John Spencer

From West Wing Wiki

John Spencer, born John Speshock (December 20 1946 – December 16 2005), was an American actor who was best known for his role as Leo McGarry, the White House Chief of Staff on the television series The West Wing.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Family 1.2 Acting Career 1.3 Death 2 Trivia 3 Selected Filmography 4 References 5 Links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Family

Spencer was born in Paterson, New Jersey (although some sources say New York City) and grew up in nearby Totowa, the son of blue-collar parents, an Irish American father and an Ukrainian-American mother.[1]

[edit] Acting Career

Spencer began his television career on The Patty Duke Show. He played Harrison Ford's detective sidekick in the 1990 courtroom thriller Presumed Innocent. In the early 1990s, he was a regular cast member on L.A. Law, playing the rumpled, pugnacious associate attorney Tommy Mullaney. Later, he acted in the romantic comedy Forget Paris (1995) as a wisecracking co-worker to Billy Crystal's basketball referee; The Rock (1996) as the weasely FBI official Womack, and the 2002 theatre production of The Exonerated. Paralleling his character on The West Wing, he was a recovering alcoholic and divorcee. Spencer was actually the first actor cast in the West Wing.

Spencer won an Obie Award for the 1981 off-Broadway production of "Still Life," about a Vietnam veteran, and received a Drama Desk nomination for "The Day Room." After two previous nominations, Spencer won his first Emmy Award in 2002 for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for his portrayal of Leo McGarry on The West Wing. The episodes Spencer submitted for judging by the Emmy voters were "Bartlet for America", in which Leo has to testify in front of a Congressional committee about the President's health and flashes back to his own medical lapse, and "We Killed Yamamoto".

Although not as visibly as his co-star Martin Sheen, Spencer believed and fought for many of the same causes. He was probably best known for his work for AIDS awareness. He referred to himself as a "dyed-in-the-wool liberal" and described Franklin Delano Roosevelt as one of his heroes.

[edit] Death

Spencer died following a heart attack in a Los Angeles hospital on December 16, 2005, four days before what would have been his fifty-ninth birthday. West Wing cast mate Stockard Channing was visiting with Spencer at the time of his death. He was buried in Laurel Grove Memorial Park in Totowa, New Jersey. At the time of his death, Spencer had appeared in two of the five West Wing episodes then in post-production. Those episodes were Running Mates and The Cold. His death was subsequently written into the show as his character, vice presidential candidate McGarry, dying of a heart attack on election night. Coincidentally, the fictional character had a disconcerting history of heart problems.

[edit] Trivia

An only child of a working-class family (his father was a truck driver who never finished grammar school and his mother was an occasional waitress), both of his grandfathers were alcoholics.

[edit] Selected Filmography

• WarGames (1983)
• The Protector (1985)
• Hiding Out (1987)
• Presumed Innocent (1990)
• L.A. Law (1990-1994)
• Wing Commander IV (1994)
• Forget Paris (1995)
• The Rock (1996)
• Cop Land (1997)
• The Negotiator (1998)

[edit] References

John Spencer at Imdb

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at John Spencer (actor). The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with West Wing Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.

[edit] Links

John Spencer Tribute Page