Peter Weller

Peter Weller
Peter Weller
Born	Peter Frederick Weller
Occupation(s)	Actor, director, lecturer
Spouse	Shari Stowe (2006–present)

Peter Frederick Weller (born June 24, 1947) is an American film and stage actor, director and lecturer.

He is best known to moviegoers as the titular character of RoboCop in the first two RoboCop movies as well as Buckaroo Banzai in the cult-classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. He received an Academy Award nomination for his direction and acting in the 1993 short Partners.

Biography

Early life

Weller was born in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, the son of Dorothy, a homemaker, and Frederick Weller, a lawyer, federal judge, and former helicopter pilot for the Army^[1] who often flew President Lyndon B. Johnson. Weller had a "middle-class Catholic" upbringing.^[2] As a result of his father's army work, Weller spent many years abroad during his childhood. His family lived in Germany for several years before eventually moving to Texas, where he attended Alamo Heights High School in San Antonio. While enrolled at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), he played trumpet in one of the campus bands. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre, and began his acting career after graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Career

Weller's stage career began in the 1970s with appearances on Broadway in Full Circle, directed by Otto Preminger, and Summer Brave, William Inge's rewrite of his play Picnic. About this time, he became a member of the famed Actors' Studio.

He has appeared in more than 50 films and television series, including turns as the title characters in the cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, and blockbuster hits RoboCop and RoboCop 2. He has also appeared in such critically acclaimed movies as Mighty Aphrodite, the Oliver Stone-produced The New Age, and Naked Lunch. In 1995, he appeared in Screamers, a science-fiction film based on the short story "Second Variety" by Philip K. Dick and directed by Christian Duguay. Duguay would later direct Weller in the TV series Engineering an Empire for the History Channel.

On television, he played the shuttle captain in the short-lived show Odyssey 5 and made guest appearances as Terran supremacist John Frederick Paxton in the Star Trek: Enterprise episodes "Demons" and "Terra Prime".

Weller has also directed various projects for television, including episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, Monk, and three episodes of the aforementioned Odyssey 5. He also directed a 1997 adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Gold Coast starring David Caruso and Marg Helgenberger.

Weller is a contributor to the History Channel in several productions, credited as "Peter Weller, Syracuse University," where he is an adjunct faculty member. He is a graduate student in art history at UCLA, focusing on the Italian renaissance. Weller also hosts the series Engineering an Empire for the network.

In 2006, Weller joined the cast of the critically acclaimed drama series 24 as terrorist collaborator Christopher Henderson. Weller received a "cheer" in TV Guide's "Cheers & Jeers" section for his performance. In December 2006, Weller starred as architect Frank Lloyd Wright at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in "Frank's Home", a new play by Richard Nelson.

Personal life

Weller is a fan of Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, who directed him in Beyond the Clouds. In an interview in Cigar Aficionado magazine, he was quoted as saying:

"There is no director living except maybe Kurosawa, Bergman, or Antonioni that I would fall down and do anything for. I met Antonioni three years ago in Taormina at a film festival. I introduced myself and told him that I adored his movies, his contributions to film, because he was the first guy who really started making films about the reality of the vacuity between people, the difficulty in traversing this space between lovers in modern day... and he never gives you an answer, Antonioni - that's the beautiful thing."^[2]