John de Lancie
TPMA Honorary Board MemberActor John de Lancie’s film credits include The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, The Fisher King, Bad Influence, The Onion Field, Taking Care of Business, Fearless, Multiplicity, Women on Top, Nicholas, Good Advise, Patient 14, The Big Time, Reign on Me, Pathology Games, Teenius, Crank2, and The Marriage Counselor.
John has appeared in numerous television shows including; Torchwood, Breaking Bad, CSI, The Unit, West Wing, Sports Night, Judging Amy, The Closer, Star Trek, Legend, LA Law, Picket Fences, Civil Wars, The Practice, and Touched by an Angel. He will be reprising his role of “Q” in the upcoming season of Star Trek: Picard.
He has been a member of The American Shakespeare Company, The Seattle Repertory Company, The South Coast Repertory, The Mark Taper Forum and the Old Globe, where he performed Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues. His favorite performances include Man and Superman, The Common Pursuit, Childe Byron, Art, and the world premieres of Richard Greenburg’s The Naked Lady on the Appian Way, Alan Alda’s Radiance and Rajiv Joseph’s Mr. Wolf.
In the world of music, John has performed with: Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic; Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra; Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Cleveland Orchestra and National Orchestra; Esa Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and Charles Dutoit and the Philadelphia Orchestra and The Montreal Symphony. His repertoire includes Peer Gynt, King David, The Bourgeois Gentleman, The Lincoln Portrait, St. Joan, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oedipus Rex, Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra, The Nightingale, Egmont, and, of course, Peter and the Wolf. Recently, he narrated the world premier of Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches.
John was the host of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Symphonies for Youth for four years. In addition, he’s written and directed ten symphonic plays, ninety-minute programs that are fully-staged productions with orchestra. Titles include Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream (Korngold score), Bourgeois Gentleman, and The Abduction from the Seraglio, as well as a vaudeville-style presentation Carnival of the Animals. They were produced with the Milwaukee, St. Paul, Ravinia, Los Angeles, and Pasadena chamber orchestras.
John was also the writer/director/host of First Nights, an adult concert series at Disney Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which explored the life and music of Stravinsky, Beethoven, Mahler, Schumann, and Prokofiev. These were fully-integrated, fully-staged productions with orchestra. For Star Trek fans, John and Robert Picardo have created a “Trek Concert Experience” that has been performed with the Dallas, Toronto, Cincinnati, Denver and Calgary orchestras.
John has performed or directed numerous plays for Los Angeles Theater Works, the producing arm of National Public Radio where the series The Plays the Thing originates. He and Ed Asner did a national tour of the Scopes Monkey Trial where he played Clarence Darrow, as well as wrote and directed an adaptation of The Lost World which toured the country. John has directed Tosca and Cold Sassy Tree in Atlanta, Madame Butterfly in San Antonio, Cinderella in Sacramento, and The Adduction in Minneapolis.
John was co-owner, with Leonard Nimoy, of Alien Voices, a production company devoted to the dramatization of classic science fiction. John produced, co-wrote and directed dramatizations of: The Time Machine, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World, The Invisible Man, and First Men in the Moon, as well as three television specials for the Sci-Fi Channel.
John is a graduate of Kent State University and The Juilliard School. He’s also an avid sailor, completing a voyage of the South Pacific in his own boat.
John has become an outspoken secular activist. Rather than developing a religious outlook, he became fascinated by an ever-changing world. “I’m wondering if one of the things at the core of believing in God, or not, has to do with change. I have grown to embrace change. Personally, I love reading the science section in the paper every morning. I’m in awe of humankind’s boundless curiosity.”
On June 4, 2016, he addressed the participants at the Reason Rally in Washington, DC. On July 14, 2017, he attended the unveiling of a statue of Clarence Darrow at the Rhea County Courthouse, Dayton, Tennessee, the site of the Scopes Trial in 1925, where Darrow had argued in favor of the teaching of evolution and secular education. He was a keynote speaker at the event. John, with co-writer Kristen Trevor, wrote a play based on the 2005 intelligent design trial in Dover, Pennsylvania. In October 2019, John was a featured speaker at the annual conference of the Center for Inquiry, CSICon.
John is a supporter of the proposed Thomas Paine statue and is proud to serve on the board of the Thomas Paine Memorial Association.