Wallace Shawn
Wallace Shawn
Wallace Michael Shawnis an American actor, voice actor, playwright, essayist and comedian. He is best known for appearing in film roles, such as Wally Shawn in the Louis Malle-directed comedy-drama My Dinner with Andre, Vizzini in The Princess Bride, Ezra in The Haunted Mansion, providing the voice of Rex in the Toy Story franchise, providing the voice of Gilbert Huph in The Incredibles, and providing the voice of Calico in Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. He also...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth12 November 1943
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
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 have been vain since birth.
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 have been vain since birth. I expected other people to like what I did, although my vanity has definitely diminished over the years.
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.
Sleep: a poor substitute for caffeine!
Escape before it’s too late.
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.
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 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.
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.
When I was first exposed to the films of Ingmar Bergman, I found them frank and disturbing portraits of the world we live in, but that was not something that displeased me. They were beautiful. I thought people would respond to my plays the way I responded to Bergman's films.