Kinney was born in Lincoln, Illinois, the son of Elizabeth L. (née Eimer), a telephone operator, and Kenneth C. Kinney, a tractor company supervisor.[1]
Career
Theatre
Kinney has been involved in theatre since 1974, when he, Gary Sinise and Jeff Perry founded the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. In describing the company's radical usage of cinematic techniques such as accelerated time, substantial soundtracks and the rough equivalent of dissolves and bleeds, Kinney had said:
We’ve always been more influenced by cinematic techniques than stage techniques because stage techniques have been around long enough to become really boring and cliché. Our earliest influences were the films of Cassavetes, not any plays we’d seen. We always tend to score our pieces and we always tend to manipulate the audience to look where we want them to look and the way to do that is to get very tight on certain situations.[2]
He has directed several plays (see below) and performed in several. In 1985, he performed in the Drama Desk Award–winning play Balm in Gilead by Lanford Wilson. In 1996, Kinney played Tilden in the Sam Shepard play Buried Child directed by Gary Sinise in New York City. During a performance of Buried Child, Kinney had a "terrible, horrible, screaming panic attack" and stayed offstage for several years, only returning in 2002 in a performance with Kurt Elling called Petty Delusions and Grand Obsessions.[3] He directed Richard Greenberg's play Well Appointed Room in 2006 and Neil LaBute's reasons to be pretty in 2009. In 2010, he directed another Lanford Wilson play, Fifth of July, for Bay Street Theatre (July) and for the Williamstown Theatre Festival (August).
In October–November 2012, Kinney directed Checkers, a new play by Douglas McGrath at the Vineyard Theatre, New York City.[4] He directed Lyle Kessler's new play Collision in January 2013 at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.[5]
Film and television
Besides his theatrical work, Kinney has done much acting, mainly for television, starting in 1986 with an appearance in Miami Vice. In 1987, he starred as Pastor Tom Bird in the CBS miniseries Murder Ordained opposite JoBeth Williams. He is perhaps best known for his portrayal of the idealistic unit manager Tim McManus on HBO's prison drama Oz.
Kinney also directed two episodes of Oz, "Cruel and Unusual Punishments" in 1999 and "Wheel of Fortune" in 2002. Explaining the experience, he said, "it was great training for shooting on a limited budget, on a time crunch."[6]
His film work includes a role in the 1988 film Miles from Home, which featured many cast members of Steppenwolf and was directed by Sinise. In 1995, he played mayoral candidate Todd Carter in Carl Franklin's film Devil in a Blue Dress. In 1996, Kinney played a comedic role as Uncle David in the coming-of-age drama Fly Away Home. In 1999, Kinney played the lead in the indie filmThe Young Girl and the Monsoon, about Hank, a 39-year-old photojournalist dealing with a demanding job and a growing daughter. In 2001, he played the estranged father of the protagonist, Sara Johnson (Julia Stiles), in the film Save the Last Dance.
In 2006, Kinney directed an 18-minute film called Kubuku Rides (This Is It), which portrays the effects of drug addiction of a mother as seen by her young son. The film is based on the short story by Larry Brown. It is the first film produced by Steppenwolf Films. In 2008, he directed Diminished Capacity, a feature film with a big Steppenwolf presence, based on the Sherwood Kiraly novel of that name.
For television, in 2008, Kinney was Deputy Attorney General Zach Williams in Canterbury's Law, a short-lived Fox series. In 2009, he played Sergeant Harvey Brown in the ABC series The Unusuals, and in the same year, he had a recurring role as Special Agent Sam Bosco on the hit CBS series The Mentalist.
2010 saw a pilot for a CBS drama called The Line, starring Dylan Walsh as ATF Agent Donovan with Kinney as a complex criminal, Alex Gunderson, that Donovan is hunting. The series was to be based on a novel by Robert Gregory Browne called Kiss Her Goodbye. (Browne said that the show was tentatively called ATF.[7]) In 2011 Kinney had a recurring role in the North American adaptation of Being Human as Heggemann, an 1,100-year-old Dutch vampire. In April 2012 he starred in the CBS police procedural drama NYC 22 as Field Training Officer Daniel "Yoda" Dean. However, after four episodes NYC 22 was axed. Kinney also guest starred as Salvatore Amato, a member of a Chicago crime family, in the new Fox drama The Mob Doctor premiering in September 2012.[8]
From 1984 to 1988, Kinney was married to Elizabeth Perkins. From 1993 to 2005, he was married to his Oz co-star Kathryn Erbe, with whom he has two children.
