Actor Dennis Franz was born on Oct. 28, 1944 in Maywood, Illinois. His full name is Dennis Franz Schlacta. Dennis has two older sisters. His father was a German immigrant and both his parents worked for the Post Office Department. In 1962, Dennis graduated from Proviso East Township High School where he was active in baseball, football, and swimming. He attended Wright Junior College and graduated from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale with a major in speech and theater in 1966. After SIU, he served with the Army including 11 months of duty in Viet Nam. Returning to Illinois, he worked for the Post Office and renewed an interest in acting he first developed in high school.
He joined with some friends to help to launch the Organic Theater Company in Chicago and was noticed by producer Robert Altman who persuaded Dennis to move to Los Angeles. Dennis met producer Stephen Bochco in the early 1980s. Bochco cast him in two different character roles including Detective Norman Buntz on Hill Street Blues on NBC. In movies and on TV, Dennis played interesting roles as police officers for more than twenty years. Dennis joined the cast of NYPD Blue on ABC-TV in 1993 in the role of Detective Andy Sipowicz. While with that series between 1993 and 2005, Dennis won four Emmy Awards for Lead Actor in a Drama Series. This had never happened before for the same character in the same series. He also won a Golden Globe Award in 1994 and that same year won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor in a Drama. For a complete list of the films and TV shows of Dennis Franz, readers may visit his page on the Internet Movie Data Base.
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