Peter Weller

Peter Weller (born June 24, 1947) is an American film and stage actor, director and history lecturer. He is best known for his roles as the title character in the first two RoboCop films, the title character in the cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension as well as Naked Lunch. He received an Academy Award nomination for his direction of the 1993 short Partners, in which he also acted. He also hosted the show Engineering an Empire on the History Channel. He played Stan Liddy in the 5th season of the Showtime original series Dexter. --- Weller was born in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, the son of Dorothy Jean (née Davidson), a homemaker, and Frederick Bradford Weller, a lawyer, federal judge, and career helicopter pilot for the United States Army. Weller had a "middle-class Catholic" upbringing. As a result of his father's army work, Weller spent many years abroad during his childhood. His family lived in Germany for several years before eventually moving to Texas, where he attended Alamo Heights High School in San Antonio. While enrolled at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), he played trumpet in one of the campus bands. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre in 1969, and began his acting career after graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Weller's stage career began in the 1970s with appearances on Broadway in Full Circle, directed by Otto Preminger, and Summer Brave, William Inge's rewrite of his play Picnic. About this time, he became a member of the famed Actors Studio. Weller was in the 1984 film Firstborn with Corey Haim, where he played the abusive boyfriend of Haim's mother (played by Teri Garr). Weller is a fan of Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, who directed him in Beyond the Clouds. In an interview in Cigar Aficionado magazine, he was quoted as saying: “ There is no director living except maybe Kurosawa, Bergman, or Antonioni that I would fall down and do anything for. I met Antonioni three years ago in Taorminaat a film festival. I introduced myself and told him that I adored his movies, his contributions to film, because he was the first guy who really started making films about the reality of the vacuity between people, the difficulty in traversing this space between lovers in modern day... and he never gives you an answer, Antonioni – that's the beautiful thing."