Tucker Smallwood
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tucker Smallwood (born February 22, 1944) is an American actor, author and vocalist.
From 1967 to 1970, Smallwood served in the U.S. Army Infantry, Airborne. Commanding a Mobile Advisory Team during the Vietnam War, he was wounded in action. After recovering from the injuries, Smallwood moved to New York where he studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse and established a career as a performer in Broadway productions (Mahalia), films and television.
His films include The Cotton Club (1984), Contact (1997), Deep Impact (1998), Larry David's Sour Grapes (1998), Traffic (2000), Quigley (2003) and Spectres (2004).
On television, he has been a regular and made guest appearances on many series, including Space: Above and Beyond, Millennium, The X-Files, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld, Murphy Brown, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise.
He often plays military characters, and as a science fiction fan, he always longed to play a Star Trek alien. He came close on Voyager when he played the human form of a disguised alien, but it was not until Enterprise that he played a fully alien character, a sympathetic Xindi, for several episodes.
Smallwood sometimes sings in his acting roles. His Millennium character sang "Seasons in the Sun" to people before euthanizing them. He is the vocalist in the blues band Incarnation with guitarist Arlen Roth, and their self-titled first album, produced in 1994 at Clark Dimond's Dimond Studio in Colorado's Sangre de Cristo Mountains, is a tribute to the music of Delta Blues King Robert Johnson with 15 tracks written by or associated with Johnson.
Return to Eden is his anthology of 33 personal essays describing his tour of duty in Vietnam, his life as as performer and his return to Vietnam in 2004. Some of these essays previously appeared in magazines. In 2006 the mp3 version of Return to Eden was first runner-up in the audio/spoken word category at the Fifth Annual DIY Book Festival, which celebrates independent authors and publishers.
