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William H. Macy

William H. Macy:Publicity photo of William H. Macy
Publicity photo of William H. Macy

William Hall Macy (born March 13, 1950) is an Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated American actor, probably best known for his role as Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo. He is also a teacher and director in theatre, film and television.


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Early life

Macy was born in Miami, Florida, and grew up in a Lutheran family in Georgia and Maryland. His father, also named William Hall Macy, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal for flying a B-17 bomber in World War II; he later ran a construction company in Atlanta and worked for Dun & Bradstreet before taking over a Cumberland, Maryland-based insurance agency when Macy was nine years old. His mother, Lois, was a war widow who met Macy's father after her first husband died in 1943; Macy describes her as a "Southern belle".[1] Macy has a half-brother, Fred Merrill, from his mother's first marriage.

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 College 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.

Career

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 and State and Main.

He may be best known for his lead role in Fargo, in a role for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and helped shift his career into overdrive. His film work also includes Benny & Joon, Above Suspicion, Mr. Holland's Opus, Ghosts of Mississippi, Air Force One, Boogie Nights, Pleasantville, Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho, Happy, Texas, Mystery Men, Magnolia, Jurassic Park III, Focus, Panic, Welcome to Collinwood, Seabiscuit, The Cooler, and Sahara.

Macy has also had a number of roles on television. In 2003, he won two Emmy Awards, for the lead role and as co-writer of the made-for-TNT film Door to Door, a drama based on the true story of Bill Porter, a door-to-door salesman in Portland, Oregon, born with cerebral palsy. Macy is particularly proud of the writing for that film; he turned the commercial-interrupted format of television into an advantage in the film, by breaking the story up into several uninterrupted stories.

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 notriously 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."

In a November 2003 interview with USA Today, Macy said 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.

Personal life

Since 1997, he has been married to Academy Award nominated actress Felicity Huffman. Their portmanteau couple nickname, as coined by Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, is "Filliam H. Muffman". The couple has two daughters, Sofia Grace and Georgia Grace. They live in Los Angeles, California, and have had a cabin in Vermont since the 1980's. Macy is known for his liberal leanings; he and Huffman appeared at a rally for John Kerry in 2004. [2],[3]

He should not be confused with actor Bill Macy, who co-starred in the television series Maude, even though some call him Bill.

Trivia

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'.

Macy recently called out the unprofessional behaviour of actress Lindsay Lohan: "You can't show up late," Macy, 56, told reporters Thursday at a Los Angeles junket promoting his new movie, Everyone's Hero. "It's very, very disrespectful. I think what an actor has to realize (is that) when you show up an hour late, 150 people have been scrambling to cover for you," Macy told reporters Thursday. "There is not an apology big enough in the world to have to make 150 people scramble. It's nothing but disrespect. And Lindsay Lohan is not the only one. A lot of actors show up late as if they're God's gift to the film. It's inexcusable, and they should have their asses kicked." When asked about Lohan's work on Bobby, Macy paused and said, "She was pretty late." He added, "I worry about these young kids - 15, 18, 20 years old - who in the span of one year become millionaires and powerhouses. It's too much power for a kid that age to handle."

Filmography

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