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William Louis Petersen (born February 21, 1953) is an American actor, best known for playing Gil Grissom on CSI. Handsome, athletic and wiry, this veteran of the Chicago stage entered movies convincingly playing edgy, implacable pursuers but soon seemed just as credible in sports dramas and light comedies. Petersen simmered as the morally ambiguous protagonist of William Friedkin's scalding crime drama, "To Live and Die in L.A." (1985). Sporting alarmingly tight pants and a bad attitude, he was a Secret Service agent who lavishly breaks the law to snare a master counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe). The following year, Petersen brought a nearly palpable confusion and anxiety to his portrait of a burned out FBI agent who hunts down a serial killer in Michael Mann's disquieting "Manhunter" (retitled "Red Dragon: The Pursuit of Hannibal Lecter" for TV). Petersen, the youngest of six children, was born in Evanston, Illinois, to parents who worked in the furniture business. He is of Danish descent on his father's side and German on his mother's. He graduated from Bishop Kelly High School in Boise, Idaho, in 1972. He was accepted to Idaho State University on a football scholarship. While at Idaho State, Petersen took an acting course which changed the direction of his life. He left school along with his wife, Joanne, in 1974 and followed a drama professor to Basque country where he studied as a Shakespeareian actor. Petersen was interested in Basque culture and he studied the Basque language, Euskera, and gave his daughter the Basque name Maite, meaning love. Petersen returned to Idaho intent on being an actor. Not wanting to work a non-acting job in Idaho, he returned to the Chicago area, living with relatives. He became active in the theater and earned his Actors' Equity card. He performed with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and was a co-founder of the Remains Theater Ensemble which also included other prominent Chicago actors Gary Cole and Ted Levine. A football player in college, Petersen has been well cast as screen sportsmen. He made his TV debut playing a womanizing team manager in "Long Gone" (HBO, 1987), a highly regarded cable telefilm set in the world of minor league baseball. Petersen subsequently acted in several mild comedies including "Cousins" (1989), "Hard Promises" (his producing debut) and the dark comedy "Passed Away" (both 1992). A youth spent in rural Idaho served him well as he played a classic Western law man, Sheriff Pat Garrett, pursuing Emilio Estevez's Billy the Kid in "Young Guns II" (1990). Petersen donned cowboy duds again for the popular TV miniseries sequel, "Return to Lonesome Dove" (CBS, 1993). He is usually credited without his middle initial (i.e. credited as "William Petersen" and not "William L. Petersen"). Because his role in Manhunter was so emotionally exhausting, he did everything he could to rid himself of Will Graham after finishing principal photography. He shaved off his beard, cut his hair and dyed it blonde. He also claims to have done this because, while rehearsing for a play in Chicago, his dialogue was always coming out Will Graham; he dyed his hair so he could look in the mirror and see a different person. In a move perhaps indicative of his career choices, Petersen declined a part in Oliver Stone's Platoon, as it would have kept him in the Philippines, away from his family. Instead, he worked on the 1987 made-for-TV movie Long Gone. Petersen has remained active on the stage, particularly with Chicago's Remains Theatre, an avant-garde company which he and several others formed in 1979 as Ix. His several Joseph Jefferson Awards for work in Chicago theater include honors for "In the Belly of the Beast" and "Tooth of Crime". Petersen made his Broadway stage debut in a 1996 production of Tennessee Williams' "Night of the Iguana". In 1985's To Live and Die in L.A., Petersen appears, briefly, frontally nude. Petersen was offered the role of Henry Hill in the movie Goodfellas, but turned it down. In 1993, Petersen appeared in the miniseries "Return to Lonesome Dove," and in 1996, appeared in Fear. Both projects featured him as a character with the surname "Walker." In the 2000 release, The Contender, Petersen played the role of Governor Jack Hathaway, an unscrupulous candidate for vice president following the death of the incumbent. He also appeared uncredited in the noir thriller Mulholland Falls as a character who finds himself on the violent receiving end of Los Angeles police. Generally shying away from the spotlight, Petersen assumed a higher profile after forming a film and TV production company, High Horse Films, with his partner Cindy Chvatal in 1986. He has been producing works of a more literary nature than the norm for Hollywood. A case in point was "Keep the Change" (TNT, 1992), a thoughtful TV-movie based on a Tom McGuane, in which Petersen starred as an emotionally conflicted California artist who returns to the sanctuary of his native Montana. He has also been popping up in more commercial fare on film and TV. Petersen battled a mysterious sea creature in the Peter Benchley miniseries "The Beast" (NBC, 1996) and announced plans to star in an hour-long drama series on NBC that would be co-produced by High Horse Films. On the big screen, he attempted to protect his teen-aged daughter from a psychopathic Mark Wahlberg in the James Foley-helmed thriller "Fear" (1996). Since 2000, Petersen has gained his greatest fame starring as Dr. Gil Grissom in the CBS crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Petersen recently took a break from CSI to appear in a five-week run of the Trinity Repertory Company production of Dublin Carol in Providence, Rhode Island. On the evening of Wednesday, May 30, 2007 Petersen was at Wrigley Field to join WGN radio sportscasters covering a Chicago Cubs – Florida Marlins game and he mentioned he had seen CSI: The Experience at the Museum of Science and Industry on the South Side of Chicago. He was on a nine-week break from the show at the time, and he expressed how he and his castmates were “blessed” to have such a successful series when he had seen shows starring friends cancelled after only a few episodes. According to Michael Ausiello of TV Guide, Petersen has renewed his contract with CBS to appear on CSI for the 2008-2009 season, reportedly for $600,000 per episode. Petersen married longtime girlfriend Gina Cirone in June 2003. He has a daughter, Maite, from his previous marriage. (Maite gave birth to his grandson, Mazrik William, in October 2003.) Petersen is an avid Chicago Cubs fan, and will drop by Wrigley Field at least once a year to sing the seventh-inning stretch. In 2004, Peterson described to Playboy Magazine a near-death experience he had in the 1980s, which gave him assurance that there is an afterlife. He also showed up in the 2007 writers' strike. |
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