Ed Flanagan was born in Boston. After being totally terrified by all early
movie-going experiences from Disney to film-noir until the age of twelve, he
became an award-winning radio actor in his late teens while acting and directing
in local community theatre. At 17 he was invited by Dore Schary, production chief
at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to spend a summer vacation visiting the old MGM lot to
see first-hand a major studio at work and became determined to one day work there
himself, known around Boston as that kid who went around writing ' MGM ' and '
arts gratia artis ' grafitti all over town. When his parents refused to let him
return to Hollywood to study at the Pasadena Playhouse, he entered a mainstream
university to pursue acting and directing.
But soon another call distracted him from that path and after eight years of
seminary training he became a Catholic priest serving as a missionary in the far east.
After some years he became totally
disenchanted with that life and returned to the U.S. in the late
60's to study film-making and directing at NYU Grad School of Film
and Television under Haig Manoogian, Marty Scorcese's mentor. That
summer, working
as an apprentice to Gene Kelly who was
on the east-coast directing 20th Century Fox's musical film version
of "Hello Dolly" with Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau, he made
the agonizing decision to petition
Rome to be released of his priestly vows and
returned to the lay life, quickly becoming
a Madison Ave TV commercial producer and associate producer of three
G.E. Theatre network TV specials.
Trained by the Russians
in the early 80's, he
became adept and well-known
on the east-coast for an unusual 'bio-energy'
healing modality that instantly erases
negative desires/habits
without hypnosis, working
on the electro-magnetic field surrounding
the body. Word of his work
spread to the west-coast
and at the request of many
in Los Angeles who had
heard of his great success with smoking
and weight-loss, he traveled there for work three
times
in the summer of 2001 and then suddenly
and un-expectedly moved
to LA from Boston in
September, 2001.
He acquired a house on Lake Calabasas. Ed then met Mala Powers,
a movie star from the the 50's (who trained under the great Russian
actor-director, Michael Chekhov), and was inspired to resurrect his acting
career, studying under her and the great LA Chekhov coach, Lisa Dalton.
In less than a year, with their insistence, he had his headshots taken and
began in early 2004 submitting himself to various film projects. In addition to the role of Madir, he then landed another
major role in the feature film, "Three For The Ride", in which he plays a lovable
Jewish pawnbroker and (call it type-casting) was recently cast in another feature,
"Pieces of Eight", in which he plays a Jewish borscht-belt comic.
Ed is currently studying the Torah (kidding!) but in his first three months
out there has been cast in over a dozen films including these three features and
several pilot-shorts, some of which may be developed into full-length features.
Now, FINALLY, after a 50 year circuitous route, he is happily pursuing his old
Hollywood dream in a new spiritual path.
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