Biography
Terry Kinney was an American stage, film and TV actor who was also well-known for being one of the co-founders, along with Jeff Perry and Gary Sinise, of the legendary Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Born into a working class family in Lincoln, Illinois, Kinney always dreamt of becoming an actor. By the time he entered college at Illinois State University in the early 1970s, that dream only intensified. Then one day in 1973 while attending a production of "Grease" their mutual friend Gary Sinise was starring in, Kinney and Jeff Perry decided to team up with Sinise to form a brand new theater company. They called it the Steppenwolf Theatre, and set up shop in a church basement in Highland Park, Illinois. Together, the three of them put on performances for the next three years on a part-time basis as they finished college. The Steppenwolf Theatre became a full-time endeavor for Kinney and his two co-founders in 1976 after the three of them had graduated college. Kinney spent the next decade focusing primarily on building Steppenwolf into a powerhouse theater company, which it would eventually become in the 1980s. Kinney was a stage actor, first and foremost, but by the mid-1980s, with Steppenwolf gaining a positive reputation in the theater world, Kinney began nabbing various screen acting roles in films like "A Walk on the Moon" (1987), "The Last of the Mohicans" (1992), and "Sleepers" (1996). Then in 1997 Kinney landed his breakout acting role on the HBO prison series "Oz" (HBO, 1997-2003). He played Tim McManus on all six seasons of the show, which ended in 2003. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s Kinney worked steadily in both films and on TV. In 2009 he nabbed a recurring role on "The Mentalist" (CBS, 2008-2015), and followed that up with a recurring roles on "Fargo" (FX, 2014- ), as well as the critically-acclaimed HBO mini-series "Show Me a Hero" (2015). In 2016 Kinney joined the cast of the Showtime series "Billions" (Showtime, 2016- ). That series, about two prominent figures in the high-stakes world of New York finance, also starred Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis.
