Early life

Shea was born in North Conway, New Hampshire, near where his father was teaching at Fryeburg Academy, Maine, and was raised in the Sixteen Acres area of Springfield, Massachusetts with four siblings. His parents were Elizabeth Mary (née Fuller) and Dr. John Victor Shea, Jr., who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, who became a teacher, coach and later assistant Superintendent of Schools. Elizabeth Shea introduced John to literature, poetry, classical music, and art and urged him to study the piano.

Shea attended Roman Catholic schools in Springfield, graduating from Cathedral High School, where he captained the varsity debate team and played varsity football and track. Shea received his early theatre training at Bates College. He performed on the varsity debating and football teams and co-edited the college literary magazine, Puffed Wheat, before graduating with a BA in 1970. He studied acting and directing at the Yale School of Drama under Dean Robert Brustein, gaining an MFA in Directing in 1973. During his time at the School of Drama, he also performed at the Yale Repertory Theatre, in the Yale cabaret with schoolmates Joe Grifasi and Meryl Streep, and studied filmmaking with Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet, and George Roy Hill in the film program at the Art and Architecture School.

In 1973, after two summers during college acting in Mac Dixon's Theatre Workshop of Nantucket productions, Shea worked with John Wulp's Nantucket Stage Company as an assistant director and actor in a production of Dracula. This production, with set and costume designs by Edward Gorey, later transferred from Nantucket to Broadway.

Stage and screen debuts

After a directing apprenticeship at both the Chelsea Theatre under Robert Kalfin and the Public Theater with Joseph Papp, he made his Broadway debut at the age of 26 in Kalfin's production of Isaac B. Singer's Yentl opposite Tovah Feldshuh, for which he received the Theatre World Award. Yentl started Off Broadway at the Chelsea Theatre Center at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and, after a favorable reception, was moved to the Eugene O'Neill Theatre by producer and Actor's Studio co-founder, Cheryl Crawford, and was later made into a film starring Barbra Streisand. After seeing his performance Lee Strasberg invited Shea to join the Actors Studio where he spent several years observing Method acting techniques.

In 1977, during his first trip to Los Angeles to get experience in front of a camera, he played guest roles in such TV series as Eight Is Enough and Man from Atlantis and co-starred in "The Last Convertible", a mini-series for Universal. He made his television film debut as Joseph in The Nativity (1978) opposite Madeleine Stowe as Mary, a biblical epic shot in Spain. His feature film debut came in Matthew Chapman's English film noir Hussy (1980) opposite Helen Mirren. His American film debut was in Constantin Costa-Gavras's Academy Award-winning Missing (1982), which starred Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. The film, shot on locations in Mexico, also won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and helped launch Shea's international acting career.

Film

Since Missing, Shea has starred in many films, including Armyan Bernstein's Windy City (opposite Kate Capshaw for which he won a "Best Actor" award at the Montreal Film Festival in 1984). In 1982, he co-hosted, with Kathryn Walker, the June 12th Anti-Nuclear Rally in Central Park, the largest political rally in the history of the United States. This rally was the subject of the 1984 documentary film In Our Hands by Robert Richer and Stan Warnow, in which Shea appeared.

He made his debut into Indian cinema with the 2009 Tamil drama Achchamundu! Achchamundu!, directed by Indo-American film director Arun Vaidyanathan, becoming the first American actor to work in a Tamil film. In his only animated film, Light Years directed by Harvey Weinstein, Shea voiced the central character Sylvain. Shea recently wrote and directed Grey Lady, a romantic thriller set on Nantucket, starring Eric Dane, Natalie Zea, Adrian Lester, Carolyn Stotesberry, Chris Meyer, and Amy Madigan. The independent film, produced by Beacon Pictures and shot by Andrzej Bartkowiak, had its first screening in August 2015.

Independent films

Shea has also starred in a number of independent films, including The Adventures of Sebastian Cole (1998) with Adrian Grenier; Scott Dacko's political thriller The Insurgents (2007) with Mary Stuart Masterson; An Invisible Sign (2011) with Jessica Alba; and Jim Hemphill's romantic comedy The Trouble With the Truth (2012) with Lea Thompson. Shea co-wrote and directed the independent film Southie (1998) starring Donnie Wahlberg, Rose McGowan, Amanda Peet, Anne Meara, Will Arnett and Lawrence Tierney. The film won the Seattle International Film Festival award for Best Film, represented the United States at the Montreal International Festival, and was distributed by Lions Gate Films.

Stage work

Since his Broadway debut in "Yentl" Shea has continued to work in Off-Broadway and Broadway theatre productions, starring in Arthur Kopit's End of the World starring with Linda Hunt and Barnard Hughes, directed by Hal Prince; Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize winning How I Learned to Drive (with Molly Ringwald; Anne Meara's Down the Garden Paths, with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson; Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night at Chicago's Goodman Theatre; the original production of A. R. Gurney's The Dining Room at Playwright's Horizons; Peter Parnell's The Sorrows of Stephen at the Public Theatre; Steven Poliakoff's American Days at the Manhattan Theatre Club; Theodore Mann's production of Romeo and Juliet on Broadway at Circle in the Square; Philip Barry's The Animal Kingdom opposite Sigourney Weaver directed by John Wulp; the title role in Nancy Hasty's The Director; and Israel Horowitz's The Secret of Madame Bonnard's Bath on Theatre Row.

Shea is the Artistic Director Emeritus of the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket where he helped produce forty productions and acted in David Harrower's Blackbird, a revival of The Director, in Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still, and, annually, in Orson Welles' Moby Dick Rehearsed in which he plays Ahab. In the summer of 2013 he directed a 40th anniversary production of Edward Gorey's Dracula. Shea made his Carnegie Hall debut playing "The Soldier" in Tom O'Horgan's production of Igor Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, with Pinchas Zukerman and Andre de Shields. In 1986, he made his London West End debut starring in Joseph Papp's production of Larry Kramer's drama The Normal Heart at the Albery Theatre.

Shea is also a regular reader on Selected Shorts for Symphony Space, broadcast nationwide on Public Radio International. His reading of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory won AudioFile Magazine's Earphones Award in 1999, as part of the anthology Selected Shorts: Classic Tales, Vol. XII. For his work reading Ted Bell's international thriller Assassin, Shea received an Audie Award-nomination as "Best Male Narrator." He performed all of Bell's other novels: Hawke, Spy, Pirate, Czar, Warlord, Phantom, Warrior, Nick of Time, and The Time Pirate, among other audio books, including Jonathan Tropper's One Last Thing Before I Go for which he won an Audiofile Award.

Television

Besides his more high-profile starring roles in the television series Lois & Clark and Mutant X, Shea's diverse international television work includes guest-appearances on TV series Sex and the City, Law & Order, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent as well as being a recurring character on Gossip Girl and The Good Wife. In Grant Tinker's CBS series WIOU, written by John Eisendrath and Kathryn Pratt, Shea led an ensemble cast. Among his television films he was featured in Family Reunion playing Bette Davis' attorney and former student. He starred in Small Sacrifices (opposite Farrah Fawcett), and also in Jim Goddard's British production of Kennedy, starring Martin Sheen and Blair Brown, in which Shea portrayed Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy won the BAFTA Award for Best Television Film.

Personal life

John has been married twice. He and his first wife, photographer Laura Pettibone, had one child together, Jake. He and his current wife, the artist Melissa MacLeod, a co-founder of the cooperative (X) Gallery on Nantucket, have two children, Miranda and Caiden.

Selected filmography

• Agent X (2015) (Main Role) (TV)
• Grey Lady (writer, director, actor)
• Elementary (TV series) (2015, guest role)
• The Good Wife (2012, guest role)
• The Trouble with the Truth (2012)
• Gossip Girl (2007-12) (Recurring Role) (TV)
• The Italian Key (2011)
• 51 (2010)
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2008; episode: "Legacy")
• Eleventh Hour (U.S. TV series) (2008; episode 17)
• The Insurgents (2007)
• A Broken Sole (2007)
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2005 episode: "The Good Child")
• Law & Order (2003) ("Shrunk") (TV)
• Mutant X (2001 TV)
• Lost & Found (1999)
• Sex and the City (1999 episode: "Evolution: Dominic")
• Southie (1998; director and co-writer)
• A Will of Their Own (1998 miniseries)
• The Apocalypse Watch (1997 TV)
• Forgotten Sins (1996 TV)
• Tales from the Crypt (1993 episode: "As Ye Sow")
• Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993) TV series — Lex Luthor
• Notorious (1992 film) (1992)
• Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992)
• Freejack (1992)
• WIOU (1990 TV series)
• Small Sacrifices (1989)
• Stealing Home (1988)
• Light Years (1988)
• A New Life (1988)
• Unsettled Land (1987)
• Coast to Coast (1987)
• The Impossible Spy (1987) (TV)
• A Case of Deadly Force (1986) (TV)
• Hitler's S.S.: Portrait in Evil (1985) (TV)
• Windy City (1984)
• Kennedy (1983)
• Missing (1982)
• Family Reunion (1981)
• Hussy (1980)
• The Nativity (1978)

[ Source: Wikipedia ]