James Remar Biography
Born: December 31, 1953
Hard-working character actor James Remar has been mainly typecast as a psychopathic killer in a wide variety of thrillers, both blockbusters and low-budget straight-to-video. A native of Boston, he studied acting at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse and made his Broadway debut with +Bent, opposite Richard_Gere. His first major film role was gangster Ajax in Walter_Hill's 1979 action drama The_Warriors. The film gained a minor cult following and seemed to cement Remar's reputation as a bad guy. He would continue to work with director Hill for Windwalker (1980), 48_Hrs. (1982), and Wild_Bill (1995).
During the '80s, he played psycho gangster Dutch Schultz in Francis_Ford_Coppola's The_Cotton_Club, a maniac killer in Rent-a-Cop, and a Neanderthal in The Clan of the Cave Bear. He got a little break in 1989 as the cop Gentry in Gus_Van_Sant's Drugstore_Cowboy. During the '90s, he made a deal with the devil in Tales From the Darkside: The Movie and appeared in many movies that ended up on TV or home video. He had played so many villains that he was able to spoof himself as Max Shady in the comedic thriller parody Fatal_Instinct. A few gentle comedy dramas followed with Penny_Marshall's Renaissance_Man and Herbert_Ross' Boys on the Side.
Many film roles opened up in the late '90s, from Victor_Salva's independent comedy Rites of Passage to the big-budget Robert_Zemeckis mystery What_Lies_Beneath. After playing Frank Cisco on the TV series Total Security, he showed up on HBO's Sex and the City as Richard, Samatha's (Kim_Cattrall) rich boyfriend of the moment. He then joined the cast of the USA original series The_Huntress as fugitive Tiny Bellows, the love interest of Dottie Thorson (Annette O'Toole). In 2003, he could be seen in feature films from the action moneymaker 2_Fast_2_Furious to the light comedy Duplex. Andrea LeVasseur, Rovi
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