Early life
Thomas Ian Griffith was born in Hartford, Connecticut on March 18, 1962, the son of Irish-Americans Mary Ann (née O'Neil; 1934–1990) [5] and Dr. Thomas Joseph Griffith. [1] [6] His maternal grandfather, John J. O'Neil, was born in Killorglin, County Kerry, Ireland, and emigrated to Hartford in the 1920s. [7] Griffith's mother was the founder and director of the noted Irish dancing academy, The Griffith Academy of Dance in Wethersfield, Connecticut. [8] [5] She was a graduate of the University of Hartford, and received a Master's in counseling from St. Joseph College. [5] She was also an accredited An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha and Teagascóir Coimisiún Le Rinci Gaelacha Irish dance teacher. [5] His father was a college professor in business administration. [1] [6] He has two sisters, Colleen Marie and Mary Beth, [5] both of whom continued in their mother's footsteps and teach at The Griffith Academy. [6] [9]
Griffith grew up in Wethersfield, [10] and attended South Catholic High School in Hartford. [6] He became obsessed with taekwondo when he was 12 and earned a black belt when he was 18. [11] He later earned a black belt in American Kenpo while studying the sport in New York under Hyung Yup Chung. [2] After moving to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, he studied with Jun Chung. [2] In the 1990s, he started boxing under Benny Urquidez. [2]
In addition to learning various forms of dancing (such as Irish step-dancing and Celtic folk-dancing) from his mother, he also learned to sing and play several instruments, including piano and accordion. [3] He was so proficient on the accordion that he won the U.S. and Connecticut State championship. [3] Of his dancing, he later said "I never had a formal dance lesson in my life, I picked up tap dancing while playing the piano for allowance money as a child in Hartford, Connecticut." [3] Griffith also juggled and wrote songs. [3]
He studied law at the College of the Holy Cross where he was a dean's list student before leaving after his junior year to "make it" as an actor in New York. [6] [3]
Career
In 1980, Griffith landed a job as various replacement roles (including a tap-dancing football hero, a cameraman, a stage manager, and Aggie) in the Broadway musical play The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas at the 46th Street Theatre. [6] [3] The next year, he had another role in the Broadway musical The First, which ran from October to December 1981 at the Martin Beck Theatre, and then spent a season in 1982 acting at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [6] [3] He also appeared in off-Broadway productions of The Threepenny Opera and Guys and Dolls. [2] His theater roles were usually credited under his shortened name Thomas Griffith. [12]
Griffith made his television-acting debut on NBC's daytime soap opera Another World , in which he was cast as the "troublemaking-womanizer" Catlin Ewing, [3] whom he portrayed from January 1984 to January 1987. [13] [14] [6] During this time, he met and dated his co-star, onscreen love interest, and future wife, Mary Page Keller; [15] the couple eventually married in 1991. [6] Griffith was noted for performing and choreographing his own stunts on the show. [16] Appearing on Another World made him "one of daytime television's more familiar and possibly popular faces" [17] and a "soap superstar." [18] By 1985, he was a frequently invited guest at international trade shows and exhibitions, where he met fans and signed autographs. [19] [20] [21] [22] As early as July 1986, news circulated that Griffith, although playing a popular character on Another World, was not going to renew his contract once it ended in January 1987, and the importance of his role was gradually diminished in the writing of the show. [23] [24]
After leaving Another World in 1985, Keller moved from Brooklyn, New York (where most of the television series was filmed) to Los Angeles, California; Griffith joined her in early 1987 when his contract expired. [6] [25] There they formed their own film production company, Ian Page Productions, named after their middle names. [26] Together, they co-wrote, co-produced, and co-starred in the independent film A Place to Hide in 1988. [26] In the late 1980s, Griffith had guest roles in several prime-time television crime drama series, including Miami Vice , In the Heat of the Night, and Wiseguy . [27] [28]
In late 1988, Griffith landed his theatrical film debut when he was cast as the lead villain in The Karate Kid Part III (1989). [29] In the film, he portrays Terry Silver, a rival martial arts expert who influences Daniel LaRusso against his friend and mentor, Mr. Miyagi. Although many reporters assumed that he won the role of Silver because of his personal knowledge of martial arts, Griffith explained that he won the role solely because of his acting experience as the character of Silver, as originally written when he auditioned, didn't have much fighting in the film. [2] The plot initially revolved around Silver torturing LaRusso and plotting his demise, but once the film's fight choreographer, Pat Johnson, discovered Griffith's expertise with martial arts, he recommended that the actor approach director John G. Avildsen for new scenes to be written. [2] Avildsen was excited about expanding Silver's parts and reworked the script to make the character an equal nemesis. [2]
Despite being offered similar martial arts roles following The Karate Kid Part III, the actor did not want to be typecast. [2] When interviewed by Black Belt magazine, Griffith explained he wanted to keep his roles balanced, and that although he loved doing action and martial arts films, he was also driven to keep playing straight drama parts, and was interested in going back to plays and doing Shakespeare. [2]
His agent heard that ABC was casting for its television biopic of late screen actor Rock Hudson and sent Griffith over to audition for director John Nicolella. [30] Although Griffith only did a cold reading, Nicolella loved his delivery and asked him to repeat the audition for a dozen ABC executives; the following day Griffith was informed that he had the part. [30] The actor admitted to The New York Times that prior to the Hudson biopic, he was not a fan of the screen legend's work and had only seen Giant (1956), but that through research for the role, he learned to appreciate the late actor's work and found it to be a great role for him. [31] [28] Griffith was only one inch taller than Hudson and had a similar physique, but required several hours of makeup each day (including darkening his brown hair and wearing brown contacts over his blue eyes) to get into character, especially when depicting Hudson's final years as he was dying from AIDS. [31] [32] Producer Frank Konigsberg later told newspaper reporters that he felt it was more important to cast an actor who could play Hudson's tortured spirit than an exact lookalike, [32] and that Griffith "has the presence, the height and the build of Rock. He also has that wonderful kind of open, all-American quality, a boyish innocence that makes you really like the guy. That's what Rock had, too." [33] The two-hour Rock Hudson film was broadcast on ABC in January 1990. [6] [34]
During the 1990s, he starred in a series of direct-to-video and low-budget theatrically-released films. With his wife, he co-wrote, co-produced, and co-starred in the action thriller film Ulterior Motives, produced in 1990 through their own Ian Page Productions (in cooperation with Lorenzo Lamas' film production company Den Pictures), but it was only released two years later in 1992, direct-to-video. [35] [6] [26] He next wrote and co-produced Night of the Warrior , which was directed by Rafal Zielinski and starred Lorenzo Lamas (who again co-produced the film through Den Pictures). [6] The film was co-produced by Griffith and Keller through Ian Page Productions, and was distributed in theaters and on video via Trimark Pictures in 1991 (prior to the official release of Ulterior Motives). [6] [26]
With several acting, writing, and producing credits to his name, Griffith was picked up for representation by talent agency Creative Artists Agency, and was briefly positioned to be one of Hollywood's next big action stars, [36] ultimately scoring a three-picture writing-producing-starring-directing deal for Ian Page Productions through New Line Cinema (though he never used his option to direct his films). [6] [37]
When the deal with New Line Cinema was offered in 1991, he had already written his next motion picture, Excessive Force, in which he plays a Chicago police officer who gets framed for the murder of a mob boss. [37] John Hess was hired to direct while Griffith produced, co-choreographed (with Bobby Bass), and starred in the film; he can also be seen playing several jazz tunes on the piano. [6] [2] The film was filmed on location in Chicago, Illinois between March-May 1992, [38] [37] and included such notable stars as James Earl Jones, Burt Young, and Lance Henriksen, but wound up as the only film produced as part of his New Line Cinema contract.
Griffith next starred in the Canadian film Crackerjack, which received a limited theatrical release in some countries but was a direct-to-video release in the United States, and the direct-to-video Blood of the Innocent (both 1994). He elicited frequent comparisons to actors like Jean Claude van Damme, Steven Seagal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Mickey Rourke, [36] but his films received mixed to negative reviews and Griffith ultimately never reached their level of success. [6] His performances, however, received praise from critics.
Through the late 1990s and 2000s, Griffith transitioned to smaller projects and roles, working almost exclusively direct-to-video. He did, however, star in the film Hollow Point alongside Tia Carrere as DEA agent Max Parrish and collaborate with director John Carpenter. He played head vampire Jan Valek in Carpenter's 1998 film Vampires and co-created the comic book series Asylum with Carpenter and producer Sandy King. [39]
In 1999, he starred in the TV movie Secret of Giving with Reba McEntire; earlier in 1999, he had appeared in McEntire's video for the song "What Do You Say." In 2002, Griffith appeared in the film XXX , in which he portrayed Agent Jim McGrath.
In 2007, Griffith retired from acting altogether to pursue screenwriting. From 2013 to 2017, he periodically wrote and worked as a story editor for the NBC television series Grimm and became a co-producer in 2015. He and his wife, Mary Page Keller, also collaborated to write the sixth episode of the dramedy series Dolly Parton's Heartstrings in 2019, as well as an episode for Netflix series Virgin River. [40]
In 2021 and 2022, Griffith came out of his retirement from acting to reprise the role of Terry Silver in the fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons of Cobra Kai . [41] [42]
