Aidan Quinn

Aidan Quinn is an American actor born on March 8, 1959, in Chicago, Illinois, to Irish Catholic parents. His father, Michael Quinn, taught English literature at Rock Valley College, and his mother, Teresa, worked as a homemaker, bookkeeper, and in the travel business. Quinn was raised across multiple locations, including Chicago, Rockford, Illinois, and Dublin and Birr, County Offaly, Ireland. At nineteen, while working as a roofer, he decided to pursue acting and trained at the Piven Theatre Workshop. He has three brothers and a sister: his older brother Declan is a cinematographer, his younger sister Marian is an actress, director, and writer, and his brother Paul, also an actor and director, died in 2015 at the age of 55.

Quinn made his film debut in Reckless in 1984, followed by a breakthrough performance in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), in which he played "Dez," the love interest of Rosanna Arquette's character. That same year, he starred in the NBC television film An Early Frost, portraying a young gay lawyer dying of AIDS alongside Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, and Sylvia Sidney, earning his first Primetime Emmy Award nomination. He appeared in The Mission (1986) as Robert De Niro's brother, and played escaped convict Richard "Stick" Montgomery in the action comedy Stakeout (1987) opposite Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez. In 1988, Quinn had been cast as Jesus Christ in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, but lost the role when Paramount Pictures dropped distribution rights and Universal Pictures acquired the film, with Willem Dafoe ultimately taking the part.

Quinn made his Broadway debut in 1988 in the drama A Streetcar Named Desire, for which he received the Theatre World Award that same year. His stage work coincided with a prolific film career that expanded significantly through the 1990s, encompassing Avalon (1990), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), Benny & Joon (1993), Legends of the Fall (1994), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), Michael Collins (1996), and Practical Magic (1998). In 2000, he portrayed Paul McCartney in the VH1 television drama Two of Us. He played Kerry Max Cook in The Exonerated (2005), based on a true story about death row exonerations, and starred in the NBC drama The Book of Daniel in 2006, which was canceled after three weeks with five episodes left unaired. His second Emmy nomination came in 2007 for the television film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

Quinn has been notably active in Irish cinema throughout his career. He is a four-time Irish Film and Television Award nominee and won the IFTA for Best Supporting Actor in a Film for Conor McPherson's The Eclipse (2009). His other credits include Song for a Raggy Boy (2003), Wild Child (2008), Stay (2013), and Unknown (2011), bringing his total feature film appearances to more than 80. He played a cameo role as William Rainsferd in the World War II-set film Sarah's Key (2010). From 2012 to 2019, Quinn starred as Captain Thomas "Tommy" Gregson in the CBS television series Elementary.

In 1987, Quinn married Elizabeth Bracco, his co-star from Stakeout and the sister of actress Lorraine Bracco. They have two daughters: Ava Eileen, born in 1989, who is autistic and appeared as the baby "David" in Avalon, and Mia, born in 1998, who played a ghost in The Eclipse. The family previously lived in Englewood, New Jersey, and now resides in Palisades, Rockland County, New York, as well as in the Catskills region of Ulster County, New York.

Quinn has participated in several philanthropic efforts, including charity golf events for the East Lake Foundation and Samuel L. Jackson's "One for the Boys" testicular cancer awareness campaign. He attended a 2010 premiere benefit screening of A Shine of Rainbows supporting the International Children's Media Center and The American Ireland Fund. He spoke at the 2003 "Night of Too Many Stars" gala benefiting The Autism Coalition and served as an honorary board member of the National Alliance for Autism Research, which later merged with Autism Speaks. In 1991, he participated in MTV's "Books: Feed Your Head" literacy promotion by reading a segment from Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.