William Kinsolving

After a questionable academic career at Stanford (I mean, how practical is a double major in Drama and Far Eastern Theology?), Kinsolving fled to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to play Richard the Second. He then attended The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art for polish. Returning to New York, he appeared as an actor off-, under-, and on Broadway, as well as a saloon singer in any number of seedy Greenwich Village nightclubs. For creative diversion during these years, he acted and/or directed back in Oregon, then at the Stratford Shakespeare Theater, Harvard, Dartmouth, Café La Mama, then went and won the Best Actor of the Year award from the SF Chronicle for performing at the Berkeley Rep.

Ineluctably transitioning to a second career as most do, Kinsolving wrote his first play, was awarded a Ford Foundation Playwriting Grant, and had the play produced by the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival. This led to the first of some 54 films on which he worked for every major studio in Los Angeles, London and Rome as screenwriter and script doctor. Suspecting that such a life was leading to the corruption of his soul (not to dare mention his body), he retreated to northern California to write the first of five novels including several best-sellers.

Concurrently while serving on the Board of Trustees of the California Institute of the Arts, he met and was smart enough to marry Susan Kinsolving, the poet. She presented him with two astonishing daughters, and presently puts up with him in Connecticut. Quixotically between books, he joined the Board of Directors of both The Actors’ Company, as well as a California biotech corporation. He regressed indulgently to cabaret and fundraising performances, accompanied by the likes of Peter Duchin and Emmanuel Ax, singing at the Algonquin Hotel’s late lamented Oak Room and at one of the late Brooke Astor’s better birthday parties among many other venues.

A sixth novel is finished! Set in ante-bellum America, it’s the first book of a trilogy featuring three brothers and an extraordinary woman. The second book covers the Civil War from unique perspectives; the third, Reconstruction from one-off points-of-view.