John Heard

His patrilineal "Heard" line settled in the area around Ipswich, Massachusetts, in the 1600s. His maternal grandfather, Harry Louis Sperling, was the son of Jewish emigrants from Poland and Hungary. The rest of John's ancestry was mainly English and Irish. John was raised Catholic.

Through John's maternal grandmother, Ebeth A. Burton, John's maternal great-great-uncle was Joseph R. Burton, a politician who was a Republican U.S. Senator from Kansas, from 1901 to 1906.

Graduated from Washington, DC's Gonzaga College High School in 1964, and was inducted into the school's theatre hall of fame in the spring of 2003.

Graduated from Clark University, Worcester, MA in 1968.

John Heard was a very talented actor who established himself as a respected thespian in the late 1970s and early '80s, though he is perhaps better known for his turn as Peter McCallister, Kevin McCallister's (Macaulay Culkin) father in the Home Alone (1990) movies. John was born in Washington, D. C. , to Helen (Sperling), who acted in community theatre, and John Heard, who worked for the U. S. government.

John established himself with roles in the movies Between the Lines (1977), Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) (a. k. a.

He also shined as Reverend Dimmesdale (one of America's first religious hypocrites) in the 1979 PBS version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1979). Both "Chilly Scenes of Winter" and "Cutter's Way" (originally released as "Head Over Heels" and "Cutter and Bone", respectively) had been re-released under new titles after failing in their first go-rounds, such was the quality of the films. The two re-releases helped redefine the practice by which major studios handled smaller, art house quality pictures by releasing them carefully to select theaters with bespoke marketing campaigns so they reached the proper audience. (Studios would later develop their own art film-independent film subsidiaries to handle such pictures, so they didn't "fall through the cracks" like the first releases of the two Heard films.

)By the early 1980s, Heard seemed on his way to establishing himself as a major American actor, if not on the path to movie stardom. At the time, there was a joke that involved confusing Heard with John Hurt and William Hurt because of the similarity of their last names. At the time these contemporaries were considered equal in terms of their star power. In the early '80s, it would not have been unreasonable to predict that Heard would become an Oscar winner or a multiple nominee.

"Head Over Heels"), and Heart Beat (1981) (in which he played Jack Kerouac to Nick Nolte's Neal Cassady and Sissy Spacek's Carolyn Cassady), before giving a tour de force performance as a hideously wounded (both physically and psychologically) Vietnam veteran in Cutter's Way (1981) (a. k. a. "Cutter and Bone") opposite Jeff Bridges.

He continued to work on A-List projects, playing the not-so-sympathetic son to Geraldine Page in The Trip to Bountiful (1985) (for which Page won her own Oscar) and Tom Hanks's adult rival in Big (1988), but by the latter part of the decade he had failed to establish himself as a leading man and was playing supporting roles.

After securing Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern for Home Alone (1990), Chris Columbus felt confident enough to cast actors who were his heroes growing up like Catherine O'Hara after seeing her work on SCTV (1976), as well as Heard, and then Tim Curry and Rob Schneider on Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) because they were all open to the films.

Also appearing on television, he was nominated for an Emmy for his turn as a corrupt police detective on The Sopranos (1999).

Has three children: son, John "Jack" Matthew Heard III (b. 1987), with his ex-girlfriend Melissa Leo; daughter Annika Heard and son Maxwell ''Max'' Heard, both with second wife Sharon. Max died on December 6, 2016, at the age of 22.