John Wesley Shipp

John Wesley Shipp is an American actor born on January 22, 1955, in Norfolk, Virginia. His father, John Wesley Shipp Sr., was a farmer who later attended seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and became the pastor of a small church outside Wake Forest. His mother, Shirley Louise Bryant, worked as a nurse. Shipp has one brother and one sister. He attended Butler High School in Louisville, Kentucky, and went on to study at Indiana University.

Shipp launched his professional acting career in daytime television, taking on the role of Dr. Kelly Nelson on Guiding Light from 1980 to 1984. He then played Douglas Cummings on As the World Turns from 1985 to 1986, a performance that earned him his first Daytime Emmy Award in 1986. The following year, his portrayal of Martin Ellis on Santa Barbara brought him a second Daytime Emmy Award at the 14th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards in 1987, making him the only actor to earn consecutive wins from two different daytime dramas. That same category included Celeste Holm, Eileen Heckart, and Terrance Mann. He continued in daytime with the role of Blanchard Lovelace on One Life to Live in 1989 and later Carter Jones on All My Children in 1992.

Shipp's Broadway career spanned from 1987 to 1991, with credits including Safe Sex and Dancing at Lughnasa. Outside of Broadway, he appeared in a 1983 episode of Fantasy Island and starred in Erik Jendresen's The Killing of Michael Malloy in 1993. He also took on the recurring role of Lucky on the NBC series Sisters from 1994 to 1995.

In the 1990–91 television season, Shipp won the title role of Barry Allen on CBS's superhero series The Flash. In 1998, he joined the cast of The WB drama series Dawson's Creek as Mitch Leery, the father of the lead character Dawson, remaining a series regular through the show's first four seasons until 2001. In November 2010, he returned to One Life to Live in the short-term role of Eddie Ford, a villainous character killed off in a murder mystery in mid-December of that year. In the summer of 2011, he guest-starred on the Lifetime series Drop Dead Diva as the ex-husband of the character played by Kathy Griffin. In 2012, he filmed three episodes of MTV's Teen Wolf as the abusive father of Daniel Sharman's character, and also starred in the independent film Hell and Mr. Fudge alongside Mackenzie Astin and Eileen Davidson.

Shipp returned to The Flash franchise in 2014, joining The CW's series in a role later revealed to be Henry Allen, Barry's father. In the show's second-season finale, he portrayed Jay Garrick, an alternate-universe counterpart of the Flash, and subsequently appeared as an earlier incarnation of Barry Allen. He also provided the voice of Eobard Thawne in the animated series Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Beginning in 2015, Shipp lent his voice to the role of Sheriff Burns on the podcast drama Powder Burns, which ran through 2018, was written and produced by David A. Gregory, and received recognition from the Voice Arts Awards and the Audio Verse Awards.

Shipp returned to the stage in 2016, playing Juror 8 in the Judson Theatre Company's production of Twelve Angry Men, and reprised the role in a 2017 reading of the play at Brookfield Theatre for the Arts. Earlier in his life, he delivered a keynote speech to the Wake Forest-Rolesville High School graduating class of 1999, recounting his father's efforts to integrate the community in the late 1960s.