Claybourne Elder (born April 21, 1982[1]) is an American actor, singer, and writer who is best known for his work on television and on Broadway.
Biography
Elder is from Springville, Utah. His mother is a schoolteacher and father a carpenter, and he is the youngest of eight siblings. At an early age he played violin in the school orchestra.[2] Elder studied acting at the Moscow Klasse Centre in Russia before attending Brigham Young University and the University of Utah. He earned a degree in dramaturgy and directing from The University of Utah.[3]
Elder and director Eric Rosen were married on July 28, 2012, in New York State.[18] In 2017, they had a son through surrogacy.[19]
In 2022, many news outlets[20][21][22] reported a human interest story about Elder. In 2007, as a 23-year-old aspiring actor visiting New York City, he was in the standing-room section of the Broadway musicalThe 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee when a stranger approached him, noted his obvious enthusiasm for theater, gave him $200, and told him to spend it the next night on a ticket to a revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Elder did see that show and considered it—and the stranger's kindness—to be the factors that helped him decide to move to New York and pursue acting. By 2022 Elder was starring on Broadway in a different Sondheim revival, Company, alongside Patti LuPone, one of the stars of the Sweeney Todd production that so affected the course of Elder's career; at the same time, Elder was also starring in the HBO series The Gilded Age with Michael Cerveris, who had played the title role in that Sweeney Todd revival. Elder was reunited with Mark Howell, the stranger who had given him the money, and "paid forward" the favor by buying strangers tickets to Company. In July 2022, Elder retold this story on an episode of the WBEZ radio program This American Life that examined acts of kindness from strangers.[23]
