Wallace Shawn

Wallace Shawn's biography

Wallace Shawn is 79 years old actor born at New York City. He was born on Friday 12th of November 1943. He is often nicknamed as Wally. According to year of birth 1943 he belongs to Silent Generation. Birthday on 12th of November means he is Scorpio. Scorpio is a watery sign. These people are very intense in their thoughts. They always learn from the transformatory phase of their life.

He is native english speaker. He is citizen of United States of America. He is an adherent of atheism. His primary profession is to be actor. You can know him also as writer, voice actor, playwright, character actor, screenwriter, film actor, television actor. He is recently known as author.

Wallace Shawn's dad

Wallace Shawn's father's name is William Shawn.

Wallace Shawn's schools

We found 6 schools He attended. Complete list of schools: Harvard University, Magdalen College, Harvard College, Collegiate School, The Putney School, HB Studio.

Wallace Shawn's career

His main focus is to be actor. He is also a member of American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Wallace Shawn's partner

Deborah Eisenberg

Wallace Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg have been together. She is known as playwright. His partner was born on Tuesday 20th of November 1945 in Winnetka.

Awards and competitions

Wallace Shawn's Awards

• In 2005 he received a career achievement award from the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation. The writers organizations gave him this honor for his work in the theater.

Wallace Shawn's quotes

• We're in an emergency situation. The United States has become an absolutely terrifying country, and I would hope that I could participate in some way in stopping the horror and the brutality.
• I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write.
• The Princess Bride (1987) is by far the most popular film I've ever done. I don't think I'll ever top it.
• From being a writer of plays, it was not that surprising that somebody thought of giving me a job as an actor. After I played one part, others came along.
• I am recognized a lot for Clueless (1995), but I am recognized a great deal for The Princess Bride (1987). I don't know . . . maybe everybody who has seen that movie just goes out on the street.
• I was making my living from a joke about my appearance that I didn't understand, and in a way still don't, because when I look in a mirror it doesn't seem funny to me.
• It is hard enough to make a plan for how you are going to spend an evening with somebody else. So to make a plan for how you are going to behave in 25 years seems based on a view of life that is incomprehensible to me.
• "The Fever" is a one-person play. I decided I would perform it myself, and I decided I would not perform it in theaters, because the character in the play says certain things that I meant.
• I don't happen to have a sense of humor personally, so I don't know what's funny about a character . . . This happens to be a feature of my life generally.
• My father was a jazz listener, and I think, at least before I was five, I was not so into that. Although there were records that emphasized percussion that I liked, like Baby Dodds.
• Acting is trying to be absolutely truthful; to get audiences to believe that you are a dean, when, actually, not only are you not the dean, but if you walked into the building they'd probably throw you out. That's very hard.
• In real life, every person is the leading man or woman. We don't think of ourselves as supporting or character actors.
• In an amusement park, you can go on a roller coaster that carries you up and down, or you can go on another kind of ride that whirls you around in a circle. Similarly, there are different sorts of entertaining experiences in the theater.
• I see myself as a citizen of the planet. Even as a child, I always found it mindless to root for your own team. I was puzzled by the fact that people said their own team was better than other teams simply because it was theirs.
• I choose parts because I don't want to be embarrassed when the movie comes out. What if my friends were to see the movie? What if my niece or nephew wandered into the theater and saw the movie? I don't want to be too ashamed of it.
• I probably have a higher opinion of my writing than the average person, at least when I'm in a good mood, but I don't really think of my plays as only being relevant to a particular month or year.
• Even with my wife, I find sharing soup is hard.
• As writers, we can't predict who might come along who might find our offerings valuable.
• And my singing, I don't think I could sing Wagner or opera, but I could probably carry a tune. I was in a musical once, but it was never performed.
• Acting is an escape from the boring person that I am in real life.
• I do things, and other people laugh at them. I rarely know what the joke is supposed to be or why they're laughing.
• I spend most of my time thinking about things like laundry and buying stationery supplies.
• I never grew up thinking, "One day I will play so and so" because I wasn't expecting to be an actor at all.
• I'm being mocked because I don't live up to a socially determined view of what other people think a person should look like.
• I'm a very lucky man. It's a beautiful thing for a writer, to see people allowing your words to enter their own unconscious and their souls.
• I never planned to be an actor. It turned out I could make a living doing it.
• I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing.
• I know that I am one and I've made a living as an actor and I enjoy being an actor, but when I'm not actually doing it, I forget that I do it.
• I don't have a television, and I'm just not too up on television.
• I have been vain since birth. I expected other people to like what I did, although my vanity has definitely diminished over the years.
• I have an enormous appetite to see life as I know it presented in front of my eyes.
• After being in one movie, it didn't seem like that would be my life. I had done several jobs, briefly. I'd been a shipping clerk, I worked in a copy shop, I didn't think the acting was going to go on and on.
• Children, I always think, are just putting on a performance of being naive and not understanding anything. I have worked with children in films, and they're treated as adults and they just drop the pretense of being children.
• But because we've all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.
• There's nothing regular about my life at all, really. I don't keep a regular schedule and every day is different. It's all rather chaotic.
• You know, I haven't written as much as most other writers. Certainly maybe those who keep a more regular schedule accomplish more.
• For some reason, people find me funny. It's quite hard to define why a thought is funny. It's even harder to define why a person would be funny. It's a word that I can't define at all. But whether I know quite what it is or not, I seem to be it.
• I'm afraid that the passage of time is mostly lost on me. If you were to open up my head you would see that I'm still brooding about statements, songs and issues from the third grade. The years between 1980 and today went by very, very quickly.
• In my early 20s, I studied history and politics, and I really thought that perhaps I would devote my life to that.
• Patriotism is considered to be an emotion a person ought to feel. But why? Why is it nobler to love your own country than to love someone else's?
• In terms of number of movies, I've been in an extraordinary amount. If you count only the minutes I'm onscreen, it's not so long.
• The life of an actor can be very enviable.
• My plays have been strange from the beginning, and they never got unstrange.
• I started writing plays in around 1967, and at a certain point I thought, "I'm writing plays, I should learn about acting and what it is". So I went to the HB Studio in New York, and I was there for about nine months.
• For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.
• I grew up. I began to think the United States had some problems that really required the help of artistic people to solve. And I gave myself permission to be a writer instead of a civil servant.
• I sincerely believe that if [George W. Bush] and [Dick Cheney] recognized the full humanity of other people's mothers around the world, they wouldn't commit the crimes they commit.
• I led the life of an intellectual up until a certain age. I remember [Sigmund Freud;s] "Interpretation of Dreams" was a big favorite when I was 11. It sounded so interesting. And it really was!
• I think the whole system of education would change if I were in charge and had the ability to make changes. I don't think I would keep Princeton exactly being Princeton.
• I'm not proud to be me, I'm not excited to be me, but I find that I am me, and like most other individuals, I send out little signals; I tell everyone else how everything looks from where I am.
• In my mind, the plays I was writing were extreme examples of art for art's sake. I didn't necessarily think that other people would love them, though I thought they probably would.
• My personal life is lived as "me", but my professional life is lived as other people. In other words, when I go to the office, I lie down, dream and become "someone else". That's my job.
• You can go to a play that is enjoyable because it's funny, and then on the next night you can go to a play that's enjoyable because it's "disturbing".
• When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn't have studied it even if I had heard of it.
• The actor's role in the community is quite unlike anyone else's. Businessmen, for example, don't take their clothes off or cry in front of strangers in the course of their work. Actors do.
• See also Other Works |  Publicity Listings |  Official Sites

Wallace Shawn's body shape

Lets describe how Wallace Shawn looks. We will focus on his body shape. Body build is average.