Biography
Raised in NYC's Greenwich Village where his parents ran a bookstore, clean-cut, sensitive-looking leading man Keir Dullea acted in stock and with various repertory companies before finally appearing Off-Broadway in "Season of Choice" (1959). He gained immediate attention for his first two film roles, as the doomed juvenile delinquent in "The Hoodlum Priest" (1961) and as the young emotionally disturbed protagonist of Frank Perry's "David and Lisa" (1962). Looking younger than his years, he continued to play intense, neurotic youths in movies like "The Thin Red Line" (1964), "Bunny Lake Is Missing" (1965) and "Madame X" (1966), finally breaking the typecasting as the man who intrudes upon a lesbian relationship in the film of D H Lawrence's novella, "The Fox" (1967). After his memorable turn as astronaut David Bowman in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), his career seemed ready to blast into a new dimension, but his misses outnumbered his hits in the 1970s and 80s, due as much to his apathy as anything.
