Guest Artist Bio

David Ogden Stiers

• Performs in Strauss' Theatre Music:
  Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 2 pm
  

David Ogden Stiers is the creator of one of television’s most indelible characters: Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester III, the pompous, outspoken wartime surgeon on the hit sitcom M*A*S*H. His six year run on the award-winning program netted him a pair of Emmy nominations for a character he once described as “lovably unlovable.” He also collected a third nomination for his role in the NBC miniseries The First Olympics, Athens 1896.

Stiers was given a scholarship by the legendary John Houseman to New York’s prestigious Juilliard School Drama Division. He made his Broadway bow in The Juilliard Acting Company’s inaugural season in such plays as The Lower Depths, The Hostage and School for Scandal. Leaving the Acting Company, as the group came to be known, Stiers went on to play 11 characters in Ulysses in Nighttown starring Zero Mostel and followed that with the hit musical The Magic Show with Doug Henning. Years later he was the Narrator for Broadway’s hit musical Beauty and the Beast.

Early guest appearances on Kojak and Rhoda in the mid-‘70s led to his recurring role as the stuttering TV station manager Mel Price on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. That part landed him the role of Maj. Winchester on M*A*S*H.

Stiers made his motion picture debut in the acclaimed drama Drive, He Said, directed by Jack Nicholson. He co-starred in Magic, The Cheap Detective, Oh God!, The Accidental Tourist and Doc Hollywood, among others, and was frequently engaged by director Woody Allen, co-starring in five of his films: Mighty Aphrodite, Everyone Says I Love You, Shadows and Fog, Another Woman and Curse of the Jade Scorpion.

He actually began his movie career in the off-camera role of the “voices” in George Lucas’ directorial debut, THX-1138. In more recent years he has beguiled moviegoers by lending those vocal talents to several Disney animated features: Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Lilo and Stitch, Spirited Away and Teacher’s Pet.

The multifaceted Stiers is a member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the International Horn Society and has conducted more than 40 symphony orchestras around the country, including the San Diego Symphony, the Eugene Symphony – and the Chicago Symphony … for 47 seconds.

Stiers is associate conductor of Oregon’s Newport Symphony Orchestra.