Ed Dixon

Ed Dixon, born September 2, 1948, in Oklahoma, is an American actor, playwright, and composer whose Broadway career spans from 1971 to 2011. Over the course of that career he accumulated credits across a wide range of productions, establishing himself as a versatile character performer.

Dixon's Broadway appearances include No, No, Nanette, The King of Schnorrers, The Three Musketeers, Cyrano, Les Misérables, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Anything Goes, The Iceman Cometh, The Best Man, Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Sunday in the Park with George, and Mary Poppins. Among his most sustained Broadway engagements was his tenure in Les Misérables, where he played Thenardier during the production's second and longest-running cast.

Beyond Broadway, Dixon served as a soloist in the Kennedy Center's premiere production of Leonard Bernstein's Mass, and appears on the cast recording of that production, which was conducted by Bernstein himself. He can also be heard on the cast recording of the 2001 national tour of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, in which he played the Governor opposite Ann-Margret as Miss Mona and Gary Sandy as Ed Earl Dodd. Dixon also played Max in the 1996 U.S. tour of Sunset Boulevard, a role he returned to in a production that earned him the 2010 Helen Hayes Award for best supporting actor in a musical. He received an earlier Helen Hayes Award nomination for best supporting actor in a musical for his work in Kathy Lee Gifford's Saving Aimee. In 2018, he portrayed Judge Turpin opposite Terrence Mann in the title role of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at the Connecticut Repertory Theatre.

As a writer, Dixon composed the book, music, and lyrics for the musical Shylock, for which he received a Drama Desk Award nomination in 1987. He is also the author and composer of Fanny Hill, which originated at Goodspeed Musicals before opening in New York at the York Theatre and earned two Drama Desk Award nominations and one Drama-Logue Award nomination. Dixon co-wrote the musical Richard Cory with playwright A. R. Gurney; the work won both the Festival Prize and the Audience Award at the New York Musical Theatre Festival. His subsequent work, Whodunit... The Musical, based on a mystery by Mary Roberts Rinehart, has been produced at regional venues across the United States. For his off-Broadway solo show Georgie: My Adventures with George Rose, Dixon received the 2017 Drama Desk Award for best solo performance.

Dixon released a memoir, Secrets of a Life on Stage... and Off, on May 3, 2012.