Tony Goldwyn

Origins and early life

Tony Goldwyn was born in Los Angeles on 20 May 1960, and his place in this directory rests on his paternal grandfather Samuel Goldwyn, born Szmuel Gelbfisz in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw in 1879, who walked out of the Russian empire as a boy, became a glove salesman in upstate New York and then one of the founders of Hollywood, and who has his own fiche on this site. His father was the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., his mother the actress Jennifer Howard, daughter of the playwright Sidney Howard, so that he grew up between two dynasties of the American theatre and cinema and was not raised in Judaism; this fiche says so plainly, and lists him under the descent route, through a grandparent born a Jew.

Work and career

He trained at Brandeis University and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and after years in the theatre had his breakthrough in 1990 as Carl Bruner, the smiling friend who turns out to have ordered the murder in Ghost, a part so effective that strangers berated him in the street for years. He played the Nazi officer Amon Göth's colleague and other supporting roles through the 1990s, gave voice to the title character in Disney's Tarzan in 1999, and appeared in The Last Samurai, The Pelican Brief and Kiss the Girls.

From 2012 to 2018 he was President Fitzgerald Grant III in the ABC series Scandal, the role that made him a household face. As a director he made A Walk on the Moon (1999), Conviction (2010) with Hilary Swank, and Ezra (2023), and he has directed for Broadway and for television. He is also known for his political engagement and for his work with the Innocence Project on wrongful convictions.