David Morse

Actor

• Born: October 11, 1953
• Place of Birth: Beverly, Massachusetts

Contribution: David Morse is an award-winning actor who has performed in television, film, and stage productions. He is best known for his work in the television medical drama St. Elsewhere and the films The Green Mile (1999), Disturbia (2007), and The Hurt Locker (2008).

Background

David Bowditch Morse was born on October 11, 1953, in Beverly, Massachusetts. He and his three sisters were raised on the North Shore. When Morse auditioned for his first play in his freshman year of high school, he realized it was an effective way of coping with his troubled home life.

After graduating high school, Morse was asked to become a member of the famed Boston Repertory Theatre. He accepted the offer and spent six years touring and performing various plays on a rotating schedule.

Career

Morse left the Boston Repertory Theatre in 1977 to move to New York City. He waited tables to support himself while working in various Broadway and off-Broadway productions. In 1980, he landed a lead role in the Oscar-nominated basketball movie Inside Moves. This performance helped him secure a role on the hospital drama St. Elsewhere in 1982.

Morse’s good-guy character Dr. Jack Morrison resonated with viewers, proving to be his breakthrough role. The actor performed on St. Elsewhere until its 1988 cancellation. In addition to his work on St. Elsewhere, Morse took roles in a variety of television movies during the mid-1980s, including the sci-fi drama Prototype (1983), the romance-docudrama Shattered Vows (1984), and the thriller When Dreams Come True (1985).

The resounding success of his character on St. Elsewhere proved to be bittersweet for Morse. He became successful enough in the television industry to land a variety of roles but was typecast in roles similar to his St. Elsewhere character. As a result, he did his best to take on as many diverse roles as he could to demonstrate his range of abilities.

One of these roles included Bicycle Pete in the 1991 television docudrama Cry in the Wild: The Taking of Peggy Ann, in which he played a paranoid schizophrenic who kidnaps a teen girl in rural Pennsylvania. Morse also took a darker role in Sean Penn’s directorial debut film, The Indian Runner (1991).

Morse followed with a major role in the thriller The Good Son (1993), which tells the story of a murderous young sociopath. Though he worked steadily for the next two years, his next major role did not come until the 1995 film The Crossing Guard, in which he starred opposite Jack Nicholson. Soon after, he landed a role opposite Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage in the thriller The Rock (1996). Morse then starred in the Oscar-nominated adaptation of Carl Sagan’s famed novel Contact (1997).

A string of successful film roles quickly followed. He played yet another villain opposite Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey in the hit crime drama The Negotiator (1998). A major role in Antonio Banderas’s film Crazy in Alabama came in 1999. Morse then landed starring roles in the film adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Green Mile (1999) and the musical drama Dancer in the Dark (2000).

Morse continued to appear in successful films; however, his focus during the next few years was on television. He starred in the series Hack from 2002 to 2004. Though it was disliked by critics, Hack did well in ratings. From 2006 to 2007, he took a recurring role in the medical drama House, M.D. as a detective determined to arrest the title character, Dr. Gregory House.

Morse’s mainstream success continued with the television miniseries John Adams (2008), in which he played George Washington, a major part in the Oscar-winning war film The Hurt Locker (2008), and the part of honest police officer Terry Colson on HBO’s Treme (2010–12). He then landed a role opposite Nicolas Cage in the fantasy thriller Drive Angry (2011). Following these works, Morse moved away from action films with the dramedy Collaborator (2011) and the surrealistic Winter in the Blood (2013). Two more 2013 films, Horns and McCanick, were followed by roles in the horror-thriller The Boy and the drama Concussion, which was based on the true story of a doctor's findings about brain damage in the contact sport of football.

Between 2016 and 2019, Morse landed parts both in films and on television. Though the WGN America series Outsiders, of which he was a main member of the cast and which began airing in 2016, was canceled in 2017 after two seasons, he appeared as Hank Crawford in six episodes of the NBC series Blindspot from 2017 to 2018. Additionally, in 2017, he had big-screen roles in Trouble and Thank You for Your Service. Ben Stiller's 2018 Showtime miniseries Escape at Dannemora gave him another opportunity on the small screen when he was cast to play Gene Palmer in the fictionalized account of a real-life prison breakout. That same year, Morse performed in a Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh, earning a Tony Award nomination. In the years that followed, Morse played recurring roles on the television series Blindspot (2017-2020) and The Chair (2021). On the silver screen, he appeared in The Virtuoso (2021) and played Archbishop Corrigan in Cabrini (2024), a film about Italian American nun and saint Mother Francis Xavier Cabrini. Morse also starred in the 2024 film Blood Knot, in which a father and son compete in a fishing competition, and portrayed Abraham Lincoln in the 2025 film The Gettysburg Address. In 2024, Morse was also cast in the upcoming Amazon Prime series We Were Liars.

Impact

Morse is a storied actor who has proven his skill across all disciplines and genres of the craft. Initially typecast as the “good guy” early in his career, he was able to demonstrate his ability to play a wide range of characters. Morse has been successful in supporting and leading roles on television, film, and stage, for which he won an Obie Award in 1997 and received two Emmy nominations in 2007 and 2008. In 2009, Morse won a Gotham Award and a Washington, DC, Film Critics Association Award for The Hurt Locker. Morse received the Outer Critics Special Achievement Award in 2022.

Personal Life

Morse married Susan Wheeler Duff, herself an actor, on June 19, 1982. They have three children and reside in Philadelphia.

Bibliography

Adelson, Suzanne. “David Morse Gets Ready to Take the Plunge as St. Elsewhere’s Premiere Groom.” People 29 Sept. 1986: 99. Print.

"David Morse." IMDb, 2024, www.imdb.com/name/nm0001556. Accessed 16 Sept. 2024.

“David Morse Embracing the Dark.” Backstage. Backstage, 21 Feb. 2001. Web. 16 Aug. 2013.

McGrath, Charles. “Discovering Irishness, Recovering Niceness.’” New York Times. New York Times Co., 7 Jan. 2008. Web. 16 Aug. 2013.

Morse, David. “A Conversation with David Morse.” Interview by Ted Sod. Roundabout Theatre Company. Roundabout Theatre Company, 29 May 2013. Web. 16 Aug. 2013.

Morse, David. “David Morse.” Interview by Noel Murray. A.V. Club. Onion Inc., 23 June 2008. Web. 16 Aug. 2013.

Tomlin, Dalton. “David Morse Sheds Light on ‘Dancer in the Dark.’” Rice Thresher. Rice U, 13 Oct. 2000. Web. 16 Aug. 2013.

Vincentelli, Elisabeth. “David Morse Makes Steven Levenson’s New Play More Interesting than It Actually Is.” Rev. of The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin, by Steven Levenson. New York Post. NYP Holdings, Inc., 28 June 2013. Web. 16 Aug. 2013.