Stuart Pankin

Stuart Pankin is an American actor born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 8, 1946. He attended Dickinson College, where he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, and later studied at Columbia University. He has been married to actress Joy Pankin since 1974, and the couple has a son named Andy.

Pankin's stage career includes Broadway appearances from 1971 to 1972, during which he performed in the play The Crucible, Narrow Road to the Deep North, Mary Stuart, and the comedy Twelfth Night. He has also performed at St. Vincent Summer Theatre.

On television, Pankin is recognized for portraying anchor Bob Charles on HBO's Not Necessarily the News and for voicing Earl Sinclair in the family sitcom Dinosaurs. He played the father Mike Dooley in the sitcom Nearly Departed and appeared as Orthodox Jew Ben Heineman in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Pankin appeared on Ken Reid's TV Guidance Counselor Podcast on January 24, 2017, and has made guest appearances across numerous television series while lending his voice to various animated productions.

His film work spans approximately three dozen titles. One of his earliest screen roles was as asthmatic musician and magician Dudley Laywicker in Hollywood Knights. He portrayed Commander Edward Plank across all three entries in the Zenon trilogy — Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, Zenon: The Zequel, and Zenon: Z3. Additional film credits include Gordon Szalinski, the brother of Wayne Szalinski, in Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves; Sheriff Lloyd Parsons in Arachnophobia; and Jimmy in Fatal Attraction. Pankin also appeared as an absent-minded professor in the large-screen IMAX edutainment productions Encounter in the Third Dimension and Misadventures in 3D.