Emmy Award-winner William H. Macy is an actor, director and writer. He attended Bethany College in West Virginia in the veterinary medicine program but he soon switched to theater. He transferred to Vermont's Goddard College, where he studied under playwright David Mamet. Upon graduation, Macy joined Mamet's Chicago theater troupe, and, with him, founded the St. Nicholas Theatre Company. In 1975, the troupe staged Mamet's American Buffalo with Macy playing "Bobby," the youth who serves as a kind of witless apprentice to two hapless thieves. He continued to perform with the company until 1978 when he moved to New York to further his career. There Macy acted on and off-Broadway and began appearing on television. Macy found success in off-Broadway shows, including a Mamet-directed Twelfth Night (1980-81) and A. R. Gurney's The Dining Room (1982), and he and Mamet also co-founded the Atlantic Theatre Company, where Macy has both acted and directed. By the time the actor finally reached Broadway portraying "Howie Newsome" in the 1988 all-star revival of Our Town, Mamet had already used him in small roles for his House of Games (1987) and Things Change (1988), and in a larger role as a doomed police detective in Homicide (1991). After starring onstage as a college professor accused of sexual harassment by a female student in Mamet's Oleanna (1992), he reprised the role in Mamet's 1994 film version.
In 1994, after having guest-starred in a number of TV series, Macy won the part of "Dr. David Morgenstern," the hospital chief of staff on E.R., a part he would hold for four years. In the meantime, he won several supporting screen roles, but his big screen role breakthrough only came in 1996 playing duplicitous car salesman "Jerry Lundegaard" in Joel and Ethan Coen's Fargo, which won him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Success continued the following year when he landed roles in three feature films, Wag the Dog, Air Force One and Boogie Nights. He finished the decade with a wide range of supporting roles in such diverse films as A Civil Action, Pleasantville, Happy, Texas, Mystery Men and Magnolia.
Macy co-wrote one of his best parts in 1999, that of a movie critic who turns out to be a philandering, larcenous murderer in TNT's A Slight Case of Murder. His fourth TV movie scripted with Steven Schachter cast him opposite wife Felicity Huffman, and he later took a recurring role as a ratings expert on her ABC series Sports Night. He was back with Mamet for State and Main (2000), playing a libidinous Hollywood director on location in Vermont. He also acted that year in a London revival of American Buffalo, this time taking the larger, and older role of "Teach." Recent films that have brought Macy continued acclaim include Welcome to Collinwood, The Cooler, Stealing Sinatra and Seabiscuit. In 2003, he won two Emmy Awards — for lead actor and co-writer of Door to Door.
Born William Hall Macy on March 13, 1950, in Miami, FL., Macy married Felicity Huffman in 1997. The couple has two daughters.
Best Known As: The shifty, inept car salesman in the movie Fargo
The reliable actor and sometimes writer-producer William H. Macy worked steadily on stage and screen for more than 15 years before breaking out in the Coen brothers' 1996 movie Fargo (with Frances McDormand). Macy got his acting start at Vermont's Goddard College as a student of playwright David Mamet's. In the early 1970s he joined Mamet and others in founding the St. Nicholas Theater Company in Chicago, and Macy was one of the original actors in Mamet's American Buffalo. During the 1980s Macy was based in New York, where he helped co-found the Atlantic Theater Company and worked on stage and in commercials and television productions. By the late 1980s his film career was taking off and he quickly became known as a reliable supporting player, appearing in films by directors such as Woody Allen (1987's Radio Days and 1992's Shadows and Fog) and Macy's old friend David Mamet (1987's House of Games and 1991's Homicide). Macy also showed up in TV movies and had a recurring role in TV's E.R. Since winning an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor for his performance in Fargo, he's found steady work in quality projects, from big-budget movies and independent films to TV productions such as the Bill Porter story, Door to Door. (Macy won Emmys for acting and writing for that movie.) His feature films include Boogie Nights (1997, with Mark Wahlberg), Mystery Men (1999, with Ben Stiller), The Cooler (2003, with Alec Baldwin), and Sahara (2005).
Macy married actress Felicity Huffman, later the star of TV's Desperate Housewives, in 1997.
William H. Macy came to acting by way of Bethany and Goddard Colleges. At the latter school, Macy studied under playwright David Mamet, with whom he would be frequently associated throughout his career. After college, Macy was a member of Mamet's theater troupe, the St. Nicholas Company. The actor performed in a number of productions, many of them written by Mamet, until 1978 when he left the company and headed to New York. Some of his earliest work there included commercial voice-overs, such as the now infamous "Secret: Strong enough for a man, but PH balanced for a woman."
Macy also continued his theater work, forming the Atlantic Theatre Company with Mamet in 1985 and acting in Broadway and off-Broadway shows. In addition, he worked in television and began doing feature films, debuting in '80s Foolin' Around. He continued to act in supporting roles throughout the decade, appearing in such films as Mamet's directorial debut, House of Games (1987) and Woody Allen's Radio Days (1987). In 1991, he won a more substantial role, in Mamet's Homicide, and subsequently began to find work in more well-known films, including Benny and Joon and The Client.
Macy finally got a shot at a leading role with his turn in Mamet's Oleanna. He won positive notices and an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his portrayal of a professor accused of sexual harassment. More acclaim followed with his starring role as a hapless car salesman in Joel Coen and Ethan Coen's Fargo (1996), for which he garnered a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. The next year, Macy's star rose a little higher, thanks to his work in three high-profile films, Wag the Dog, Air Force One, and Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights. He was similarly lauded for his versatility through work in such films as Psycho and Pleasantville, and in 1999 he continued his winning streak as an unconventional superhero in Mystery Men, a gay sheriff in Happy, Texas, and a member of the ensemble cast of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia.
Despite the fact that Macy drew praise for his turn as a reluctant hit man in the 2000 drama Panic, the film went largely unseen, and his next substantial role found him running from dinosaurs in Jurassic Park III. As always Macy continued to intercut his more commercial efforts with such decidedly non-mainstream fare as Focus and Stealing Sinatra. Surprisingly, it was just such work that netted Macy some of his most glowing reviews. Case in point was a memorable performance as a disabled traveling salesman in the 2003 drama Door to Door; a role that earned its convincing lead an Emmy. After sticking to the small screen with the Showtime miniseries Out of Order, Macy went wide with the theatrical hit Seabiscuit and the breathless Larry Cohen-scripted thriller Cellular. That same year, the actor would continue to nurture a succesful ongoing collaboration with famed writer/director David Mamet in the widely-praised but little-seen crime drama Spartan. Macy has also continued to do television work, appearing on such series as Spencer, Law & Order, and ER. For his role in the 2004 made for television drama The Wool Cap (which also found him teaming with writer Steven Schachter to adapt a story originally written by Jackie Gleason), Macy was nominated for multiple awards including a Best Actor at the Golden Globe and an Emmys.
In 2005, Macy returned to home turf with the Mamet-scripted thriller Edmond, directed by Stuart "Reanimator" Gordon. The picture reunited the actor and director, who originally collaborated in the early eighties on the stage version of the playwright's Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Adapted from Mamet's 1982 one-acter, Edmond dramatizes the descent of a seemingly normal man (Macy) from sanity to unbridled psychosis. While Edmond didn't exactly bomb critically or commercially after its July 14, 2006 premiere, it fell below the bar of previous Mamet efforts on two levels: first, the studio opened it to decidedly more limited release than Mamet's directorial projects over the previous several years (such as Spartan and Heist), thus ensuring that fewer would see it, and it also suffered from somewhat lackluster reviews. Surprisingly, those who did complain of the work attacked Mamet's script in lieu Gordon's direction. Variety's Scott Foundas observed, "The problem is that, too often, we don't fully understand what motivates Edmond, and many of Mamet's efforts toward explanation -- that life is one big shell game, that we're all latent racists at heart -- feel like specious armchair philosophizing."
Macy produced that same year's Transamerica, and graced the cast of Jason Reitman's hearty satire Thank You For Smoking, with a funny turn as senator and anti-tobacco promulgator Ortolan Finistirre. At around the same time, he also voiced a crooked, baseball bat-swiping security guard in that year's family friendly animated feature Everyone's Hero. Meanwhile, audiences geared up for Macy's contribution to the ensemble of actor-cum-director Emilio Estevez's semi-fictional, Altmanesque docudrama Bobby, which recounts the events that preceded RFK's assassination by Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel. As the hotel manager, Macy joins a line-up of formidable heavyweights: Helen Hunt, Elijah Wood, Harry Belafonte, Martin Sheen, Estevez himself, Anthony Hopkins, Sharon Stone, and many others. The picture had journalists and moviegoers across America whispering 'Oscar contender' long before its initial release on November 22, 2006. Shortly after production wrapped, Macy made headlines in mid-late 2006 for a comment that involved his allegedly berating Bobby co-star Lindsay Lohan's on-set behavior, in reference to her constant tardiness.
Meanwhile, the trades reported the everpresent Macy's involvement in two 2007 features: the animated Bee Movie (with a lead voice by Jerry Seinfeld), about a honeybee who decides to sue mankind for its use of honey, and Wild Hogs, a farce with Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and John Travolta as a trio of Hell's Angels.
In 1997, William H. Macy married Felicity Huffman, with whom he appeared in Magnolia. ~ Rebecca Flint, All Movie Guide
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 playwrightDavid
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.
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.
Macy auditioned for the role of Brian Griffin on Family
Guy, but was turned down due to budget restrictions for the pilot.[citation needed]
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.
Personal life
Since 1997, Macy has been married to Academy Award
nominated actress Felicity Huffman. The couple have two daughters, Sofia Grace (born
August 1, 2000) and Georgia Grace (born March 14, 2002).They live in Los Angeles,
California, and have had a cabin in Vermont since the 1980s. Macy is a Lutheran.[4] He is known for his liberal leanings; he and Huffman appeared at a rally for John Kerry in 2004.[5][6] Macy also plays the ukulele
and is an avid woodturner, even appearing on the cover of the specialist magazine
Fine Woodworking. He is a national ambassador for UCP.[7]
Macy in popular culture
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.
The character Ottman in the comic is based upon Macy's appearance.
Filmography
The Awakening Land (1978) – Will Beagle (as “W.H. Macy”)
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