The distinguished American actor Fritz Weaver was born in Pittsburgh. After earning his B.A. at the University of Chicago, he trained as an actor at the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York. His first New York appearance was in The White Devil, for which he won the 1955 Clarence Derwent Award. His Broadway debut (1955) was in The Chalk Garden (Tony nomination, Theatre World and Outer Critics Circle awards). Weaver has acted in classics—as Hamlet in 1968 and Macbeth in 1973 at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, and as King Lear at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., in 1991—as well as in one-man shows (Lincoln, 1976) and contemporary dramas (Lanford Wilson's Angels Fall, 1982). He has been seen on Broadway in Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1992) and in the Irish Repertory production of A Life, for which he won the 2002 Drama League Award. His films include Fail-Safe (1964), Day of the Dolphin (1973), Marathon Man (1976), and The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). He has made many appearances on the small screen, but he is perhaps best known worldwide for his portrayal of Josef Weiss, the doomed patriarch of a Berlin Jewish family, in the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust, for which he received an Emmy nomination.