William Mesnik
William Mesnik is an American character actor, musician and playwright who appeared in numerous films and television series of the 1990s and 2000s.
He started his career as a singer-songwriter in the mid-1970s, playing in such Greenwich Village coffee houses as Paul Colby's The Other End.
He honed his playwriting skills as a regular contributor to The West Bank Downstairs Theater Bar repertory during the 80s, then went on to create several genre-bending musical theater pieces, including his music-drama about folk singers during the blacklist Three Songs, garnering "Critic's Choice" in the Los Angeles Times and a "Best Ensemble" Nomination.
In 2000 he released an album, Campaign Songs, as an accompaniment to his drama Muckrakers: an evening of presidential campaign songs and family dysfunction, which debuted at FCT on the eve of the United States presidential election.
A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Mesnik's theatrical resume encompasses Broadway, Off-Broadway, major regional venues such as Yale Rep, The Old Globe, McCarter Theatre, The Kennedy Center, and Actors Theater of Louisville, and European-American collaborative productions of Shakespeare's King Lear and Chekhov’s Ivanov. In 2002, he was nominated for an Ovation Award for his role as Holofernes in Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost,produced by A Noise Within.
He became a familiar face in the 90s and 2000s from his numerous commercial, episodic television and film appearances, including: L.A. Law, Law & Order, Lois and Clark, Murphy Brown, That '70s Show, Spin City, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Dharma & Greg, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Minority Report, Titanic, Stonebrooke, and two films by John Schlesinger: The Next Best Thing and Eye for an Eye.Filmography
