Jeff Daniels

Jeffrey Warren "Jeff" Daniels (born February 19, 1955) is an American actor, musician, and playwright. He founded a nonprofit theater company, the Purple Rose Theatre Company, in his home state of Michigan. He has performed in a number of stage productions, both on and off Broadway, and has been nominated for the Tony Award as Best Actor for the Broadway play God of Carnage (2009), along with his other three castmates.

His film debut was 1981's Ragtime, and his most recent films are Steve Jobs and The Martian, in 2015. For his work, he has received four Golden Globe Award nominations, including as Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture—Comedy/Musical for Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) (hence the name of his theater company). He has also received nominations by the Screen Actors Guild, Satellite Awards, and several others for his work in The Squid and the Whale (London Critics Circle Awards, Independent Spirit Awards, and Gotham Awards). He played Debra Winger's husband in the 1983 Oscar-winning film Terms of Endearment. Recently, he starred as Will McAvoy in Aaron Sorkin's HBO television series The Newsroom, for which he won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2013.