November 12: Happy Birthday Wallace Shawn

[TMC]

https://lebeauleblog.com/2018/11/12/...wallace-shawn/

Wallace Shawn is 75 years old today? Inconceivable! Shawn, whose father was the longtime editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, studied at Harvard and Oxford. He began writing plays in the 1960s, and in 1975, his play Our Late Night was produced off-Broadway, and won an Obie Award for playwriting. He has won two further Obies as a writer, for Aunt Dan and Lemon and The Fever. In 2006, he wrote a translation of The Threepenny Opera for a new Broadway production.

Shawn began appearing in small movie roles. He has had character roles in a wide variety of films through the years, including The Bedroom Window, She’s Out of Control, Clueless, and Woody Allen’s The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Shawn has done a lot of voice acting, notably as Rex in the Toy Story franchise. He has had a long list of guest and recurring roles.

In 1981, Shawn starred with stage director and actor Andre Gregory in My Dinner with Andre, directed by Louis Malle. Shawn, Gregory and Malle re-teamed in 1994 for Vanya on 42nd Street, adapted from Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. But while Shawn would prefer to be remembered for his plays and those two films, for many people, he will always be known as the man who liked the world “inconceivable” a little bit too much.