Mandy Patinkin (IPA: /pəˈtɪŋkɨn/) (born November 30, 1952) is an American actor of stage and screen and a tenor vocalist. Patinkin is known for his roles in television series such as: Chicago Hope, Dead Like Me and the first two seasons of Criminal Minds. His film credits include The Princess Bride, Yentl, Men With Guns and Dick Tracy.
Patinkin was born Mandel Bruce Patinkin (Yiddish/Hebrew: Menachem Mendel) in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Doris "Doralee" (née Sinton), a homemaker, and Lester Patinkin, who was the head of the People's Iron & Metal Company and the Scrap Corporation of America. His mother wrote Grandma Doralee Patinkin's Jewish Family Cookbook. Patinkin is a cousin of Mark Patinkin, author and nationally syndicated columnist for The Providence Journal, and Jason "Dink" Patinkin, President of Columbia University's EarthCo. One of his other cousins is Sheldon Patinkin of Columbia College's Chicago Theater Department and a founder of The Second City.
Patinkin grew up in a middle class Jewish family and was raised in Conservative Judaism, attending religion school daily "from the age of seven to 13 or 14" and singing in synagogue choirs. He attended South Shore High School, Kenwood Academy (1970 graduate), the University of Kansas, and Juilliard School of Drama. At Juilliard, he was a classmate of Kelsey Grammer. When the producers of Cheers were auditioning for the role of Dr. Frasier Crane, Patinkin was the one who put Grammer's name forward.
After some TV commercial and radio appearances, including the CBS Radio Mystery Theater in 1974, Patinkin's initial success came in musical theater, when he played the part of Che in Evita on Broadway in 1979. Patinkin went on to win that year's Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. He then moved to film, playing parts in movies such as Yentl and Ragtime. He returned to Broadway in 1984 to star in the Pulitzer Prize winning musical Sunday in the Park with George, which saw him earn another Tony Award nomination for Best Actor (Musical).
Patinkin played Inigo Montoya in Rob Reiner's 1987 The Princess Bride (which Patinkin considers his favorite role), in which he delivers what is arguably the best-remembered line in the film: "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die". Over the next decade he continued to appear in various movies, such as Dick Tracy and Alien Nation.
On Broadway, over the next decade, he appeared in the Tony Award-winning musical The Secret Garden for 706 performances. He also released two solo albums, titled Mandy Patinkin and Dress Casual.
In 1994, he took the role of Dr. Jeffrey Geiger on CBS's Chicago Hope for which he won an Emmy Award. However, despite the award and the ratings success of the show, Patinkin left the show during the second season, as he was unhappy spending so much time away from his wife. He returned to the show in 1999 at the beginning of the sixth season, but it was later cancelled in 2000. Since Chicago Hope, Patinkin has appeared in a number of films. However, he has mostly performed as a singer, releasing three more albums.
In 1998, he debuted his most personal project, Mamaloshen, a collection of traditional, classic, and contemporary songs sung entirely in Yiddish ("Mamaloshen" is Yiddish for "mother tongue"). The stage production of Mamaloshen was performed on and off–Broadway, and has toured throughout the country. The recording of Mamaloshen won the Deutschen Schallplattenpreis (Germany’s equivalent of the Grammy Award).
He returned to Broadway in 2000 in the New York Shakespeare Festival's The Wild Party, earning another Tony Award nomination for Best Actor (Musical). Recently, he has also been seen in the Showtime comedy-drama Dead Like Me as Rube Sofer. In 2004, he played a six–week engagement of his one–man concert at the Off–Broadway complex Dodger Stages.
In September 2005, he debuted in the role of Jason Gideon, an experienced profiler just coming back to work after a series of nervous breakdowns, the result of six members of his team's deaths - which he feels responsible for, in the CBS crime drama Criminal Minds. The show aired in the slot immediately after the 2007 Super Bowl.
On Friday, July 13, 2007, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Patinkin was absent from a table read for Criminal Minds and may not return for a third season. The departure from the show was not due to contractual or salary matters, but over creative differences. Many weeks before his departure, in a videotaped interview carried in the online magazine Monaco Revue, Patinkin told journalists at the Festival de Télévision de Monte-Carlo that he loathed violence on television and was uncomfortable with certain scenes in Criminal Minds. He also spoke of having planned to tour the world with a musical and wanting to inject more comedy into the entertainment business. In later episodes during the 2007-2008 season, Patinkin's character was written out of the series.
Patinkin married actress and writer Kathryn Grody in 1980. They have two sons, Isaac and Gideon.
Patinkin suffered from keratoconus, a degenerative eye disease, in the mid-1990s. This led to two corneal transplants, his right cornea in 1997 and his left in 1998. He also was diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer in 2004. He celebrated his first year of recovery by doing a 280-mile charity bike ride with his son Isaac — the Arava Institute Hazon Israel Ride: Cycling for Peace, Partnership & Environmental Protection. He subsequently joined the boards of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and Hazon.
Patinkin has been involved in a variety of Jewish causes and cultural activities. He sings in Yiddish, often in concert, and on his album Mamaloshen. He also wrote introductions for two books on Jewish culture, The Jewish American Family Album, by Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler, and Grandma Doralee Patinkin's Holiday Cookbook: A Jewish Family's Celebrations, by his mother, Doralee Patinkin Rubin.
Patinkin contributed to the children's book Dewey Doo-it Helps Owlie Fly Again: A Musical Storybook inspired by Christopher Reeve prior to Christopher and Dana Reeve's deaths. The award winning book, published in 2005, benefits the Christopher Reeve Foundation and includes an audio CD with Mandy Patinkin singing and reading the story as well as Dana Reeve and Bernadette Peters singing.
Awards
Nominations
Patinkin can also be heard in Adam Guettel's Myths and Hymns, the Placido Domingo-starring studio cast recording of Man of La Mancha (1996), the Leonard Bernstein compilation Leonard Bernstein's New York (1996), Madonna's album I'm Breathless (1990), the studio cast recording of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific (1986), and the concert version of Sondheim´s Follies in Follies in Concert (1985).
