Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia
Hecht, Paul
Stage, film, and TV actor, born in London, England in 1941. He was a member of the first graduating class of the National Theatre School of Canada (1963).
He has recorded extensively for the CBC, where he began his career as a staff announcer in Montreal in the early ‘60’s. During that time he worked with the legendary radio director Rupert Caplan and hosted a live radio show from Expo ’67 in Montreal with Lise Payette.
At the Shaw Festival he has performed in plays by Shaw, Chekhov, Turgenev, Handke, Kaufman-Ferber, Brecht, Harwood, Osborne, Dickens and Pinter. He also performed at the Manitoba Theatre Centre as the son in Mother Courage (1964-65).
He made his debut on Broadway as the Player in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (Tony award nomination 1968). His most recent Broadway appearance was in the dual roles of John Ruskin and Jerome K. Jerome in Stoppard’s Invention of Love. Other Broadway roles include John Dickinson in 1776 (performed at the Nixon White House), Nathan in the Bock-Harnick musical Rothschilds, Rufio in Shaw's Caesar & Cleopatra, and Belcredi in Pirandello's Henry IV, (both with Rex Harrison), Dick Wagner in Tom Stoppard's Night & Day, (with Maggie Smith), and the Director in Noises Off.
Off Broadway roles include George Pye in Humble Boy (Charlotte Jones) at the Manhattan Theater Club and on tour in the UK with the National Theatre; Ralph in the American Premiere of Harold Pinter’s Moonlight at the Roundabout (with Jason Robards); Neil Simons’ London Suite. For his portrayal of Pirandello's Henry IV at the Roundabout he received an OBIE award (1990).
Across the United States he has appeared as Cyrano in the world premiere of the Anthony Burgess translation at the Guthrie in Minneapolis, and as Marc Antony in both Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra at the American Shakespeare Festival, Stratford Connecticut. He has performed with the NY Shakespeare Festival in such roles as Henry V, MacDuff, and Menenius in Coriolanus (with Christopher Walken).
TV audiences may have recognized him over the years as Charles in Kate and Allie, and as a variety of unsavory characters in Law & Order, Queer as Folk, Family Re-Union, I’ll Take Manhattan, All My Children, and many other shows.
Movie credits include Last Call with Jeremy Irons and Sissy Spacek, Down to Earth with Chris Rock, Private Parts with Howard Stern, Joshua Then and Now with James Woods (dir. Ted Kotcheff).
He works regularly for Recorded Books (Alexander McCall Smith, Ray Bradbury, William Safire, Thomas Mann, Arthur Conan Doyle, Gore Vidal, Balzac). He has appeared on Selected Shorts at Symphony Space since its inception in 1985, and also at the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd St Y. He appeared in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (Stoppard/Previn) and Façade (Walton/Sitwell) with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and was the Narrator of Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat, conducted by Robert Craft. He has performed with the Allentown Symphony and also performs a program of John Donne poetry with the Early Music Group Parthenia. He can be heard as the evil Emperor Palpatine in Highbridge audio's recording of The Return of the Jedi.
He served as President of the New York Branch of the Screen Actors Guild from 1991-1995.
Last updated 2009-04-06
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The Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia web site was originally conceived and developed in 1996 by Gaetan Charlebois—theatre critic, playwright, and actor.
