Harry Groener is known to many viewers as the mayor of Sunnydale on the cult-hit series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but some of the actor's biggest accomplishments have been on the stage. Born in Germany, Groener's family moved to the U.S. when he was two. He apprenticed with the San Francisco Ballet as a teenager, and went on to study drama at the University of Washington before embarking on what would become an extremely successful career on Broadway. Throughout the following decades, he would appear in countless plays such as Cats, Oklahoma!, and Spamalot, while simultaneously maintaining a career onscreen, appearing in movies like Road to Perdition and About Schmidt, and on TV shows like Dear John (as the very awkward Ralph), The West Wing, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Harry Groener
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- Parents—his father was a concert pianist, his mother an opera singer—moved to San Francisco from Germany when he was 2.
- Began studying ballet and jazz dancing before his teens, and became interested in acting in high school.
- While choreographing Jack Heifner's Vanities at the Actors Theater in Louisville in 1976, met his wife, Dawn Didawick, who was starring in the play.
- Earned a Tony nomination in his Broadway debut as Will Parker in a 1979 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!
- Originated the Broadway roles of Munkustrap in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats in 1982, and Bobby Child in the "new Gershwin musical" Crazy for You in 1992, which earned his second and third Tony nominations, respectively.
- Other accolades include a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for playing the title role in a 2010 production of King Lear and a 2011 Joseph Jefferson Award (the Jeffs) as the star of Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III in Chicago.