Richard Jenkins in DeKalb, IL, Jenkins earned a degree in drama from Wesleyan University before attending a graduate theater program at Indiana State College. While there, he began studying with acclaimed acting coach Harold Guskin, whose exploratory approach greatly informed Jenkins’ style of performance. Richard Jenkins later developed a long and distinguished career in regional theater, most notably with the Trinity Repertory Theater in Rhode Island (his home for over 30 years), where he also served as artistic director. Jenkins began appearing in films and television in the mid-1970s, starting with a 1974 PBS broadcast of a Trinity Repertory performance of the play “Feasting With Panthers,” about the imprisonment of playwright Oscar Wilde. The following year, Jenkins briefly relocated with his wife and family to Los Angeles, CA to try his hand at more on-camera work, but he found the experience unrewarding, returning to Providence after only 10 months.
Another set of famous filmmaking siblings – Joel and Ethan Coen – also made excellent use of Jenkins’ versatile skills. The filmmakers first became aware of him after he auditioned for William H. Macy’s role in “Fargo” (1996), but did not cast him in one of their films until their neo-noir “The Man Who Wasn’t There” (2001), where he played the hard-drinking lawyer father to femme fatale Scarlett Johansson. Two years later, he turned up as a more sober legal figure in “Intolerable Cruelty” (2003), the Coen’s lightweight tribute to screwball comedies, and reunited with them in 2008 as a gym manager in the dark comedy “Burn This,” about a former CIA agent (John Malkovich) who loses his memoirs to a pair of Jenkins’ employees (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand).