Dan Hedaya

Dan Hedaya (born July 24, 1940)^[1] is an American actor. He often plays sleazy villains or wisecracking supporting characters.^{[citation needed ]} He has had supporting roles in films such as Commando (1985), Clueless (1995), and Mulholland Drive (2001).

Hedaya was born in New York City, to a Sephardic Jewish family from Aleppo, Syria.^{[2] [3] [4] [5]} Hedaya was raised in Bensonhurst. While a student at Tufts University, he began performing at the campus theater.^[3] He worked as a junior high school teacher for many years before deciding to pursue acting full-time.^[5] He studied acting at HB Studio ^[6] in New York City.

Alongside a successful career in the movies, Hedaya has appeared in several TV roles, including Carla Tortelli's ex-husband Nick on the sitcom Cheers and its short-lived spinoff The Tortellis . He played the estranged father of Mallory Keaton's boyfriend, Nick, on the sitcom Family Ties . More recently, he played an Italian-American priest in the controversial and quickly cancelled NBC series The Book of Daniel . Adding to his list of television credits is his performance as the long-lost father of Adrian Monk on Monk . He also guest starred in 1997 and 2005 as a wisecracking lawyer on the medical drama ER .

In films, Hedaya has played the evil dictator and the secondary antagonist Arius in 1985's Commando and Mel Horowitz, the father of Alicia Silverstone's Cher, in the 1995 film Clueless . He played Julian Marty, a cuckolded husband who plots his wife's murder in the first Coen Brothers film, Blood Simple . His resemblance to Richard Nixon led to his being cast as the former president for the film Dick . Hedaya appeared in several episodes of the television series Hill Street Blues as a corrupt, bigamist cop during the series' first season. During the 1980s Hedaya also appeared in the television series Miami Vice .

• Dan Hedaya at IMDb

• 1940 births
• Living people
• 20th-century American male actors
• 20th-century American Sephardic Jews
• 21st-century American male actors
• 21st-century American Sephardic Jews
• American people of Jewish descent
• Male actors from Brooklyn
• American male film actors
• American people of Syrian-Jewish descent
• American Mizrahi Jews
• American male television actors
• Jewish American male actors
• People from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn
• Tufts University alumni
• Jews from New York (state)

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