One of the few American actors whose stage experience equals that of their film work, William H. Macy (sometimes credited as W.H. Macy) struggled for years to make others realize what mentor David Mamet knew from the very beginning, that here was an astonishing "cleanup hitter" (Macy's description for a character actor). Early on, his boyish handsomeness led to typecasting as the callow youth ("dead or weeping by the end of the play") or the boy genius with the solution to the play's central conflict. When he first moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s to pursue a film career, he was mostly the villain, the child molester, the sleazy lawyer, the good cop gone bad. He went broke twice along the way, and the frustration seeped into his hangdog persona, played out on his melancholy features as he humanized despairing, imperfect people. His square-faced, weathered innocence finally landed Macy his breakthrough role as the smarmy car salesman who arranges the kidnapping of his wife in the Coen brothers' quirky "Fargo" (1996), and suddenly the lovable loser was an Oscar nominee and a recognizable face, firmly ensconced on the Hollywood A-list.Though he entered college with every intention of studying veterinary medicine, Macy transferred to Goddard College and met Mamet (the man he calls his "godfather"), a recent Goddard grad who had returned to teach acting at his alma mater. The student responded to his instructor's call for hard work (the very antithesis of the liberal laxity of that "hippie" institution), and when Mamet returned to his native Chicago, he took Macy and fellow "Mamet Mafia" member Steven Schachter with him. The trio founded the St Nicholas Theater, and in 1975 staged Mamet's "American Buffalo" with Macy playing Bobby, the youth who serves as a kind of witless apprentice to two hapless thieves. Acknowledging his debt to Mamet, he told The Guardian (January 27, 2000): "He wasn't just my mentor, he also gave me my career. He gave me crucial roles througho