Paul Hecht made his debut on Broadway as “The Player” in Tom Stoppards Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (Tony Award nomination – 1968). His most recent Broadway appearance was in the dual roles of “John Ruskin & Jerome K. Jerome” in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. Other Broadway roles include “John Dickinson” in 1776 (performed at the Nixon White House), “Nathan” in the Bock-Harnick musical Rothschilds, “Rufio” in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar & Cleopatra and “Belcredi” in Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV, (both with Rex Harrison), “Dick Wagner” in Tom Stoppard’s Night & Day (with Maggie Smith), and the “Director” in Noises Off by Michael Frayn, Herzl by Dore Schary, and Don Juan by Moliere, for the New Phoenix Rep.
Off-Broadway, Paul has appeared as “George Pye” in Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones at the Manhattan Theatre Club and on tour in the UK with the National Theatre. “Ralph” in the American Premiere of Harold Pinter’s Moonlight at the Roundabout Theatre Company (with Jason Robards), and Neil Simon’s London Suite. Other appearances Off-Broadway include MacBird & Sjt, Musgraves Dance. For his portrayal of Pirandello’s Henry IV at the Roundabout he received an OBIE award (1990).
Around the country, he has appeared as “Cyrano” in the world premiere of the Anthony Burgess translation of Cyrano de Bergerac at the Guthrie in Minneapolis, and as “Marc Antony” in both Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. He has performed with the NY Shakespeare Festival in such roles as “Henry V,” “MacDuff,” and “Menenius” in Coriolanus (with Christopher Walken).
He has performed in plays by Shaw, Chekhov, Turgenev, Handke, Kaufman-Ferber, Brecht, Harwood, Osborne, Dickens and Pinter, at Canada’s Shaw Festival, McCarter: Princeton, Manitoba Theater Center, John Drew: East Hampton, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Baystreet: Sag Harbor, & Lincoln Center.
He has appeared in movies with Jeremy Irons, Howard Stern, Sissy Spacek, Chris Rock, Jane Fonda, and Kris Kristofferson.
TV audiences may have recognized him over the years as “Charles” in Kate and Allie, and as a variety of unsavory characters in Law & Order, Queer as Folk, Family Re-Union (with Bette Davis), I’ll Take Manhattan (with Valerie Bertinelli), All My Children, One Life To Live, Another World, As the World Turns, Starsky & Hutch, Hawaii 5/0, Remington Steele, and the premiere episode of Miami Vice.
He has recorded extensively for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he began his career as a staff announcer in Montreal in the early ‘60’s. During that time he worked with the legendary radio director Rupert Caplan and hosted a live radio show from Expo ’67.
He appeared frequently on Hi Brown’s CBS Radio Mystery Theater, and narrated Oscar Wilde’s short story The Selfish Giant (Oscar Nomination for Best Animated Short – 1972). He has recorded dozens of books for Recorded Books (Alexander McCall Smith, Ray Bradbury, William Safire, Thomas Mann). He has appeared at Selected Shorts and Bloomsday at Symphony Space, at the Morgan Library and the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd St Y, where he directed Edna St Vincent Millay’s Conversation at Midnight.He appeared in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (Stoppard/Previn) and Façade (Walton/Sitwell) with the Philadelphia Orchestra and, was the Narrator of Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat, conducted by Robert Craft.He has performed in literary/musical programs, with the Allentown Symphony, Dryden Players, Newberry Consort, and also performs a program of John Donne poetry with the Early Music Group Parthenia. He reads to children in deepest Brooklyn as part of NY State’s Pre-K For All program. He was a member of the first graduating class of the National Theatre School of Canada (1963), and served as President of the New York Branch of SAG from 1991-1995.