Frank Langella

Frank Langella
Langella at the 2012 Deauville American Film Festival
Born	Frank A. Langella, Jr. (1938-01-01) January 1, 1938 (age 79) Bayonne, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1963–present
Spouse(s)	Ruth Weil (m. 1977; div. 1996)
Partner(s)	Whoopi Goldberg (1996–2001)
Children	2

Frank A. Langella, Jr. (born January 1, 1938) is an American stage and film actor. He has won four Tony Awards, two for Best Leading Actor in a Play for his performance as Richard Nixon in the play Frost/Nixon and for his role as André in The Father and two for Best Featured Actor in a Play for the role of Leslie in Edward Albee's Seascape and for his role as Flegont Alexandrovitch Tropatchov in Ivan Turgenev's Fortune's Fool. Additionally, Langella has won two Obie Awards and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in the film production of Frost/Nixon (2008).

Langella, an Italian American, was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of Angelina and Frank A. Langella Sr., a business executive who was the president of the Bayonne Barrel and Drum Company. Langella attended Washington Elementary School and Bayonne High School in Bayonne. After the family moved to South Orange, New Jersey, he graduated from Columbia High School, in the South Orange-Maplewood School District, in 1955, and graduated from Syracuse University in 1959 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama. He remains a brother of the Alpha Chi Rho fraternity.

Langella appeared off-Broadway (e. g. in The Immoralist at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre in 1963, and Robert Lowell's The Old Glory in 1965) before he made his first foray on a Broadway stage in New York in Federico García Lorca's Yerma at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center, on December 8, 1966. He followed this role by appearing in William Gibson's A Cry of Players, playing a young, highly fictionalized William Shakespeare, opposite Anne Bancroft at the same venue in 1968, and won film fame in two 1970 films: Mel Brooks' The Twelve Chairs and Frank Perry's Diary of a Mad Housewife, being nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer for the latter. Langella won his first Tony Award for his performance in Edward Albee's Seascape and 1975 and was nominated again for what may have been the performance for which he was best known in the early part of his career: the title role of the 1977 Broadway production of Dracula. Despite his initial misgivings about continuing to play the role, he was persuaded to star opposite Laurence Olivier in the subsequent film version directed by John Badham. He eschewed the career of a traditional film star by always making the stage the focal point of his career, appearing on Broadway in such plays as Strindberg's The Father (winning a Drama Desk Award), Match (Tony Award nomination), and Fortune's Fool, for which he won a second Tony Award.