Elliott Gould

Elliott Gould, born Elliott Goldstein on August 29, 1938, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York City, is an American actor whose career has spanned stage, film, and television. His father, Bernard Goldstein, worked as a textiles buyer in the garment business, while his mother, Lucille, sold artificial flowers to beauty shops. His family is Jewish, with grandparents who emigrated from Ukraine, Poland, and Russia. Gould attended the Professional Children's School before launching a professional career that would take him from Broadway chorus roles to major Hollywood stardom.

Gould made his Broadway debut in 1957 in a minor role in the musical Rumple, which starred Eddie Foy Jr., Gretchen Wyler, and Stephen Douglass, with music and lyrics by Ernest G. Schweikert and Frank Reardon. He followed that with small parts in Say, Darling, the Betty Comden and Adolph Green musical that ran from 1958 to 1959 and featured Robert Morse, David Wayne, and Vivian Blaine, and then in the French musical Irma La Douce, which ran from 1960 to 1961 with Elizabeth Seal and Clive Revill. His Broadway career continued through 1996 and included productions such as Drat! The Cat!, Little Murders, The Guys in the Truck, and Deathtrap. A significant early milestone came in 1962 with I Can Get It for You Wholesale, in which he had a starring role. The production ran for 300 performances and is also notable as the place where Gould met his future wife, Barbra Streisand. He was also cast in A Way of Life by Murray Schisgal but departed before the production reached Broadway.

Gould made his feature film debut in the William Dieterle comedy Quick, Let's Get Married, filmed in 1964 alongside Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, and Barbara Eden, though the film did not receive a full release until 1971. He played a mute character and received star billing. His next film appearance came in William Friedkin's The Night They Raided Minsky's, a 1968 musical comedy produced by Norman Lear that also starred Jason Robards, Denholm Elliott, and Jack Burns, offering a fictional account of the invention of the striptease at Minsky's Burlesque in 1925.

Gould reached a new level of prominence in 1969 with Paul Mazursky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, in which he played Ted Henderson alongside Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, and Dyan Cannon. The film was both a critical and commercial success, and his performance earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, a prize that ultimately went to Gig Young for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? The following year, he starred as Captain Trapper John McIntyre in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, a wartime satire that became a major box office hit and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture. His work in that film earned him nominations for both the BAFTA Award and the Golden Globe Award. The back-to-back successes of those two films led to Gould appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1970.

Also released in 1970 was Getting Straight, a Richard Rush-directed comedy-drama in which Gould played a Vietnam veteran drawn into student protests, with Candice Bergen co-starring as his girlfriend. Gould continued his collaboration with Altman in The Long Goodbye, a 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel in which he played detective Philip Marlowe, and California Split in 1974. Other notable film credits include Alan Arkin's Little Murders, released in 1971, in which Gould reprised his stage role; Ingmar Bergman's English-language film The Touch, also from 1971, making Gould the first Hollywood star to appear in a Bergman film; Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far in 1977; Capricorn One and The Silent Partner, both from 1978; Barry Levinson's Bugsy in 1991; American History X in 1998; and Steven Soderbergh's Contagion in 2011. He also appeared in Ruby Sparks in 2012 and played Reuben Tishkoff across four entries in the Ocean's film series, released in 2001, 2004, 2007, and 2018.

On television, Gould is recognized for his recurring role as Jack Geller on the NBC sitcom Friends, a part he played from 1994 to 2004, and for his role as Ezra Goldman on the Showtime series Ray Donovan, which he held from 2013 to 2016. He also became a member of Saturday Night Live's Five Timers' Club, having hosted the program six times between 1976 and 1980. In 1972, he appeared as a guest in David Winters' television special The Special London Bridge Special, which starred Tom Jones and Jennifer O'Neill.