I really made a conscious effort to mix it up, not because in itself it's not the job of an actor to do all different things, but for me that's what I'm interested in.
Within a year Dafoe was part of the company.
There he apprenticed under Richard Schechner, director of the avant-garde theater troupe The Performance Group, and became romantically involved with the group's Elizabeth LeCompte, 11 years his senior and who, with her former romantic partner Spalding Gray and others, edged out Schechner and created the Wooster Group. ĭafoe studied drama at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, but left after a year-and-a-half to join the experimental theater company Theatre X in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before moving to New York City in 1976. His ancestry includes Irish, Scottish, German, and Canadian. William Alfred Dafoe, he recalled in 2009, 'My five sisters raised me because my father was a surgeon, my mother was a nurse and they worked together, so I didn't see either of them much.' In high school, he acquired the nickname Willem. One of seven children of Muriel Isabel ( née Sprissler) and Dr.
