Richard Jenkins Movies and Career Information

Richard Dale Jenkins (born May 4, 1947) is an American stage, film, and television actor. After beginning his career in theatre, Jenkins made his film debut in 1974, and has appeared in supporting roles in numerous film productions in the 1980s and the 1990s before coming to prominence in the early 2000s for playing the deceased patriarch Nathaniel Fisher on the HBO funeral drama series Six Feet Under. He has since established himself in Hollywood by appearing in lead roles in the films The Visitor and The Cabin in the Woods. Jenkins was born and raised in DeKalb, a university town in Illinois. His mother, Mary Elizabeth (née Wheeler), was a housewife, and his father, Dale Stevens Jenkins, was a dentist. Before he was an actor, Jenkins drove a linen truck (his boss was actor John C. Reilly's father). Jenkins earned a degree in drama from Illinois Wesleyan University before relocating to Rhode Island. While attending Illinois Wesleyan, Jenkins was a member of Phi Gamma Delta. He worked as an actor with the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island while breaking into film with a bit part in Feasting with Panthers (1974), a television movie, and continued as a celebrated