DeVeren Bookwalter

Biography

DeVeren Bookwalter honed his TV and movie acting talents originally in stage work in New York. From the east he moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, to plumb the opportunities of West Coast acting. One of the first of varied small roles in his new movie career was The Omega Man (1971). Bookwalter had a particular passion for Shakespeare and found an adequate outlet in his association with R. Thad Taylor's Shakespeare Society of America in West Hollywood. Working out of a turn-of-the-century Victorian mansion converted to several production stages, the SSA was especially devoted to performing all of Shakespeare's plays with a pool of LA legitimate theater, TV, and movie talent. Bookwalter played Feste the Clown in the SSA's ambitious Twelfth Night (1971)which used the mansion's massive backyard patio as the central stage. The production included young British actors Vincent Mongol and Vickery Turner and veteran funny man Avery Schreiber. When the mansion's owners tore it down in early 1972 (for the proverbial parking lot), Taylor moved the SSA to a converted garage a few miles north and with Bookwalter and the addition of a varied trove of talented volunteers constructed within it a half scale model of the Globe Theater. Reconstituting the new location as the LA Globe Theater, the SSA continued the goal of completing Shakespeare's plays, along with a steady insertion of new plays and some modern classics. Bookwalter took the helm as director and star in the SSA's acclaimed Cyrano de Bergerac (1975) which garnered the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for production, director, and lead performance for that year. The SSA completed the Shakespeare collection of plays in 1976-77 season, and Bookwalter once again moved into movies, including the American TV production of Othello (1981). His most notable movie role was as the home grown terrorist leader Bobby Maxwell in the Clint Eastwood_ continuing Dirty Harry installment The Enforcer (1976). Thereafter Bookwalter moved into the steady work of soap operas (1982-84) and finally returned to New York where he passed away before his time in 1987.