Richard Poe

Richard Poe is an American actor born on January 25, 1946, in Portola, California. He graduated from Pittsburg Senior High School in 1964 and subsequently earned a degree from the University of San Francisco in 1967. He served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War era before pursuing a career in acting across stage, film, and television.

Poe's Broadway career spanned from 1986 to 2022 and encompassed fourteen productions. His credits include the original M. Butterfly, which received a Tony Award, as well as Our Country's Good, The Pajama Game, Journey's End, All the Way Home, Fiddler on the Roof, the comedy Present Laughter, Cry-Baby, and All The Way, the last four of which were also Tony Award productions. Beyond Broadway, he created roles in two off-Broadway productions: Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey and Christopher Durang's Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. In 2006, he appeared at Ford's Theatre in A Christmas Carol, playing Ebenezer Scrooge.

On television, Poe is among a small group of actors to have portrayed the same character across three separate Star Trek series. He played Gul Evek in Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, reprised the role in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in 1993, and appeared again as the character in Star Trek: Voyager in 1995. Fellow actors who share this distinction include Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Mark Lenard, Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, Armin Shimerman, and John de Lancie.

Poe has also established a substantial career as an audiobook narrator. He narrated Cormac McCarthy's novels Blood Meridian, The Crossing, and Suttree, as well as Dan Brown's Angels & Demons and the non-fiction bestseller All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. In 2004, he won the Audie Award for his narration of East of Eden and has received three additional Audie Award nominations. He has also been a frequent recipient of AudioFile Magazine's Earphone Award.