Dakin Matthews

A actor, playwright, dramaturge, teacher, director, emeritus English professor, and Shakespeare scholar. He was a Founding Member and current Board Member of The Acting Company. where he appeared in The Hostage, The School for Scandal, The Lower Depths, and Women Beware Women, as well as in a number of Salon readings. He was also a founding member of Sam Mendes’ Bridge Project, where he appeared in The Cherry Orchard and The Winter’s Tale. He has been a leading actor in over 250 professional plays–on Broadway in To Kill a Mockingbird, The Iceman Cometh, Waitress, The Audience, Rocky, The Best Man, A Man for all Seasons, and Shakespeare’s Henry IV; off-Broadway and regionally, at The Mark Taper Forum, The Ahmanson Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, The Public Theater, Los Angeles Theatre Center, The Acting Company, American Conservatory Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, PCPA in Santa Maria, South Coast Rep, The Shakespeare Theatre, PICT, and various other professional theatres. He is a member of both the Motion Picture and the Television Academies. He has appeared in over thirty feature films, TV movies, and miniseries, including recently True Grit, Lincoln, and Bridge of Spies. He has made over three hundred appearances on television, performing as a regular or recurring character in ten different series, including Desperate Housewives, The King of Queens, and Gilmore Girls. He has been the Artistic Director of four professional theatre companies, including two he founded. His multiple award-winning scripts–adaptations, translations, originals–have been performed at Juilliard, the Goodman Theatre, the Old Globe Theatre, Lincoln Center Theater, American Conservatory Theatre, California Actors Theatre, The Antaeus Company, Andak Stage Company, and the Seattle, California, and Berkeley Shakespeare Festivals. His ten rhyming verse translations of Golden Age comedies are currently being published by LinguaText. He has taught at Juilliard, ACT in San Francisco, USD/Globe MFA Program, the Actors Center in NY, CalArts, and Cal State East Bay, where he retired as a Full Professor. He has directed at the Old Globe, the Denver Center, ACT, Trinity Rep, Juilliard, the Antaeus Company, Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, San Jose Repertory Theatre, and California Actors Theatre. He has dramaturged Shakespeare for the country’s leading directors, including Jack O’Brien, Dan Sullivan, Darko Tresnjak, Michael Sexton, and John Rando. His text, Shakespeare Spoken Here, has been adopted at San Francisco State, Cal State Hayward, U.C. Irvine, University of San Diego, and the American Conservatory Theatre. He has given workshops in Shakespearean verse-speaking across the country and around the world.