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Barry Primus

Barry Primus has built the kind of wide-ranging career that resists a single label. Born in New York City on February 16, 1938, he spent the first decade of his professional life as a stage actor, establishing a foundation that would carry into film, television, writing, directing and teaching. His early television work included appearances on The Defenders, East Side/West Side and The Virginian. Primus made his first film appearance in The Brotherhood (1968), shot in Manhattan, and went on to work across a varied group of pictures, including Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1971), Boxcar Bertha (1972), Autopsy (1975), Heartland (1979), The Rose (1979), Night Games (1980), Absence of Malice (1981) and Guilty by Suspicion (1991). On television, one of his most substantial recurring roles came in Cagney and Lacey. He played Sergeant Dory McKenna, Christine Cagney's boyfriend and a fellow police officer whose drug problem begins to compromise his work. It was a role with more tension and consequence than the standard recurring-character assignment. Primus has never confined himself to acting. After serving as second unit director on Mark Rydell's The Rose, he expanded his work behind the camera. In 1992, he directed his first theatrical feature, Mistress, an inside-Hollywood comedy-drama. He has also worked as a screenwriter and producer, including writing and directing films in which he appeared. Later screen appearances included cameos in Righteous Kill, American Hustle, Grudge Match and The Irishman. A member of the Actors Studio, Primus has also taught acting and directing at institutions including the American Film Institute, the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, UCLA, Loyola Marymount University, Columbia University and the Maine Media Workshops. That combination of performance, filmmaking and teaching gives his career a practical, lived-in breadth: not simply time spent on screen, but sustained engagement with how screen work gets made.