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| Birth Name(s) : Michael Moriarty |
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Full Michael Moriarty Biography
Michael Moriarty (born April 5, 1941) is a Tony and Emmy-winning American actor of stage and screen, as well as a prominent jazz musician. He is known for his role as Ben Stone on the long running TV series Law & Order. He has recently discussed the possibility that he will run for President of the United States as an independent candidate in the 2008 election.
Moriarty, an Irish American, was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Elinor (née Paul) and George Moriarty, a police surgeon. His grandfather, George Moriarty, had been a third baseman, umpire and manager in the major leagues for nearly 40 years. He attended the University of Detroit Jesuit High School, and then matriculated at Dartmouth College in the class of 1963, where he was a theatre major. After he received his degree, he left for London, where he enrolled in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, after receiving a Fulbright Scholarship.
In 1973, Moriarty was cast to play the egocentric Henry Wiggen in Bang the Drum Slowly, a film about friendship between two unlikely baseball teammates (the second being Robert De Niro, a slow thinking catcher who becomes terminally ill). In the same year, Moriarty starred in a TV movie adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie with Katharine Hepburn. Coincidentally, the film also featured Sam Waterston (who replaced Moriarty as the Executive Assistant District Attorney on Law & Order in 1994). Moriarty's role in Menagerie won him an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor of the Year.
From 1990 to 1994, Moriarty starred as Ben Stone on Law & Order. He left the show in 1994, alleging that his departure was a result of his threatening a lawsuit against then-Attorney General Janet Reno, who had cited Law & Order as offensively violent. Moriarty criticized Reno's comment, and claimed that not only did she want to censor shows like Law and Order but also such fare as Murder, She Wrote. He later accused Law & Order executive producer Dick Wolf of not taking his concerns seriously, and claimed that Wolf and other network executives were "caving in" to Reno's "demands" on the issue of TV violence. Moriarty published a full page advertisement in a Hollywood trade magazine, calling upon fellow artists to stand up with him against attempts to censor TV show content. He subsequently wrote and published The Gift of Stern Angels, his account of this time in his life. (Moriarty, Michael (1997). The Gift of Stern Angels. Exile Editions. ISBN 1-55096-183-7. )
Wolf and others working on Law & Order tell a different story, however. On November 18, 1993, Moriarty and Wolf, along with other television executives, met with Reno to dissuade her from supporting any law that would censor the show. Wolf said that Moriarty overreacted to any effect the law was likely to have on the show. Law & Order producers claim they were forced to remove Moriarty from the series because of "erratic behavior". One example reportedly happened during the filming of the episode "Breeder" when, according to the episode's director, Arthur Forney, Moriarty was unable to deliver his lines with a straight face. Series and network officials deny any connection to his departure and Janet Reno. Wolf also denies that the show has become less violent, graphic or controversial since 1994.
Shortly after leaving Law & Order, Moriarty moved to Canada, declaring himself a political exile. He lived for a time in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he was granted Canadian citizenship, and Toronto, Ontario before settling in Vancouver, British Columbia. He performed in Courage Under Fire, Along Came a Spider, Shiloh, Emily of New Moon and James Dean, for which he won his third Emmy.
Moriarty announced his intention to run for President of the United States in 2008 in an interview in the November 2005 issue of Northwest Jazz Profile, but has not yet formally declared his candidacy. He also has been a frequent contributor of numerous political columns to the ESR (Enter Stage Right) online Journal of Conservativism.
A website devoted to Moriarty, MMUUUHP (the "Michael Moriarty Unofficial, Unauthorized, Unsanctioned Home Page"), contains editorials by Moriarty, and these, in addition to posts on ESR, contain scathing denunciations of a wide array of eclectic targets, including Bill Clinton, Thanaticism, abortion, embryonic stem cell research, anti-Catholicism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George W. Bush, both major U.S. political parties, Halliburton, the College of Cardinals, Islam, and most of Catholic theology. Historically, he has been a supporter of the Republican Party. A recent interview contains the following quotes by Moriarty:“Like the collaborating Vichy government in France under the Nazis, America will surrender to laws and ideologies that contradict the American Constitution and the most simple Human Rights. The Supreme Court took a once individually free nation and corrupted it by the lie of Science that fetuses are, in their first two trimesters, no more than egg yolk. Ultimately, our American Intellectual Supremacists bought the "Population Problem," in the same way Europe fell under the thrall of the so-called "Jewish Problem."
On the blog Enter Stage Right Moriarty writes that he was a "very bad drunk", but that as of February 1, 2004, he had been sober for three years. |
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