Biography
Mandy Patinkin was born Mandel Bruce Patinkin on Sunday, November 30th, 1952 in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated Kenwood High School in Chicago in 1970 and attended the University of Kansas for two years before being discovered and subsequently studied at Juilliard School of Drama in New York City but turned professional before receiving a degree. He has since gone on to become an accomplished performer and the recipient of several prestigious awards. He is best knows for his roles in The Princess Bride and Chicago Hope, but he is also a regular on Broadway and has a successful music career. Having been raised Jewish, Mandy says, the main influence of my early life was the
music of the synagogue.
After several years of theater on and off Broadway, Mandy's first film role was in 1979's The Big Fix. He had his first major role the next year in the Broadway production of Evita. After various film roles in the early 1980s, he returned to Broadway with Sunday in the Park with George in 1984. After this performance, his acclaim as a vocalist increased, and he was invited to participate in a number of cast recordings for broadway musicals including South Pacific, Man of La Mancha and Kismet. The success of those albums led to CBS signing him as a recording artist, and in 1989 he released his first album and followed it with his one-man show: Dress Casual.
Dick Tracy marked Mandy's first musical performance in a film. He was subsequently featured in Madonna's album of her music from the movie titled I'm Breathless which went multi-platinum. After several film and stage appearances, Mandy made a major return to broadway with The Secret Garden in 1991. He continued his work with music, films and the theater until breaking into TV as Dr. Jeffrey Geiger on the hospital drama Chicago Hope in 1994. He later won an Emmy for the role, but left early in the second season to spend more time with his family in New York.
Though still releasing music and appearing in several films, Mandy's career slowed in the late 1990s due to medical problems. He received corneal transplants in 1997 and 1998 due to a degenerative eye disease called keratoconus. Organ donation became a special cause for him, and he has given numerous charity concerts for cancer and spinal cord research, as well as holocaust remembrance and women's shelters. Unfettered by his health problems, he had several film roles after his transplants and released his fourth and fifth solo albums.
In the year 2000, Mandy returned to Broadway in the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of The Wild Party and received another Tony nomination for his role. And in 2001, he released his sixth album Kidults.
Family
Mandy married fellow actress and writer Kathryn Grody in 1980 and has two sons, Isaac and Gideon. His mother is Doralee Patinkin Rubin, a cookbook author, who is to have her own cooking show on the Food Network.
Awards
Recordings
- Solo Albums
- Cast Recordings and Other Albums
Sources:
- http://us.imdb.com/Name?Patinkin,+Mandy
- http://members.tripod.com/~aater/index.html
- http://www.tonys.org/
- http://www.netaxs.com/~elkin/chicago_hope.html
- http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search/artistbio.asp?userid=28JO5E3LMB&ctr=67289
A factual node challenge from TheBooBooKitty