Biography
Born on 18 June 1934 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, the actor and singer whose professional life extended across roughly three decades began with chiefly dramatic parts even though he had received vocal instruction from childhood onward. Regional theatre work preceded his Broadway entrance in 1966 with the brief run of A Time For Singing, the musical drawn from the well-known novel How Green Was My Valley. During the early 1970s he portrayed John Dickenson in 1776 both on the national tour and in New York, and in 1979 he joined the company of I Remember Mama, Richard Rodgers’ final stage musical. The following year he and Dorothy Loudon assumed the principal roles in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd; his subsequent television performance as the title character earned him an Emmy Award. After the brief, five-performance run of the “Ibsen disaster” A Doll’s House in 1983, he received the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical in 1984 for his depiction of the flamboyant drag queen Albin in Jerry Herman’s hit La Cage Aux Folles. In 1985 he appeared as Ben opposite Barbara Cook’s Sally in two widely praised concert presentations of Follies at Lincoln Center and took part in Jule Styne’s Pieces Of Eight, which closed during its Canadian try-out. New York City Opera engagements in Kismet and Casanova followed, after which he repeated his La Cage Aux Folles role in London. Returning to Broadway in 1989 for the “clumsy” stage version of the classic film musical Meet Me In St. Louis, he relocated to the west coast for several years. He again assumed the part of Sweeney in the 1992 Paper Mill Playhouse revival and, in December 1993, played Max von Mayerling in the Los Angeles premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard. When the production reached Broadway nearly twelve months later, he was awarded the Tony for Featured Actor in a Musical. He subsequently appeared in several films and the 1995 television movie Annie: A Royal Adventure. On stage he portrayed Otto Frank, Anne’s father, in the James Lapine-directed revival of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s The Diary Of Anne Frank, which ran for six months on Broadway during the 1997/8 season.