Armin Shimerman has dabbled in diverse arenas. Most Science
Fiction fans are familiar with his portrayals of Quark on Star Trek: DS-9 and Principal Snyder on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In over sixty different guest star characters on Television, he has brought to life an assortment of judges, anal-retentive bureaucrats, and sweet lost souls, including the major recurring roles of Pascal
in Beauty and the Beast, Cousin Bernie in Brooklyn Bridge, Tommy
Walker on the Invisible Man, and Edmund Graves on David E. Kelley’s, "Girl’s Club."
Immediately after graduation from UCLA with a degree in English, he
apprenticed at the prestigious San Diego Old Globe Shakespeare Theater and eventually took over the lead comic roles. Afterward, he emigrated to New York where within a year he was performing for Joseph Papp in the highly acclaimed production of "3
Penny Opera." He went on to work many years on Broadway in "St. Joan" with Lynn Redgrave at the Circle in the Square, "Broadway" with Teri Garr and Glen Close, and finally Richard Rogers’ last musical "I Remember Mama." Years of work in Regional Theater followed including Stage West, Connecticut Shakespeare Festival, Vermont Champlain Shakespeare Festival, Indiana Repertory, Rutgers’
Mason Gross Theater, Los Angeles Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles Theatre
Center, Tyrone Guthrie Theater, and Seattle’s ACT. For his last stage endeavor in Pinter's "Birthday Party," he was nominated for best lead performance by the prestigious Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle.
In addition, he has co-wrote Sci-Fi novels for Pocket Books: "The 34th Rule", "The Merchant Prince," "Outrageous Fortune," and "A Capital Offense" (due out later this year). He is currently penning a Tudor mystery, "The Toad-eater." This latest book is a product
of years of teaching Elizabethan Rhetoric to classical actors.
He was a founding member of "Alien Voices," a sci-fi audio theatre group with John DeLancie and Leonard Nimoy which does recordings of classic sci-fi.
Recently, he completed six years of service as a National officer of SAG where among other things he negotiated the current TV/Film contract, the Talent Agency contract, and the current consolidation and merger document.
Facts and pictures are courtesy of Armin Shimmerman.
