William H. Macy

Thirty years ago this year, a 46-year-old character actor talked his way into the part that made him. The Coens were considering William H. Macy for the sheriff in Fargo; he wanted Jerry, the car salesman who hires two men to kidnap his own wife. He read twice, heard nothing, found out they were casting in New York and got on a plane to crash the session. Then he told Ethan Coen he'd shoot his dog if the part went to somebody else. It didn't.

A student of David Mamet

He was born in Miami on 13 March 1950 and raised in Georgia and Maryland, the son of a decorated wartime pilot who later worked in construction and insurance.

He began a veterinary degree in West Virginia and transferred to Goddard College in Vermont, where one of the teachers was a young playwright called David Mamet. He graduated in 1972, and that connection shaped the next fifty years.

With Mamet he set up the St. Nicholas Theater in Chicago the same year and, in 1985, the Atlantic Theater Company in New York, which is still going. In between he tended bar, worked as a carpenter, did a great deal of stage work and took whatever small screen parts came.

Mamet put him in 'House of Games' (1987) and 'Things Change' (1988), then handed him the lead in Oleanna (1994), the film of his play about a professor accused of harassment by a student.

Jerry Lundegaard

Fargo arrived in 1996. His Jerry, a mediocre man smiling while everything collapses around him, brought an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor and a label he later grumbled about: for years the offers were all anxious losers.

He played them well enough. Paul Thomas Anderson used him twice, as the assistant director whose wife humiliates him at every party in Boogie Nights (1997) and as the ruined former quiz-show prodigy in Magnolia (1999).

The same stretch brought Air Force One (1997), Wag the Dog (1997), written by Mamet, Pleasantville (1998) and the Psycho remake (1998).

The man everybody called

The following decade he barely stopped: Jurassic Park III (2001), the professional jinx of The Cooler (2003), the racing commentator in Seabiscuit (2003), the senator in Thank You for Smoking (2006) and the hit comedy Wild Hogs (2007).

In 2002 he did something different, co-writing and starring in the television film 'Door to Door', about a door-to-door salesman with cerebral palsy. It won him two Emmys for the same piece of work, one for acting and one for writing.

He produced Transamerica (2005), which got his wife an Oscar nomination, and in 2014 he directed for the first time with Rudderless, which he also co-wrote, produced and appeared in.

Other people's films kept using him too: the investigator in The Lincoln Lawyer (2011), the priest in The Sessions (2012) and the grandfather in Room (2015).

Frank Gallagher

The role most people have actually watched came when he was sixty. In Shameless (2011-2021), the American version of the Channel 4 series, he played Frank Gallagher, a shameless drunk sponging off his six children for eleven seasons.

He stayed for all of them, opposite Emmy Rossum and a very young Jeremy Allen White, and won three Screen Actors Guild awards for it. Earlier he had been Dr Morgenstern in the first seasons of ER.

Family, and the current diary

He married the actress Felicity Huffman in September 1997, after fifteen years of on-and-off courtship. They have two daughters, and in March 2012 the pair were given their Hollywood Walk of Fame stars on the same day in a rare double ceremony.

In March 2019 they were both drawn into the American college admissions bribery case. Huffman pleaded guilty to paying 15,000 dollars to have a daughter's entrance exam corrected and was sentenced to fourteen days in prison. Macy was named in the complaint but prosecutors never charged him.

At 76 he is working as much as ever. He was in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) and spent 2025 on Edgar Wright's The Running Man and on Train Dreams, Clint Bentley's drama with Joel Edgerton, which Netflix released in November.

'The Deputy', a contemporary western with Macy as a police chief, came out on 25 September 2026, and he is currently shooting 'The Land', Dan Fogelman's Hulu series, as the owner of a Cleveland football team.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for William H. Macy is WarGames (1983); in all, 48 films and 3 TV shows over 42 years. They have worked as actor in 50, producer in 2, director in 1 and writer in 1. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Shameless (US) (2011), with 82 votes. Their busiest decade is the 1990s, with 17 titles. The person they have worked with most is Julianne Moore, on 5 films, among them Boogie Nights and Magnolia.