David Birney

David Edwin Birney (April 23, 1939 – April 27, 2022) was an American actor and director born in Washington, D.C., into an Irish Catholic family. His father, Edwin, worked as a special agent for the FBI, while his mother, Jeanne (née McGee), was a housewife who later became a real estate agent. Birney grew up attending schools in Brooklyn, Ohio, and graduated from West High School in Cleveland, where he was named to the National Honor Society and lettered in basketball, football, and track. He earned a B.A. with High Distinction in English literature and English Honors from Dartmouth College, followed by an M.A. in theatre arts, acting and directing, from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied under Ralph Freud and William Melnitz and held a teaching assistant fellowship. He was later awarded an honorary Ph.D. in Humanities from Southern Utah University.

Birney's professional stage career began while he was serving in the U.S. Army, when he won an All Army Entertainment contest and received the Barter Theatre Award in 1965. The award carried an equity contract with the Barter Theatre, the State Theatre of Virginia, where he starred or appeared in fifteen productions and directed two others. He subsequently performed off-Broadway and in regional repertory theatres before making his New York debut with Joe Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, playing Antipholus of Syracuse in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. His Broadway career spanned 1969 to 1985 and included productions of Antigone, The Playboy of the Western World, The Good Woman of Setzuan, The Miser, and An Enemy of the People, among others. He received the Theatre World Award in 1968. Additional Broadway credits included Amadeus, Benefactors, and Man and Superman. Beyond Broadway, Birney performed leading roles at institutions including the American Shakespeare Festival, Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, Washington D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre, Princeton's McCarter Theatre, and the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival. His stage roles encompassed a wide range of classical and contemporary characters, among them Prince Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Richard III, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Jack Tanner in Man and Superman, Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World, and Jamie in A Moon for the Misbegotten. Washington's Shakespeare Theatre recognized his contribution to classical theatre with its Millennium Award.

On television, Birney built an extensive career across series, miniseries, and television films. He starred in the early 1970s series Bridget Loves Bernie alongside Meredith Baxter, a show centered on an interfaith marriage. He later played the title role in the series Serpico and portrayed Dr. Ben Samuels in St. Elsewhere from 1982 to 1983. His other television appearances included The Adams Chronicles, in which he played John Quincy Adams, as well as Glitter, Live Shot, Fantasy Island, Hawaii Five-O, McMillan and Wife, The F.B.I., Murder She Wrote, and Cannon. His miniseries credits included Testimony of Two Men, Valley of the Dolls, Night of the Fox, and Master of the Game. He also appeared in television films including The Long Journey Home and The Deadly Game, and had roles in the soap operas The Best of Everything and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing. In addition, he played Anakin Skywalker in the radio adaptation of Return of the Jedi.

Birney also worked as a writer and director for the stage. He edited and adapted a two-character play drawn from Mark Twain's shorter works and letters, titled Mark Twain's The Diaries of Adam and Eve, which was presented on the PBS series American Playhouse. He subsequently directed and starred in productions of the piece at regional theatres including the Hartford Stage and the Capital Repertory Theatre, as well as on tour. A second work, A Christmas Pudding, a collage of song, story, and seasonal poetry, was published by Samuel French, Inc. As a narrator of audiobooks, Birney recorded works by authors including Dean Koontz, Paul Theroux, Annie Dillard, and Orson Scott Card, receiving the Audie Award for his reading of Julie Salomon's The Christmas Tree and multiple AudioFile Magazine Earphone Awards.

Birney married actress Meredith Baxter in 1974, following their work together on Bridget Loves Bernie. The couple had three children — Kate, Mollie, and Peter — and divorced in 1989. He served on the Large Theatre Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Theatre and Dance Panel of the Jacob Javits Fellowship Foundation, and the Board of Overseers for the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College, where he also helped establish an endowment dedicated to live performance. He co-chaired the American Diabetes Association for five years and served as an advisor for the Children's Rights Council. In December 2017, it was disclosed that Birney had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He died on April 27, 2022, four days after his 83rd birthday, at his home in Santa Monica, California, where he was in a domestic partnership with Michele Roberge at the time of his death.