-: My name is John Connolly,
John Patrick Connolly.
And I have been a working actor since 1971.
And I'm also a Trade Union Executive,
and in residential real estate.
I did 10 years in the Regional Theater,
10 years on Broadway and Off Broadway,
about 500 commercials;
mostly television commercials.
A lot of radio as well.
And for the last 25 years I've been working primarily
in Primetime Television drama and motion pictures,
although I still do theater.
On Broadway I did Big River
which was the Huckleberry Finn Musical by Roger Miller
and I played the awful Pat Finn, Huck's father.
And I played the Lion in the Wizard of Oz.
I've played Hamlet.
I've played Winston Churchill.
I have played a crow.
I've played several women.
I have done a lot of odd things in my life
which I never expected to do.
But working on stage is ultimately I think most satisfying
for most actors
because once a play is rehearsed,
which is the quite exciting
and really wonderful part of acting
in terms of using your own personal tools
to discover the truth in a play.
Once the play opens
the relationship is between you as a performer
and the audience
live every night
eight times a week.
And the theater actually happens in the weird space
between the front row and foot lights.
Where the audience's energy meets yours.
And it's really palpable.
You can really feel it.
It's an extraordinary art form
and I love the theater.
So sometimes the transition from stage work
to doing television or film
is pretty rocky and difficult
for people who are primarily stage actors.
They've got great chops
and bring a lot to the party,
but the,
the subtleties that are captured
by film and digital recording,
they're just, it's astounding.
So the struggle is to in some sense
do as little as possible
with an amazing amount of intent and focus.
So the skills are ultimately quite similar
but it is a really different performance experience.