah Wyle), "You set the tone, Carter." It was a moment that represented the passing of the torch. And a few seasons later, in Carter's farewell episode, he passes a drunk and nauseous Dr. Morris (Scott Grimes), a notoriously bumbling character on the show, and tells him, "You set the tone, Morris." to which an ailing Morris replies, "What?" Carter, realizing that Morris is, to say the least, not cut out of the mold of Morgenstern and Greene, smiles and tells him, "Never mind."
His character on Sports Night is in sharp contrast to the "everyman" he usually plays. Sam Donovan, a ratings expert, is a very cool professional and quite intimidating. For viewers used to the milder roles this offers a new take on Macy and adds a facet to his acting.
In a November 2003 interview with USA Today, Macy stated that he wants to star in a big-budget action movie "for the money, for the security of a franchise like that". He serves as director-in-residence at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York, where he teaches a technique called Practical Aesthetics. A book describing the technique, A Practical Handbook for the Actor (ISBN 0-394-74412-8), is dedicated to Macy and Mamet.
Macy's most recent movie is entitled "Wild Hogs," a film about middle-aged men reliving their youthful days by taking to the open road on their Harley-Davidson motorcycles from Cincinnati to the Pacific Coast. Oddly enough, Macy's character was typecast as a geeky sort of ne'er-do-well who did not quite seem to have it all together. Macy has just signed on to play the role of David "Boom Boom" Curran, a character loosely based on Donald Trump, in the film The Yes Man set to release in 2009.
American post-punk/pop dance band, Head Automatica, perform a song entitled 'I Shot William H. Macy', appearing on their 2004 album, Decadence. During their recent 2006 'Lashings of Lucifer' tour amongst many big name bands including Taking Back Sunday and Angels and Airwaves, upon playing this song, crowds replied with cheers and shouts of "hang H. Macy" ala The Smiths' 1986 single, 'Panic'. There is also a popular joke from The Colbert Report in which Stephen Colbert combines Macy and his wife's name into "Filliam H. Muffman", as a jab at celebrity couples getting nicknamed by the media. |
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