Anthony LaPaglia

Anthony LaPaglia is an Australian-American actor whose gruff authority, hangdog warmth and bruised, working-class gravity have made him one of the more quietly durable leading men of his generation. Born on 31 January 1959 in Adelaide, South Australia, he has built a career that straddles three countries and every medium available to an actor, winning a Tony, a Primetime Emmy, a Golden Globe and three AACTA Awards along the way, and anchoring films and series as varied as Lantana, Without a Trace, Frasier, Annabelle Comes Home and the Arthur Miller revival that made him a Broadway star.

LaPaglia grew up in the northeastern suburbs of Adelaide, the eldest of three sons born to Egidio "Eddie" LaPaglia, a Calabrian-born car dealer and auto mechanic who had emigrated from Bovalino at eighteen, and Maria Johannes (née Brendel), a Dutch-born secretary and model. His younger brother Jonathan LaPaglia would go on to his own acting and hosting career, most visibly as host of Australian Survivor. Anthony was educated at St Pius X School in Windsor Gardens, then at the Catholic boys' school Rostrevor College and Norwood High School through the 1970s. He worked for a time as an elementary school teacher and, like a character from one of his later films, as a shoe salesman for Florsheim Shoes, taking acting classes at the South Australian Castings Agency in his late teens. Rejected by the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, he persuaded Florsheim to transfer him to the United States in 1984 and paid his way through further training in New York by continuing to sell shoes.

His breakthrough came through a series of tough, watchful supporting turns in American films of the late 1980s and early 1990s, where his olive-skinned, Brooklyn-ready presence and flair for accents quickly saw him typecast, accurately or not, as Italian-American. He appeared opposite Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler in Big Business (1988), played the third-billed cop in Ron Shelton's boxing drama The Great White Hype, and stole scenes as the menacing, Charles Grodin-quoting detective Tony Giardino in So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993). Other notable credits from this period include Allison Anders's Mi Vida Loca, the cult retail comedy Empire Records (1995), Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown (1999), and Sam Mendes's prohibition-era drama Road to Perdition (2002), in which he played Al Capone's fixer Frank Nitti.

Television offered him his first true lead. In 1996 he took over as defence attorney Jimmy Wyler for the second and final season of Steven Bochco's ambitious legal drama Murder One, replacing Daniel Benzali and fronting the show's reworked multi-case format. A few years later, he entered the ensemble of Frasier in a recurring role that became one of the show's most beloved comic creations. As Simon Moon, the boorish, perpetually soused English brother of Daphne Moon, he appeared across episodes such as "Dark Side of the Moon," the two-part "Something Borrowed, Someone Blue" and the two-part "And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon," winning the 2002 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his work on the sitcom.

It was on Broadway, though, that LaPaglia cemented his reputation as a serious dramatic actor. His 1997–98 performance as the doomed Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone in the Roundabout revival of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge was received as a career-defining piece of work, earning him the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play together with the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards. He returned to Broadway in the 2010 revival of Ken Ludwig's farce Lend Me a Tenor at the Music Box Theatre, and has periodically gone back to the stage between screen commitments.

Between 2002 and 2009 he anchored one of American network television's most consistent dramas, CBS's Without a Trace, as Jack Malone, the haunted, hard-nosed FBI Missing Persons supervisor modelled loosely on real-life agents. Across 160 episodes he gave Malone a banked intensity and moral exhaustion that earned him the 2004 Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series – Drama, and further Emmy and SAG nominations. He also served as a producer on the series, shaping its tone over its seven-year run.

Alongside the American work he kept returning home to Australia, where he delivered some of his most admired performances. In Ray Lawrence's Lantana (2001) his introspective, guilt-ridden detective Leon Zat earned him the AFI/AACTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role and remains a benchmark of twenty-first-century Australian cinema. He produced and starred in Robert Connolly's journalism thriller Balibo (2009) as Roger East, winning a second AACTA for Best Actor, and a third AACTA followed for his supporting turn in Justin Kurzel's Port Arthur drama Nitram (2021). His Australian credits also include Holding the Man, The Bank, Spotswood, and the family film Happy Feet, in which he voiced the penguin elder Ramón's foil.

For younger audiences he has been introduced through horror. He played Samuel Mullins, the grieving doll-maker whose home harbours the cursed figurine, in the prequel Annabelle: Creation (2017), and reprised the role in Annabelle Comes Home (2019) within the Conjuring Universe. Other recent work includes the mini-series Bad Mothers, the Paramount+ legal drama The Twelve and stage tours of Sam Shepard's True West.

Off screen, LaPaglia has been married three times. His first marriage was to actress Cherie Michan. He met Australian actress Gia Carides in Sydney in 1992, co-starred with her in the 1994 comedy Paperback Romance, and married her in 1998; their daughter Bridget was born in January 2003. The couple divorced in 2016, and in April 2018 he married actress Alexandra Henkel. A naturalised American citizen who retains his Australian citizenship, he is a long-standing supporter of Sydney FC in the A-League and was briefly its chairman, reflecting a lifelong passion for football that sits a little incongruously with the scowling, world-weary cops and fathers he has so often played on screen.