About Guest

Dullea, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio and was raised in New York’s Greenwich Village. He graduated from George School in Pennsylvania and attended both Rutgers and San Francisco State before deciding to pursue summer stock and regional theatre.

Attending the Neighborhood Playhouse, he made his New York City acting debut in a production of Sticks and Bones in 1956. His first big break came with the pilot program of the Route 66 (1960) series, and he proceeded to find other TV roles in Naked City (1958), Checkmate (1960) and various dramatic programs.

Tending to play men younger than he really was, none were more disturbed than his haphephobic teenager David (Dullea was 26 at the time) in the deeply-felt love story David and Lisa (1962). Dullea won the Golden Globe Award for “Most Promising Male Newcomer.”

In the World War II military drama The Thin Red Line (1964) he played an edgy, nervous-eyed private who is pushed to his murderous brink by a brutal sergeant on Guadacanal. 

The apex of his film career came with his lead role in Stanley Kubrick’s epic science-fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), as the astronaut Dr. David Bowman.

In 1973 Dullea was cast as Devon in the classic sci-fi series The Starlost which involved a spaceship called THE ARK which was composed of hundreds of domes, each of which contained a sample culture from the planet Earth, which had long since died out due to pollution). During an asteroid storm which killed the crew that was piloting it, the ship was set adrift and started careening toward an UNCHARTED SOLAR STAR! The character played by Dullea gets forced out of his dome starts exploring the ship with his 2 friends, trying to set the course correct so that they don’t hit this star.

In the years since then, Dullea has acted steadily on the stage in New York City, and in American regional theaters, in productions of Sweet Prince, The Seagull and The Little Foxes, among others. His cinematic roles since 1970 have included another “mysterious stranger” in The Next One (1984), and he also reprised his “David Bowman” role in 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984), the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dullea was the Co-founder of the Theater Artists Workshop of Westport in 1983 in London.
Dullea has worked steadily in both theatre and television throughout his long career. Among his more recent work in movies has been the role of a senator in The Good Shepherd (2006), along with Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, which was directed by Robert De Niro.