Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Born On This Day- October 26th... Anthony Rapp

Blond, wiry, intense, likable Anthony Rapp has worked in several genres as a child, teen & adult. Rapp has also established a steady career as a character actor in films. I know him from his role as Mark Cohen, the uptight aspiring filmmaker in the film version of Rent, having missed it on stage. Her created the role & played in Rent Off-Broadway & on Broadway. Rent is the late Jonathan Larson's musical phenomenon that ran for years without my ever catching a production.



In films, the young actor made his debut as a lad with a crush on an older woman in Adventures in Babysitting, as an obnoxious, bespectacled anti-Semite in the 1950s-set  drama School Ties & as a high school outsider who gets lucky in Dazed & Confused .

Born in Chicago, Rapp began appearing in musicals at 6 years old & made his professional debut at 9 in a road tour production of Evita. As a child he toured in The King & I with Yul Brynner & at age 10 was on Broadway The Little Prince & the Aviator. Rapp originated the role of Ben, the son of affluent, gullible parents in the Broadway production of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation & in the film version.

Rapp has been openly & vocally gay, he prefers the term "queer" since 1992, proclaiming that the revelation has not hurt his career in the least. Back on stage, he was Charlie Brown in the 1999 revival of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, & he played the title role in The Commonwealth Shakespeare's production of Henry V in Boston in the summer of 2002.

He is a totally talented cutie. I think it is swell that he sang REM's Losing My Religion for his audition for the original production of Rent. I was pleasantly surprised with the film version of Rent, & his work was the highlight. Rapp has a memoir about his days in Rent, as well as his mother's struggle with cancer, & his experiences growing up, entitled Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, & the Musical Rent. He lives in NYC with his partner- actor Rodney To. He turns a very boyish 40 years old today.

Have any readers seen him live?




No comments:

Post a Comment