Home

Kenneth Welsh (1942-2022)

Alias:
Ken Walsh
Ken Welsh
Kenneth Walsh

Birthplace:
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Born:
March 30, 1942

Died:
May 6, 2022

Biography from TheMovieDB

Kenneth Welsh, CM (March 30, 1942- May 5, 2022) was a Canadian film and television actor (sometimes credited as Ken Welsh). He was known to Twin Peaks fans as the multi-faceted villain Windom Earle, and had more recently played the father of Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator.  In 1984 he was nominated for a Genie Award as Best Actor for his portrayal of Reno Colt in the film "Reno and the Doc", written and directed by Charles Dennis. In 1997 Welsh directed Dennis in the latter's play "SoHo Duo" at the West Bank Theatre in New York City.  Welsh was born in Edmonton, Alberta to a father who worked for the Canadian National Railway. He grew up in Alberta and studied drama at school. He later moved to Montreal and attended the National Theatre School. Following graduation, he auditioned for the Stratford Festival in Ontario and then spent the first seven years of his career on stage.  Welsh has portrayed historical figures including Thomas E. Dewey, Colin Thatcher, Harry S. Truman (twice), Thomas Edison, James "Scotty" Reston, General Harry Crerar and James Baker.  He has made guest appearances on the acclaimed TV series Due South and Slings and Arrows.  In 2003, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.  His role as the Vice-President of the United States in the 2004 environmental disaster film The Day After Tomorrow sparked some controversy due to his physical resemblance to Dick Cheney, who at the time was the real Vice President. Director Roland Emmerich later confirmed that he deliberately chose Welsh for that very reason. Emmerich stated that the character of the Vice-President in the film was intended to be a not-so-subtle criticism of the environmental policies of the Presidency of George W. Bush.  Description above from the Wikipedia article Kenneth Welsh, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Click the heading above to show or hide the text.

Additional information:

The Search Form


Film Performances

Click the heading above to show or hide the list.

TV Performances

Click the heading above to show or hide the list.

About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

  • If you would like your profile removed from this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's gone from their site, it should soon be gone from this site.
  • If you would like to correct movie data on this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's corrected on their site, it should soon be corrected on this site.
  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.