David Alastair Lewis(1952-2024)
- Actor
- Producer
David grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York, the youngest child
of a Presbyterian minister. After admission to Harvard College, David
first aspired to be a foreign service officer, but the show business
bug bit him while onstage frequently at Harvard's Loeb Drama Center and
Hasty Pudding theatre, as well as under the summer stock mentoring of
Fred Carmichael and Patricia Carmichael at the legendary Dorset
Playhouse in Vermont, where David appeared alongside Elizabeth Franz
and Fred Grandy. As President of Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals in
his senior year, it was David who chose the script written by fellow
Harvardian and then-aspiring writer Mark O'Donnell for the 1974 Pudding
show, "Keep Your Pantheon." During his early years in Hollywood, David
studied acting with Nina Foch and Lilyan Chauvin. He also directed
stage productions of Shakespeare's Richard III at the old Hollywood
Center Theatre and Pierre La Mure's adaptation of his own original
novel about Toulouse-Lautrec, "Moulin Rouge," at the Masquers' Club.
While evaluating scripts, pre-publication novels, and film directors'
rough cuts for United Artists under several different management teams
in the late 70s and early 80s, David also volunteered his time to help
several student filmmakers at AFI's Center for Advanced Film Studies
learn to work with actors. David and his wife, actress Rose Marie
Perfect, left full-time show business in 1991 by moving to Vermont to
raise their children. Since then they continue to work occasionally in
independent films ("The Mudge Boy," "Landslide") and regional theatre.
Most recently they have both appeared in the "It's All Relative,"
written by Alyssa Polacsek and directed by Rebecca Burton for Lakota
Films.