Keir Dullea

Raised in NYC's Greenwich Village where his parents ran a bookstore, clean-cut, sensitive-looking leading man Keir Dullea acted in stock and with various repertory companies before finally appearing Off-Broadway in "Season of Choice" (1959). He gained immediate attention for his first two film roles, as the doomed juvenile delinquent in "The Hoodlum Priest" (1961) and as the young emotionally disturbed protagonist of Frank Perry's "David and Lisa" (1962). Looking younger than his years, he continued to play intense, neurotic youths in movies like "The Thin Red Line" (1964), "Bunny Lake Is Missing" (1965) and "Madame X" (1966), finally breaking the typecasting as the man who intrudes upon a lesbian relationship in the film of D H Lawrence's novella, "The Fox" (1967). After his memorable turn as astronaut David Bowman in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), his career seemed ready to blast into a new dimension, but his misses outnumbered his hits in the 1970s and 80s, due as much to his apathy as anything.

Dullea, who now does theater almost exclusively, has enjoyed success on the stage equal to or greater than that of his film career, although no single project brought him more name recognition than "2001." He made his Broadway debut opposite Burl Ives in "Dr Cook's Garden" (1967) and garnered critical acclaim as Donny Dark, the blind boy, in The Great White Way's "Butterflies Are Free" (1969). He returned to Broadway as Brick in the revival of Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1974) and also acted in Broadway productions of "P S Your Cat Is Dead" (1975) and "Doubles" (1985). Leaving Hollywood for good in 1982, Dullea and his third wife, the late director Susan Fuller, ran the Theatre Artists Workshop of Westport (CT), a non-profit organization modeled along the lines of the Actor's Studio. He starred Off-Broadway in "the Other Side of Paradise" (1992), a one-man show about writer F Scott Fitzgerald, and also appeared in a production of "Molly Sweeney" (1997) at the Playmakers Repertory Company in North Carolina.