David Rasche

David Rasche
Born	August 7, 1944 (1944-08-07) (age 65) St. Louis, Missouri
Spouse(s)	Heather Lupton

David Rasche (born August 7, 1944) is an American actor.

Biography

Early life and career

Rasche was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His father was a minister and farmer.^[1] Rasche started in theatre, but also has appeared on numerous movies and television series. He became a member of the Chicago Second City, after John Belushi moved on to Saturday Night Live.

Rasche has a scholarly background (graduate degree from the University of Chicago) and also worked as a teacher and writer before going into showbusiness full-time. He even appeared on a PBS special. He played to critical acclaim in an Off-Broadway revival of David Mamet's play Edmond and was Petruchio to Frances Conroy's Kate in a production of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew directed by Zoe Caldwell at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, CT in the mid-1980's.

In 1974, he fronted $1,000 to help start Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. He began appearing on TV and films in 1977, making his film debut in 1978 in An Unmarried Woman, directed by Paul Mazursky. The following year, he had a small part in Woody Allen's celebrated comedy Manhattan.

Sledge Hammer!

He played the title role in the late 1980s series Sledge Hammer!, a spoof series about a violent and chauvinistic policeman. A few years earlier, an almost unrecognizable Rasche played a nuclear terrorist in the 1983 TV movie Special Bulletin.

Later career

He had a minor role as a photographer in the movie Cobra alongside Brigitte Nielsen. He also starred in the early-'90s NBC sitcom Nurses.

Mr. Rasche played the role of Ted Forstmann in the 1993 made for television movie, Barbarians at the Gate, about the leveraged buyout (LBO) of RJR Nabisco. Forstmann was a critic of KKR's Henry Kravis and his investment methods. Forstmann's criticism of Kravis (and much of the rest of the financial industry during the 1980s) centred around the use of junk bond (high-yield) investments to raise large amounts of capital. When the junk bond market later fell into disfavour as a result of scandal, Forstmann's criticism was seen as prescient, as his more conventional investment strategy had been able to maintain nearly the same level of profitability as companies such as KKR and Revlon that built their strategy around high-yield debt.

In addition to his work as a screen actor, Rasche can also be heard as Captain Piett in the NPR radio adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back.

He has a minor appearance in Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers.

Rasche played the President in the short-lived 2001 television series DAG and in the 2006 film The Sentinel. He starred as a crooked police officer in the Tom Selleck movie An Innocent Man.

He also portrays the late Donald Greene, one of the passengers of doomed flight 93, in Paul Greengrass' controversial 9/11 film United 93. He is presently working on Garrett Bennett's The Spy & the Sparrow.

He also played the role of Robert Gardner on All My Children in 2008, and played a CIA officer in Burn After Reading in 2008.

In Fall 2008, Rasche starred in the ill-fated Broadway adaptation of To Be or Not to Be, in a reprisal of Jack Benny's role as Joseph Tura.

He had a major role in the 2009 satirical political comedy In The Loop, as a US official pushing for a invasion of an unspecified Middle Eastern country.

Rasche joined the cast of Ugly Betty as a recurring member in the show's third season in 2009 for the final five episodes of that season. It has since been confirmed that he will be a recurring character on the show as it enters its fourth season.

References

External links

• David Rasche at the Internet Movie Database