Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I was involved in the arts from a very early age, studying at the Hunter Museum of Art by day and playing various horror icons on the ABC affiliate Shock Theater by night. As a child, my wonderful parents encouraged my love of film, allowing me to use their Super-8 sound movie camera. I spent much of my time exploring the National Military Park on Lookout Mountain, where castle-like homes, fairy-tale caverns, cliffs and boulders became my studios and schoolmates, snakes, lizards and opossums my cast and crew. Here, a child's imagination could flourish unbridled and I knew from an early age studying the natural acting techniques of Spencer Tracy, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro that acting would be the craft that I would pursue. I learned not to "act," but instead to place myself into a character, allowing the words of other actors to affect me, as I hopefully evoked strong emotional responses from them.

With a Theatre major and an Art minor at the University of Tennessee, I continued my studies in West Hollywood at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. With familial obligations and concerns, I maintained dual residency in Los Angeles and Tennessee, where I obtained my SAG card the old-fashioned way: auditioning and becoming a Day Player on King Kong Lives, chasing Linda Hamilton around with an M-16.

All along, I continued to hone my craft as a stage actor at the Chattanooga Theatre Center under the direction of Ted Strickland (whose father mentored Katharine Hepburn and James Cagney). Here I garnered great reviews portraying a wide range of characters, from the tragic Mac Duff in Macbeth to the brooding, bi-sexual alcoholic, Brick, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, who is forced to face the mortality of his dying father. In a bitterly ironic twist of fate, my own beloved father attended opening night and died suddenly on the second night of the run of the play. With a great sense of duty passed down from my father, I gave his eulogy on a rainy November morning and then stepped into the role of Brick before a packed house of 500 that night. I will never forget his smile as I opened the dressing room door after opening night, his pride and love for his son and mine for him.

I have been truly blessed in life. I have had the opportunity to work with many wonderful actors such as Robert DeNiro, Johnny Depp, Diane Keaton and Toby Maguire, just to name a few. Somewhere along the way, I began playing understated, sinister bad guys, soliders and cops. I think actors sometimes play their alter-egos best. I recently broadened my horizons as a Producer/Screenwriter/Actor on the multi-nominated short film Marked. I was also greatly humbled to be the first recipient of a Best Actor award at the 2008 Idaho "Spud Fest" Film Festival for the film Still Me, playing a stroke survivor alongside the wonderful actress Tina Gloss (ABC's Pushing Daisies), written and directed by the multi-talented Beth McElhenny. In 2008, Still Me won awards at the Big Bear and Secret City film festivals and was featured in the 2009 Oscar edition of American Cinematographer Magazine.

I live the California dream and now call Los Angeles home, along with my wife, Sandra, who also works in the industry (for 20th Century Fox), son Wolfgang, daughter Natalia, a bobcat named Chase, a Bengal cat named Leo Di Catrio and a German Shepherd named Kaiser. Life is good.