Kathleen Chalfant

Kathleen Chalfant (born Kathleen Ann Bishop on January 14, 1945) is an acclaimed American actress whose career spans more than five decades of stage, television, and film work. Raised in a boarding house in Oakland after being born in San Francisco, she was the daughter of Coast Guard officer William Bishop and was immersed early in a community of artists and activists that shaped her later commitments. She honed her craft in New York studying with Wynn Handman, a protégé of Sanford Meisner, and also trained with Alessandro Fersen in Rome, experiences that gave her a versatile technique admired by peers. Chalfant began her professional life off‑stage as a production coordinator at Playwrights Horizons in the mid‑1970s, but made her Off‑Broadway acting debut in Cowboy Pictures in June 1974, launching a prolific run of more than three dozen Off‑Broadway productions. Her Broadway breakthrough came with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (1993), earning a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play, and she later won multiple honors—including Obie, Drama Desk, Outer Circle Critics, and Lucille Lortel awards—for her riveting portrayal of Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson’s Wit (1998), a role for which she famously shaved her head and infused with personal grief over her half‑brother’s terminal cancer. Additional accolades arrived with a second Obie for Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads (2003) and a lifetime‑achievement Obie in 2018. On television she has appeared in recurring roles on Law & Order, House of Cards, Rescue Me, and The Guardian, while her film work includes Isn’t It Delicious and Kinsey. Beyond performance, she is an outspoken advocate for civil rights, participating in the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Guantanamo Lawyers Panel and supporting the BDS movement, reflecting her belief that theater can serve as a platform for social change. In her personal life she married photographer Henry Chalfant in 1966 and they have two children, son David, a musician, and daughter Andromache, a set designer.