William Mesnik

William Mesnik, born May 21, 1953, is an American actor, musician, and playwright whose career spans Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional theater, film, and television. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, he built a professional presence across multiple disciplines over several decades.

Mesnik began his career as a singer-songwriter in the mid-1970s, performing at Greenwich Village venues including Paul Colby's The Other End. His Broadway work runs from 1976 to 1991 and includes appearances in La Bête and Oh! Calcutta! His Off-Broadway credits encompass Modigliani, A Weekend Near Madison, Smoke on the Mountain, The Good Times Are Killing Me, and The Rimers of Eldritch, among others. Regional credits include work at Yale Rep, The Old Globe, McCarter Theatre, The Kennedy Center, and Actors Theater of Louisville. He also participated in European-American collaborative productions of Shakespeare's King Lear and Chekhov's Ivanov with the Moscow Art Theatre.

Throughout the 1980s, Mesnik contributed regularly to The West Bank Downstairs Theater Bar repertory, developing his skills as a playwright. He later created several musical theater works, among them Three Songs, a music-drama centered on folk singers during the blacklist era, which premiered at Fremont Centre Theatre in 1997 and was revived in 2002. The production received a Critic's Choice designation from the Los Angeles Times and a Best Ensemble nomination from the LA Weekly Theater Awards. In 2000, he released the album Campaign Songs to accompany his stage piece Muckrakers: an evening of presidential campaign songs and family dysfunction, which opened at Fremont Centre Theatre around the time of the 2000 United States presidential election.

In 2002, Mesnik received an Ovation Award nomination for his portrayal of Holofernes in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, produced by A Noise Within. His television appearances include L.A. Law, Law & Order, Lois and Clark, Murphy Brown, That '70s Show, Spin City, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Dharma & Greg, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. His film work includes Minority Report, Titanic, Stonebrooke, and two films directed by John Schlesinger: The Next Best Thing and Eye for an Eye.