Jenkins, Richard. A veteran stage, screen, and television actor who has emerged in his sixties as an occasional leading man, Richard Jenkins was born in DeKalb, Illinois in 1947.

 

After appearing throughout the 1970s and early 1980s in a variety of small screen roles, Jenkins became a busy motion picture character actor with parts in such films as Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Little Nikita (1988), Blue Steel (1990), And the Band Played On (1993), and The Mod Squad (1999). The new century would find him in ever-more-prominent roles in Cheaper by the Dozen (2003), I ♥ Huckabees (2004), and North Country (2007), culminating in the Oscar-nominated lead role of Professor Walter Vale in The Visitor (2007) and his comic turn in The Stepbrothers (2008).

Jenkins has played relatively minor roles in three Coen Brothers films: twice as lawyers—Walter Abundas, Ed Crane's friend and father of aspiring pianist Birdy, in The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) and Miles Massey's divorce court nemesis Freddy Bender in Intolerable Cruelty (2003)—and as the hapless, in-love-with-Linda Litzke and hatcheted-to-death-by-Osbourne Cox Ted Treffon, manager of Hardbodies, a Washington, D.C. fitness spa, in Burn After Reading (2008).—David Lavery