With the role of Steve Bushak in 1990's The Freshman, actor Frank Whaley inaugurated a fruitful film career. Whaley went on to be prominently featured in three 1991 pictures. He played real-life guitarist Robby Krieger in The Doors, and two leading roles: the hapless tourist caught up in literary espionage in Back in the U.S.S.R. (1991) and the feckless night watchman with both a runaway heiress and a gang of burglars on his hands in Career Opportunities (1991). Whaley has continued averaging two to three film appearances per annum; would that the films themselves were more profitable than the likes of Swing Kids (1993) and A Midnight Clear (1993).
Frank Whaley
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Biography by AllMovie
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- Founded the band the Niagras with his brother, Robert.
- Began his film career in 1987 as the younger version of Jack Nicholson's character in Ironweed.
- Played a tourist lured into the Russian underworld in 1992's Back in the U.S.S.R., the first U.S. film ever to be shot entirely in Moscow.
- At the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, he won a Walto Salt Screenwriting Award for his film Joe the King, an autobiographical drama about growing up in a poor and troubled upstate New York household during the '70s.