| Len Cariou | |
|---|---|
Cariou in September 2009 |
|
| Born | Leonard Joseph Cariou September 30, 1939 Winnipeg, Manitoba |
Leonard Joseph “Len” Cariou (born September 30, 1939) is a Canadian actor, best known for his portrayal of Sweeney Todd in the original cast of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. He currently plays the patriarch in the multi-generational television series Blue Bloods on CBS.
Contents |
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Cariou is the son of Molly Estelle (née Moore) and George Marius Cariou, a salesman.[1] His father was French Canadian and his mother was of Irish descent.[2] Cariou attended Holy Cross School Miles MacDonell Collegiate for grades ten and eleven where he directed and starred in the school plays and he later attended St Paul's College.[3]
Cariou started acting in Winnipeg at the Manitoba Theatre Centre and later at the Stratford, Ontario, tackling classical roles like King Lear, Macbeth, Prospero, Coriolanus, Brutus, Petruchio, Iago, Oberon, and Henry V. He was offered a scholarship at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal but, married with a young child and financial responsibilities, he rejected it. Cariou also became a lead actor with the Guthrie Theatre company in Minneapolis in the mid-1960s, where he played Orlando in As You Like It, and Agamemnon in Tyrone Guthrie's compilation of The House of Atreus. In 1968, Cariou made his Broadway debut in The House of Atreus. Two years later he landed his first starring role in Applause, a musical adaptation of the film All About Eve. It earned him a Tony Award nomination as Best Actor in a Musical and won him the Theatre World Award. In 1973 he garnered his second Tony nod for A Little Night Music; he repeated the role for the 1977 film version. Six years later he won both the Tony and a Drama Desk Award for his portrayal of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in the Stephen Sondheim musical. During these years, Cariou also appeared in a number of benefits, including A Christmas Carol for the Riverside Shakespeare Company in New York, playing Scrooge, with Helen Hayes, Raul Julia, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, directed by W. Stuart McDowell at the Symphony Space in 1985.[4] His next projects, the Alan Jay Lerner–Charles Strouse musical Dance a Little Closer (1983), Arthur Miller's sole musical, Up from Paradise (1983), Teddy & Alice (1987), Ziegfeld (1988), and Lady in White (1988) proved to be far less successful.
In 2002, Cariou joined Anne Heche and Neil Patrick Harris as the replacement cast in the award-winning drama Proof. Cariou's film credits include Flags of Our Fathers, About Schmidt, Thirteen Days, The Four Seasons, the Harold Prince-directed screen adaptation of A Little Night Music with Elizabeth Taylor and Secret Window in which he starred alongside Johnny Depp who would later go onto play Sweeney Todd in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the Tim Burton directed musical based on the Broadway show. He played the father in the 2007 film 1408, and the nominal lead role in The Onion Movie, based on the satirical newspaper. On television, Cariou has appeared in The West Wing, Law & Order, Star Trek: Voyager, The Practice, Ed, The Outer Limits, and multiple episodes of Murder, She Wrote. He had a continuing role in 2006–2007 as power broker Judd Fitzgerald in the Showtime series Brotherhood.
Cariou narrated Major League Baseball's World Series films from 1992–1997. He has recorded a number of books, including several by Michael Connelly, for audiotape release. In 2004, he was elected to the American Theatre Hall of Fame. In 2009, he portrayed Franklin D. Roosevelt in the HBO movie Into the Storm, earning an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie.
In 2010, Cariou appeared as Madoff-like Ponzi scheme man Louis Tobin in FX's drama Damages, the main antagonist in season three. He currently appears as Henry Reagan, the former NYC police commissioner and patriarch of the current commissioner's family, on Blue Bloods.
|
|||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||