Peter Coyote

Coyote's professional life started not in Hollywood but on the streets and stages of San Francisco. He acted, wrote, and directed with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and co-authored the play Olive Pits with Troupe member Peter Berg — a work that earned the group an Obie Award from the Village Voice (Wikipedia). He also acted in and directed the first cross-country tour of the Minstrel Show. Before any of that translated to film, he was already building a reputation as someone who took the work seriously. The pivot to film came in the late 1970s, and by 1982 he had landed the role that most people still associate with him first: Keys in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It's a performance that works precisely because Coyote doesn't oversell it — Keys could have been a cardboard government menace, but there's something almost tender in the way Coyote plays the character's final scene with Elliott, suggesting a man who genuinely wanted to find what the boy found. That restraint became something of a career signature. He followed it with the prosecuting attorney in Jagged Edge (1985), then appeared in Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon (1992) and the sci-fi ensemble Sphere (1998). Through the 1990s and 2000s, Coyote worked steadily across television and film — A Walk to Remember (2002), the documentary AKA Tommy Chong (2006) — while his narration career grew into something substantial in its own right. He narrated the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics and became a recurring voice in major documentary series (TMDB). He also served as on-camera co-host of the 2000 Oscar telecasts (TMDB). From 1975 to 1983, he served as a member and later chairman of the California Arts Council (Wikipedia) — a detail that doesn't always make the highlight reel but says something real about where his priorities have always been.