John Pankow

John Pankow is an American actor born on April 28, 1954, in St. Louis, Missouri, into a Catholic family of German and Irish descent. The sixth of nine siblings, he grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois, where he attended Maine South High School before enrolling at Northeastern Illinois University. His elder brother is James Pankow, a trombonist, composer, and founding member of the rock group Chicago. Pankow left Northeastern Illinois in his junior year after attending a performance of David Mamet's American Buffalo at the St. Nicholas Theater, an experience that led him to enroll in the theater's two-year training program to focus exclusively on acting.

His professional career began in New York, where a visit to a friend led to an audition for a role in the PBS Great Performances episode "Life on the Mississippi." He went on to appear in multiple Off-Broadway productions, including the New York Shakespeare Festival's The Tempest, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Henry VIII, as well as Brian Friel's Aristocrats and John Patrick Shanley's Italian American Reconciliation. His Broadway career, which spanned from 1980 to 2019, included productions such as Serious Money, The Iceman Cometh, Kiss Me!, Cymbeline, Twelve Angry Men, and Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, in which he played Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, taking over the role from Tim Curry and later reprising it for a touring production.

Pankow's screen career began with minor roles in The Hunger in 1983 and Rambo: First Blood Part II in 1985. His first substantial film role came in William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), in which he played rookie Secret Service agent John Vukovich alongside William Petersen and Willem Dafoe. Friedkin had deliberately sought young stage actors for the project, and Pankow, who had previously appeared with Dafoe in The Hunger, was brought to the director's attention by Petersen and cast immediately. He subsequently appeared in The Secret of My Success (1987) opposite Michael J. Fox and played Demi Moore's husband in Mortal Thoughts (1991). Additional film credits from this period include Batteries Not Included (1987), directed by Matthew Robbins; Monkey Shines (1988), directed by George A. Romero; Talk Radio (1988), directed by Oliver Stone; and Year of the Gun (1991), directed by John Frankenheimer.

On television, Pankow is best known for playing Ira Buchman across all eight seasons of the NBC sitcom Mad About You, a role for which he received four Screen Actors Guild Award nominations for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series. He later joined the Showtime and BBC co-production Episodes as a series regular, portraying American television executive Merc Lapidus. Pankow has been married to actress Kristine Sutherland since 1986, and the couple have one daughter. He resides in New York City.