Bill Irwin

Bill Irwin is one of the best known American actors and clowns. He has performed as a circus clown, a stage clown, a television clown, and now has become very well known on the Broadway stage as an actor.

Bill Irwin graduated from Oberlin College in 1973 with a degree in theater arts, and from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College the following year.

In 1975, he helped found the Pickle Family Circus in San Francisco, California. He left the company in 1979, and decided to pursue stage work. He created a number of highly regarded stage shows, including The Regard of Flight (1982), Largely New York (1989), Fool Moon (with David Shiner)(1993), The Harlequin Studies (2003), and Mr. Fox: A Rumination (2004). Mr. Fox is a production that Irwin had worked on for years, a biography of 19th century clown George Washington Lafayette Fox that also has autobiographical elements.

Bill is perhaps best known for creating the character of Mr. Noodle on Sesame Street. (He has been joined since then by Mr. Noodle's brother, Mr. Noodle (actor Michael Jeter) and the Noodle brother's sister Ms. Noodle, played by Kristen Chenoweth.

Bill has won a number of awards, including a 1984 MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Tony Award in 2005 for Best Actor in a Play for his appearance as George in the revival of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

To find out more about Bill Irwin, visit these unofficial sites for Bill:
(to the best of my knowledge, he does not have his own website.)

http://www.bill-irwin.com
http://www.keyboardjazz.com/sites/willie/

You can also visit his Wikipedia page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Irwin