Anthony Edwards

Birthday: 19 July 1962, Santa Barbara, California, USA

Birth Name: Anthony Charles Edwards

Height: 188 cm

Anthony Edwards was born in Santa Barbara, California, on July 19, 1962, to a well-blended family. He is the youngest of five children, and the son of Erika Kem (Weber), a landscape painter and artist, and Peter Edwards, an architect. His mother was of German descent, and his father was of English, Irish, Scottish, and Spanish-Mexican ancestry.Edwards's parents encouraged him to act at age 16, which eventually led him to attending a summer workshop in London before graduating from high school. Returning to the United States, Edwards worked in commercials, jobs that helped him pay his education at The University of Southern California, where he studied acting. However, he dropped out of college and, in that same year, he had a small role in the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), starring Sean Penn. The movie was a box office smash and Edwards was looking forward to doing more films. His first movie role was that of teen-aged "John Muldowney" in Heart Like a Wheel (1983) and his first starring role as nerdy "Gilbert Lowell", in Revenge of the Nerds (1984).Edwards didn't need to worry about being typecast as a socially-challenged loser. After starring in The Sure Thing (1985) and Gotcha! (1985), he landed another big-time successful movie Top Gun (1986), in which he played Tom Cruise's ill-fated easy-going navigator/best friend, Lt. Nick "Goose" Bradshaw. As Cruise rode Top Gun (1986) into the Hollywood stratosphere, Edwards also found his flight to stardom, at the same time. After Top Gun (1986), he reprised his role as Gilbert in the movie Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987), before he starred in Summer Heat (1987). He also starred in Mr. North (1988), and Miracle Mile (1988), although they weren't too successful.Edwards began working in TV movies and continued to star in more box office movies such as Hawks (1988), How I Got Into College (1989), Downtown (1990), Pet Sematary II (1992), Landslide (1992) and Delta Heat (1992). The '90s won Edwards his best reviews for his recurring role of the quirky "bubble man" Mike Monroe on the popular television series Northern Exposure (1990). He was nominated for a Cable Ace Award in HBO's Sexual Healing (1993), and the following year, he starred in Charlie's Ghost Story (1995), before he played law clerk "Clint Von Hooser" in the John Grisham movie The Client (1994). This led to his most prominent role, as easy-going charismatic physician "Dr. Mark Greene" on the very popular TV series ER (1994).For his work on ER (1994), he was nominated for an Emmy Award four times For Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, but has never won. However, he has won a Golden Globe Award For Best Performance by an Actor-in-a-TV-Series, and was nominated four times, and also has two Screen Actor's Guild Awards. Prior to playing Dr. Greene, he also played bank breaker turned cold-blooded killer, "Dick Hickock" in the TV movie remake of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1996), which was the best TV movie of the 1996-97 season. During Edwards' hiatus on ER (1994), he went back to the box office circuit to star and to produce the movie Don't Go Breaking My Heart (1999), a complex movie which wasn't a big hit. Edwards, once again, returned to the set of ER (1994), and this time, he signed up for a salary that almost no actor could be paid, so his decision was to stay on the show for 3 more years and possibly to save the money in order to spend a lot of family time and to work on directing later.His first big roles after ER (1994) were that of "Brains" in the movie Thunderbirds (2004), and as "Jim Paretta" in The Forgotten (2004). In the many years that he starred on ER (1994), that show gave him more success in working on and off the set. Also, it gave him a spiritual blessing that so many popular actors have had over the years. Show less «

(2013, on Gotcha!) Well, there's a game you couldn't play today. Isn't that wild? All that innocence...Show more »

(2013, on Gotcha!) Well, there's a game you couldn't play today. Isn't that wild? All that innocence gone. There's no way. It's just tragic. But that movie was pure fun. I'd already done Revenge Of The Nerds with Jeff Kanew, so I already had a great friendship with the director, and he'd gotten the script and convinced them to be able to do a shoot in France and Germany all summer and then come back and shoot at UCLA. Co-starring an unbelievably beautiful and sexy Linda Fiorentino, who made us all laugh. And it's the one film where my kids really make fun of me now. All that blond hair... Show less «

(2013, Pet Sematary II) Oh, my God. A movie I don't think I ever even seen. And yet it's probably th...Show more »

(2013, Pet Sematary II) Oh, my God. A movie I don't think I ever even seen. And yet it's probably the most important movie I've ever worked on, because it's the movie I met my wife on. What's funny, though, is that she doesn't usually do makeup on movies. She's more of a fashion makeup artist. So the coincidence that we would end up in that same place-Peachtree, Georgia!-on that movie... me, who can't even watch horror movies, and she, who doesn't really work on films, and yet we ended up meeting there. It goes back to my earlier comment about how surprises are always the best experiences. Show less «

(2013, on Miracle Mile) Oh, that was great. That was a script by Steve De Jarnatt, who also directed...Show more »

(2013, on Miracle Mile) Oh, that was great. That was a script by Steve De Jarnatt, who also directed. I actually just saw Steve about six months ago in New York. They did a doomsday film festival in New York, so he and I were guests, and they screened Miracle Mile, which I hadn't seen in 20 years or whatever. It's been awhile! But that was a script that everybody wanted to make, but they wanted him to change the ending. It was this great adventure, but they wanted it to have a happy ending. But he stuck it out, and luckily he stuck it out long enough that I was old enough to play the part. So I got to do it, and we did it at a time when there really was no green screen for special effects. You had to shoot what was there. It's amazing how dated that film looks now, because of our ability to do things technically now. I mean, it really looks antiquated. Mare Winningham is one of the greatest actresses ever. It was eight weeks of night shooting, though, so you'd be driving home from work at, like, 6 in the morning, having had a wrap beer, and then you're suddenly going, "Oh my God, what do people think of somebody having a beer at 6 in the morning whenever everyone else is on their way to work? Show less «

There's really no point in having children if you're not going to be home enough to father them.

(2013, on Mr. North) It might be in a selfish way, but it really made me feel good as an actor. It w...Show more »

(2013, on Mr. North) It might be in a selfish way, but it really made me feel good as an actor. It was the last film that John Huston worked on, and he wrote a letter to the financiers as to why I should play that role. It was just with that simple John Huston eloquence, but it just meant the world to me, because he believed that I could do it, and he wrote the letter saying as much. I spent that summer with him in Newport, and he actually passed away while we were making the film. He was just producing-his son [Danny Huston] was directing-but it was a really beautiful and poetic experience, in a way, to do that film. And to hear Lauren Bacall and John talk about those days when they were shooting The African Queen, talking about Bogart and being there-just to witness that was, like, the gift of a lifetime. Show less «

(2013, on Downtown) That was a buddy comedy with Forest Whitaker, but it was so overcomplicated in t...Show more »

(2013, on Downtown) That was a buddy comedy with Forest Whitaker, but it was so overcomplicated in the shooting of it. It was such a simple, funny story, but it got so overshot that all the freshness of it got taken out of it, so I think as a result it ended up being not such a great movie. Because they almost put too much into it. I think they were like, "Oh, we have this funny script, now let's do this," and then they spent a lot of money on stunts, and a lot on this and a lot on that, and I just think the heaviness of it all dragged that movie down. Show less «

Flying back from New York, the flight attendant said, "God, I wished you were here yesterday, we had...Show more »

Flying back from New York, the flight attendant said, "God, I wished you were here yesterday, we had a stroke on the plane". I said, "If I have a stroke on a plane, I hope the pretend doctor isn't the one on the plane. I want a real doctor." Show less «

(2013, on Zodiac) David Fincher is a longtime friend. As a director, my wife had worked with him as ...Show more »

(2013, on Zodiac) David Fincher is a longtime friend. As a director, my wife had worked with him as a makeup artist when he would do Madonna videos years before, and his child and my oldest child were in preschool together, so we're kind of dad-friends through that, too. But then after all these years, I was in New York, and that summer he called me and said, "Hey, there's a part, do you want to come look at it?" And it was unbelievable the amount of work that had gone into the creating of that movie. He sent us all binders of information about the report, filled with all the stuff that Armstrong had actually done, and it was amazing to see that detailed dedication of a filmmaker. Obviously David Fincher is one of the great American filmmakers, but, once again, to watch that kind of process is what's fascinating to me. Show less «

Anthony Edwards

Anthony Edwards's FILMOGRAPHY

Anthony Edwards'S roles

Feedback about this page?