Ron Silver

Ronald Arthur Silver was born in Manhattan on July 2, 1946. His father, Irving, was an executive in the men’s wear business. His mother, May Zimelman Silver, worked in the city school system as an aide and a substitute teacher. Young Ron attended New York City public schools, graduating from Stuyvesant High School. At the State University of New York at Buffalo, he studied Spanish; he received a master’s degree in Asian studies at St. John’s University in Queens. He studied acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio. An activist most frequently allied with left-wing issues, he was president of Actors’ Equity, the stage actors union, for most of the 1990s and was a co-founder of the Creative Coalition, a group that advocates for First Amendment rights, public education and arts support. He campaigned for Bill Clinton for president. Still, he had contrary impulses, and he paid attention to them. He was an advocate for President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense plan, and he supported Mr. Giuliani’s campaign for mayor of New York in 1994. In 2004, he made headlines when he was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention in Manhattan, supporting the nomination of President George W. Bush for a second term, largely because of the president’s stance against Islamic terrorism. He supported Mr. Giuliani for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.