John Michael Higgins

A military brat who moved myriad times while growing up, this boyishly handsome player began acting in regional theater as a child and continued to pursue an entertainment career after graduating college. Although he has played a striking number of gay roles — a flamboyant dog owner in Best in Show, real-life tennis star Bill Tilden in the off-Broadway play Big Bill, a Catholic priest dying of AIDS in a controversial episode of Nothing Sacred that never aired on network TV — Higgins is a straight actor who masterfully embodies over-the-top characters of all orientations. His breakthrough role came in 1996, when he did a fine (if at times grotesque) impression of David Letterman in the TV-movie The Late Shift. While the real late-night talk-show host despised Higgins' work, it got the actor noticed and he quickly became a perennial small-screen guest star, usually playing characters that were bitchy, uptight or both. His uproarious turn in Christopher Guest's 2000 mockumentary Best in Show jump-started his film career, and he subsequently appeared in supporting roles in both blockbusters (Blade: Trinity) and indies (Guest's A Mighty Wind).