In 1992 O'Hare arrived to New York in John Logan’s play “Hauptmann” and 1994 he met Derek Anson Jones, with whom he lived and bought an apartment in Brooklyn. On January 17, 2000, Jones, who became a successful director, died of AIDS (He was the 1999 nomination for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play with Wit: despite her success in Los Angeles, Margaret Edson discovered there was little interest from other companies, who deemed the play overly intellectual and difficult to produce. A close friend, Derek Anson Jones, was eventually able to convince the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, to produce the play, with Jones as director. Wit opened on the East Coast in October 1997, earning strong word-of-mouth reviews before winning three Connecticut Critics Circle Awards, including best play.) Jones had told O’Hare he was H.I.V. positive two weeks after they met. “I thought about it and decided you don’t get to pick who you love,” said O’Hare. About five months after Jones’s death, O’Hare met Redwood. They met, O’Hare told Sanford Marcus on the blog Queer Sighted, in a chat room on AOL, from which he was booted after he sent Redwood an X-rated photograph of himself.
Denis O'Hare is an American actor noted for his performances in Take Me Out and Sweet Charity as well as the show True Blood. O'Hare is married to Hugo Redwood and the couple have a son. "We got married because we could," Redwood explained. "A lot of the impetus for doing it was because, if we weren’t married, then we’d have to go through two rounds of adoption. I would be Declan’s father, and then Denis would have to adopt him. This way, it’s neat and clean. Now I’m a married man with child."
“You send the picture with the information you need,” O’Hare said, adding that he sent the photo a month after they began chatting. “We’re gay men. How else do you meet? It’s: ‘What do you got? Cool, I can work with that.’ ”
“He shows up in a black Town Car, in black ribbed sweater and architect glasses. I thinking, I’m not ready for someone this stylish. I just wanted to have a little fun, and he looked so daunting. Then he sees the buzzer, my name is on it and Derek Jones. He goes, ‘Oh, the cat’s away, the mouse will play.’ He wouldn’t let it go. He said, ‘Where’s Derek tonight?’ I said, ‘He’s dead.’ Without a pause Hugo says, ‘That’s a buzz killer,’ and I thought, this is going to be just fine.”
Denis O'Hare was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, living in Southfield until he was 15, when his family moved to Wing Lake in Bloomfield Hills. His mother is a musician and he grew up playing the church organ.
As a teenager, O'Hare was in his school's choir and in 1974 he went to his first audition, gaining a chorus part in a community theatre production of Show Boat.
In 1980, O'Hare left Detroit for Chicago to study theatre at Northwestern University.
O'Hare won a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out, where his character's lengthy monologues in which he slowly falls in love with the game of baseball were considered the main reason for his award. He won the 2005 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical for his role as Oscar Lindquist in the Broadway revival of Sweet Charity.
In 2004 he played Charles J. Guiteau in the Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, for which he was nominated for the Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical Tony Award. He lost to co-star Michael Cerveris who played John Wilkes Booth. Before appearing in those shows, he appeared on Broadway in the 1998 revival of Cabaret, in which he played Ernst Ludwig onstage and the clarinet in the show's orchestra, the "Kit Kat Band".
O'Hare was featured in the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of Saint Maybe. He has appeared as a guest star on several episodes of Law & Order and its spin-offs, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In 2008, he has appeared as a guest star on several episodes of Brothers & Sisters. His feature film credits include The Anniversary Party, 21 Grams, Garden State, Derailed, Michael Clayton, A Mighty Heart, Half Nelson, Milk, Edge of Darkness, Charlie Wilson's War and Changeling.
In 2009, O'Hare portrayed Phillip Steele (an amalgam character based on Quentin Crisp's friends Phillip Ward and Tom Steele) in a television biopic on Crisp entitled An Englishman in New York. The same year he played therapist Dr. David Worth in the series Bored to Death (episode 1.3).
In 2010, O'Hare joined the cast of HBO's True Blood in its third season as Russell Edgington, the vampire king of Mississippi who is 2,800 years old. In 2011, he appeared in the film The Eagle as a Roman officer named Lutorius. Recently he has appeared in a recurring role as Judge Charles Abernathy on the television drama series The Good Wife. O'Hare co-starred as Larry Harvey in FX's American Horror Story.
In 2012, O'Hare starred alongside Amy Adams and Donna Murphy as the Baker in Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods at The Public Theater. The production played at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, NYC from July 23 to September 1, 2012.
In July 2013, it was announced that O'Hare would be in American Horror Story: Coven.
O'Hare is of Irish descent and holds an Irish passport.
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_O%27Hare
With a clean, precise vision of an emotionally complex play, Jones received the best reviews of his short career for ''Wit,'' the story of a haughty literature professor whose defenses are broken down by her battle with ovarian cancer.
It was a play with which Jones had long been associated; he and the playwright, Margaret Edson, had been best friends since the two were students together -- and each other's prom dates -- at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington.
Passionate about Edson's work, Jones played the role of the stricken professor during an informal reading of the script in 1991 and kept a copy of the play with him for several years, continually showing it to artistic directors of theaters.
Finally, in 1997, Jones convinced the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven to produce the play, with Kathleen Chalfant in the lead role. Positive reviews led to a New York production at the MCC Theater on West 28th Street, where the play became the surprise hit of the 1999 season.
After a brief flirtation with Broadway, Jones helped take ''Wit'' Off Broadway, to the Union Square Theater. Lisa Harrow of the Royal Shakespeare Company took over the lead role from Judith Light.
Jones's approach to the play was simple, allowing Edson's language to dominate the stage. Still, using a series of sliding curtains and minimal lighting, Jones managed almost seamlessly to conjure settings as varied as a hospital, a lecture hall and a family's living room. His work was honored with the 1999 Lucille Lortel Award for direction as well as a Drama Desk nomination.
A graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, Jones also worked extensively in the regional theater, directing at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and at New York Stage and Film in Poughkeepsie.
Since ''Wit,'' Jones had also directed ''An American Daughter'' and ''Much Ado About Nothing'' at the Long Wharf, and a new play, ''Angelique,'' at MCC Theater.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/19/arts/derek-anson-jones-38-directed-off-broadway-plays.html
Further Readings:
Actors: Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer, Sam Trammell, Rutina Wesley, Ryan Kwanten
Studio: HBO Studios
DVD Release Date: May 19, 2009
Run Time: 720 minutes
Amazon: True Blood: The Complete First Season (2009)
TRUE BLOOD chronicles the backwoods Louisiana town of Bon Temps... where vampires have emerged from the coffin, and no longer need humans for their fix. Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin, Golden Globe(R)-winner for "True Blood", Academy Award®-winner for “The Piano”) works as a waitress at the rural bar Merlotte's. Though outwardly a typical young woman, she keeps a dangerous secret: she has the ability to hear the thoughts of others. Her situation is further complicated when the bar gets its first vampire patron - 173-year old Bill Compton (Steven Moyer, "Quills") - and the two outsiders are immediately drawn to each other. Delivering the best of what audiences have come to expect from Creator and Executive Producer Alan Ball (writer of Oscar®-winning Best Picture “American Beauty”, creator of the Emmy® Award-winning HBO® series “Six Feet Under”), TRUE BLOOD is a dark and sexy tale that boldly delves into the heart - and the neck - of the Deep South.
More LGBT Couples at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Real Life Romance
This journal is friends only. This entry was originally posted at http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/4135607.html. If you are not friends on this journal, Please comment there using OpenID.