Hill Harper

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hill Harper

Birth name	Frank Hill Harper
Born	May 17, 1966 (age 40) Iowa City, Iowa, United States
Other name(s)	F. Hill Harper
Notable roles	* Xavier in Get on the Bus * Alex Waters in The Visit * Dr. Wesley Williams in City of Angels (TV series) * Dr. Sheldon Hawkes in CSI: NY

Hill Harper (born Frank Hill Harper on May 17, 1966 in Iowa City, Iowa), is an American film, television and stage actor.

One of the more compelling actors of his generation, Hill Harper has earned a reputation for turning in complex performances defined by equal parts intensity and charisma. Acting since the age of 7, Harper, a native of Iowa City, continued to nurture his interest while an undergraduate student at Brown and then as a graduate student at Harvard, where he earned degrees in law and government. During his years at Harvard, the actor was a full-time member of Boston's Black Folks Theater Company, one of the oldest and most acclaimed African-American theater troupes in the country. Harper broke into both film and television in 1993, doing recurring work on the Fox series Married...with Children and making his film debut in the short Confessions of a Dog. He had his first substantial role in a feature in Spike Lee's Get on the Bus (1996), which cast him as a UCLA film student riding a bus to the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. He went on to further demonstrate his versatility in such films as Lee's He Got Game (1998) and Christopher Scott Cherot's Hav Plenty (1997), the latter of which featured him as an egotistical pop-soul singer. The actor's profile subsequently rose on both the mainstream and independent film circuits, thanks to roles in films ranging from Beloved (1998) to the independent romantic comedy Loving Jezebel (1999) to The Skulls (2000), an entry into the teen thriller/horror genre. Harper also did some of his most acclaimed work in Jordan Walker Pearlman's The Visit (2000), an independent drama in which he starred as a prisoner dying of AIDS who tries to put his life back together. Rebecca Flint, All Movie Guide Harper graduated magna cum laude from Brown University (A.B. 1988) and also graduated with a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Master of Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a member of Boston's Black Folk's Theater Company. He is also a good friend of actress Gabrielle Union.