[TMC]

March 25: Happy Birthday Lee Pace

Lee Pace is turning 42 today. Pace, the son of a petroleum engineer, was born in Oklahoma, and spend part of his youth in Saudi Arabia. By his teens, he was attending high school in Texas, where one schoolmate was Matt Bomer. Pace began acting at Houston’s Alley Theater, and then studied at Juilliard.

After finishing college, Pace appeared in a few off-Broadway productions. He made his screen debut in a guest appearance on Law & Order: SVU in 2001. A few years later, he starred on the Showtime movie Soldier’s Girl, and was a regular on the short-lived Fox series Wonderfalls.

In 2007, Pace began starring as Ned, aka The Piemaker, on ABC’s Pushing Daisies. He received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations during the show’s two-season run.



Pace landed his first major feature film role in 2006, as Richard Hickock in Infamous. He has gone on to major roles in films such as Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Possession, Marmaduke, and more recently Driven. He is also known for roles in two big-budget franchises–as Thrainduil, the Elvenking, in the Hobbit trilogy, and Ronan the Accuser in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Pace returned to series television in 2014, when he began starring on AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire. Later this year, he will begin starring on Foundation, an Apple TV+ series adapted from the novels by Isaac Asimov.