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.