Shawn, Wallace

Wallace Shawn, (born November 12, 1943, New York, New York, U.S.), American playwright and character actor whose oft-surreal probing plays found favour in the British theatre and led some to call him the leading contemporary dramatist in the United States.

Shawn was exposed to New York City’s literary culture from a young age, as his father, William Shawn, was the editor of The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. He studied history at Harvard University and then philosophy and economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, before turning to playwriting after returning to New York. His first produced work was Our Late Night, which premiered in 1975 and won an Obie Award for playwriting. Shawn’s A Thought in Three Parts—featuring a prolonged simulated orgy in the second act—was met with parliamentary protests when it debuted in London in 1977 and was subsequently pulled from the theatre, which helped forge his reputation as a risk-taking playwright. In 1979 he made his on-screen acting debut with a small role in director Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and his “second career” soon led to his first brush with international fame.

Shawn and fellow actor-writer André Gregory starred in the film My Dinner with André (1981), which was an art-house sensation upon its release and became a cult classic in later years. The movie re-created a real-life dinner between the two principals, and the plot simply consisted of a long, meandering philosophical conversation, unusual subject matter for a modest box-office hit. Shawn went on to have memorable roles in a number of other Allen movies and in such films as The Princess Bride (1987), Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), and Clueless (1995). In 2013 Shawn wrote and starred in A Master Builder, the film adaptation of Henrick Ibsen’s play of the same name (1892). He then appeared in the movies Admission (2013), Maggie’s Plan (2015), The Only Living Boy in New York (2017), and Book Club (2018).

Throughout his career, Shawn acted on television as well, including a recurring role on the 1996–97 Clueless spin-off. He assumed guest roles on numerous shows, notably Murphy Brown, Sex and the City, The Good Wife, Mozart in the Jungle, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Young Sheldon.

Shawn’s distinctive voice also lent itself well to a number of family movies, including four Toy Story films (1995, 1999, 2010, and 2019), The Incredibles (2004), Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (2010), and Penguin Monster Beach Party (2015) and its sequels.

Meanwhile, Shawn produced highly lauded dramas. Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985) won him a second Obie Award, and he took a third in 1991 for The Fever, a caustic 90-minute monologue that dissects the power relations between the world’s poor and elite classes and finds a pervasive moral deficiency in the latter. The Designated Mourner (1996; film 1997) touched on similar ground, telling the story—through actionless narrations by the three characters—of educated and privileged people who grapple with their humanity during a chaotic civil war in an unnamed country.

In 2009 London’s Royal Court Theatre staged a three-month festival of Shawn’s work, including the premiere of his first new play in more than 10 years, Grasses of a Thousand Colors. He subsequently debuted his play Evening at the Talk House in London in 2015.

In addition to acting and playwriting, Shawn published the nonfiction collections Essays (2009) and Night Thoughts (2017).