Eric McCormack

Eric James McCormack (born April 18, 1963) is a Canadian/American actor, musician, and writer. Born in Toronto, he began his acting career performing in high school plays. He left Ryerson University in 1985 to accept a position with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where he spent five years performing in numerous play productions.

For much of the late 1990s, he lived in Los Angeles and had minor roles. He made his feature film debut in the 1992 science-fiction adventure film The Lost World. McCormack appeared in several television series, including Top Cops, Street Justice, Lonesome Dove: The Series, Townies, and Ally McBeal. McCormack later gained worldwide recognition for playing Will Truman in the American sitcom Will & Grace, which premiered in September 1998. His performance earned him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series in 2001.

Aside from appearing in television, he made his Broadway debut in the 2001 production of The Music Man and starred in the 2005 film The Sisters. Following the series conclusion of Will & Grace in 2006, McCormack starred as the leading role in the New York production of Some Girl(s). He starred in the television miniseries The Andromeda Strain (2008) and returned to television in 2009 in the TNT drama Trust Me, which was cancelled after one season. Also in 2009, McCormack was cast in the science-fiction movie Alien Trespass. In addition, he starred as Dr. Daniel Pierce for three seasons of the TNT crime drama Perception, and provided the voice of "Lucky" on The Hub's Pound Puppies

Eric McCormack (writer)

Eric McCormack (born February 3, 1938) is a Scottish-born Canadian author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, gothic horror and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as Inspecting the Vaults (1987), The Paradise Motel (1989), The Mysterium (1992), First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1997) and The Dutch Wife (2002).

Biography

McCormack was born in Bellshill, Scotland, an impoverished industrial community located 32 kilometres outside Glasgow where his father worked in a steel mill. McCormack took a masters degree in English literature from the University of Glasgow, then taught at a high school in Muirkirk, Scotland, a mining town. In 1966, he went to the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he wrote his PhD on Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a text he frequently alludes to in his fiction. In 1970 he took up a teaching post in the English Department of St Jerome's University, which was established in 1959 as St Jerome's College and has been federated with University of Waterloo since 1960. He has since retired from teaching there.