Tony Shalhoub | Biography, Films, TV Shows, & Facts (2024)

Tony Shalhoub (born October 9, 1953, Green Bay, Wisconsin, U.S.) is an American actor who was perhaps best known for his comedic roles, most notably the “defective detective” (a sufferer from obsessive-compulsive disorder) Adrian Monk in the USA network television series Monk (2002–09).

Shalhoub was the son of a Lebanese immigrant, and he was drawn to acting at an early age, making his debut in a high-school production of The King and I. Shalhoub attended the University of Southern Maine (B.A., 1977) and Yale University’s School of Drama (M.A., 1980). Early in his career, he focused on stage work, performing with the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in several theatrical productions at the New York Shakespeare Festival. He found success on Broadway in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles (1989) and earned a Tony Award nomination for his performance in Herb Gardner’s Conversations with My Father (1992).

Shalhoub ventured into television acting in 1986, playing a terrorist in one episode of the series The Equalizer, and in 1988 he appeared in his first television movie, Alone in the Neon Jungle. He quickly moved on to more-substantial roles, portraying Enrico Fermi in the Emmy Award-winning Day One (1989) and the romantic taxi driver Antonio Scarpacci in the series Wings (1991–97).

Shalhoub’s versatility allowed him to transfer easily to the big screen, where his most-memorable performances included playing a pawnbroker with a surprisingly regenerative head in the first two Men in Black films (1997, 2002), a Muslim antiterrorist FBI agent in The Siege (1998), and the comic villain Alexander Minion in three installments (2001–03) of the Spy Kids series. Shalhoub demonstrated his command of foreign dialects and talent for comedy as a non-English-speaking cab driver in Quick Change (1990), opposite Bill Murray, and he costarred as the moody chef Primo in Big Night (1996).

It was Shalhoub’s ability to absorb himself totally in character roles that proved key to the success of his portrayal of Monk. During Monk’s eight-season run, Shalhoub earned numerous honours, including multiple Emmy Awards (2003, 2005, 2006) and Screen Actors Guild Awards (2004, 2005) as well as a Golden Globe Award (2003).

Shalhoub’s later big-screen roles included the voice of the vehicle Luigi in the animated Cars (2006) and its sequels (2011, 2017), a psychiatrist in the romantic comedy How Do You Know (2010), and an arrogant entrepreneur whose kidnapping drives the plot of the action comedy (2013). He also portrayed real-life figures in two movies that aired on HBO. In Too Big to Fail (2011), about the economic crisis of 2008, he played the CEO of financial-services firm Morgan Stanley, and in (2012) he appeared as the Soviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov, who was friends with Ernest Hemingway. He provided the voice of the computer-animated ninja master Splinter in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) and its 2016 sequel. In 2017 Shalhoub appeared in the film Final Portrait, portraying the younger brother of famed Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. During this time he also had recurring roles on a number of TV series, including Nurse Jackie. In addition, he portrayed the uptight father of a female comedian in the 1950s in the Amazon show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017– ). For that series, he received an Emmy in 2019.

In 2010 Shalhoub returned to the Broadway stage in the farce Lend Me a Tenor, and three years later he earned a Tony Award nomination for his performance in Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy as the hero’s Italian immigrant father. Shalhoub also received a Tony nod for his performance in Act One (2014), in which he appeared as American playwright Moss Hart, and he won the award for his work (2017–18) in The Band’s Visit, a musical about an Egyptian police band stranded in an Israeli desert village.