Wallace Shawn

Wallace Michael Shawn (born November 12, 1943) is an American actor, playwright, and essayist. His film roles include Wally Shawn (a fictionalized version of himself) in My Dinner with Andre (1981), Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987), Mr. James Hall in Clueless (1995), and the voice of Rex in the Toy Story franchise (1995–2019). He has also had roles in six of Woody Allen's films. His television work includes recurring roles as Jeff Engels in The Cosby Show (1987–1991), Grand Nagus Zek in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–1999), Cyrus Rose in Gossip Girl (2008–2012), and Dr. John Sturgis in Young Sheldon (2018–present).

His plays include the Obie Award–winning Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985), The Designated Mourner (1996), and Grasses of a Thousand Colors (2008). He also co-wrote the screenplay for My Dinner with Andre Gregory and scripted A Master Builder (2013), a film adaptation of the play by Henrik Ibsen, in which he also starred. Haymarket Books published his books Essays (2009) and Night Thoughts (2017).

Shawn was born to a Jewish family on November 12, 1943, in New York City. His parents were journalist Cecille (née Lyon; 1906–2005) and William Shawn (1907–1992), the longtime editor of The New Yorker. He has two younger twin siblings: composer Allen Shawn and Mary, who is severely autistic and lives in an institution.

Shawn attended The Putney School, a private liberal arts high school in Putney, Vermont. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history from Harvard College. He studied philosophy, politics, economics, and Latin at Magdalen College, Oxford, originally intending to become a diplomat. He also traveled to India as an English teacher on a Fulbright program. He taught Latin in Manhattan, but since 1979 he has made his living primarily as an actor.

Shawn's early plays, such as Marie and Bruce (1978), portrayed emotional and sexual conflicts in an absurdist style, with lyrical and violent language. In a conversation with Andre Gregory, parts of which were used to create My Dinner with Andre, Shawn said these plays depicted "my interior life as a raging beast." Critical response was extremely polarized: some critics hailed Shawn as a major writer, while John Simon called Marie and Bruce "garbage" and Shawn "one of the unsightliness actors in this city." 

His 1977 play A Thought in Three Parts caused controversy in London when the production was investigated by a vice squad and attacked in Parliament after allegations of pornographic content. Shawn received the Obie Award for best playwrighting in 1974 for Our Late Night. Shawn's later plays are more overtly political, drawing parallels between his characters' psychology and the behavior of governments and social classes. Among the best-known of these are Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985) and The Designated Mourner (1997). 

Shawn's political work has invited controversy, as he often presents the audience with several contradictory points of view. He has called Aunt Dan and Lemon a cautionary tale against fascism. Shawn's monologue, The Fever, originally meant to be performed for small audiences in apartments, depicts a person who becomes sick while struggling to find a morally consistent way to live when faced with injustice and harshly criticizes the United States record in supporting oppressive anti-communist regimes. 

In 1997, Shawn discussed the political nature of Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever and The Designated Mourner in an interview in which he talked extensively about the thematic connections among them, as well as his own views on Marxist, communist, and socialist politics, their relevance to American liberalism, and how governmental and individual responsibilities for finding solutions to the dichotomy between rich and poor in the world take hold in his characters. 

Aunt Dan and Lemon earned Shawn his second Obie Award for excellence in playwriting in 1986, and The Fever won Best American Play in 1991. Three of Shawn's plays have been adapted into films: The Designated Mourner (basically a film version of David Hare's stage production), Marie and Bruce, and The Fever. Vanessa Redgrave stars in The Fever (2004), which first aired on HBO on June 13, 2007.

Shawn has also written political commentary for The Nation, and in 2004 he published the one-issue-only progressive political magazine Final Edition, which featured interviews with and articles by Jonathan Schell, Noam Chomsky, Mark Strand, and Deborah Eisenberg. Shawn is credited as a translator of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, which opened at Studio 54 in Manhattan on March 25, 2006. He appears briefly in voiceover during "Song about the Futility of Human Endeavor." He published his first nonfiction work, Essays, on September 1, 2009. It is a collection of essays that express his perceptions of politics and other aspects of his life.