David Ackroyd (born May 30, 1940 in Orange, New Jersey) is an American actor, who first came to prominence in soap operas such as The Secret Storm and Another World.
Dark-haired with a serious handsomeness to him, he was able to extend his all-stage career into film and TV in the early 1970s, beginning with daytime leading man outings in The Secret Storm and Another World. He progressed to prime time work as Gary Ewing in Dallas until Ted Shackelford successfully took over the role when the character moved front and center with the spin-off drama Knots Landing. David's prime on-camera work occurred in the late 70s with a series of strong co-star roles in the mini-series The Dark Secret of Harvest Home with Bette Davis and The Word as well as the TV-movies And I Alone Survived and Women in White.
He then began to find supporting roles in such movies as The Mountain Men, The Sound of Murder, Wrestling with God, Dark Angel, Prison Life and Xena: Warrior Princess. However, film stardom eluded him.
On Broadway, Ackroyd appeared in Unlikely Heroes, a 1971 production of three plays based on the stories of Philip Roth; and Children of a Lesser God, in which he replaced John Rubinstein as the lead character James Leeds in 1981.
Since the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Ackroyd has narrated documentary television series like History's Mysteries and UFO Files: "Alien Engineering".
