Marc Grapey Marc plays the male lead in A Piece of Eden, Bob Tredici. He is a co-founder and past Artistic Director of Chicago's Famous Door Theatre Company. Since its inception in 1988, it has produced over thirty plays and garnered a total of twenty-two Joseph Jefferson Awards and Citations (Chicago's version of the Tonys). With the company he appeared in The Homecoming, Hitting for the Cycle, Hellcab, Conquest of the South Pole, Little Murders, and Beautiful Thing. Other Chicago acting credits include the world premiere of Eric Bogosian's Griller at the Goodman Theatre, and Mizlansky/Zilinsky at Steppenwolf. As a director for Famous Door, he has staged Black and Blue, Close of Play, Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, and A Yard of Sun. He has directed extensively outside the company as well, including shows in Chicago and Los Angeles. He has appeared as a guest star on numerous television shows, including Sex and the City, The West Wing, Chicago Hope, Veronica's Closet, High Incident, Early Edition, Cracker, and The Untouchables. He is featured in the films: While You Were Sleeping for Hollywood Pictures, Watch it!, A Private Matter, Body Waves, and The Day Trippers, which won the jury award at the Slam Dance Film Festival, and was an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, 1996. His first starring role is in A Piece of Eden. He says, "I was in a strange position because I was playing John to a degree. I mean his father caught fire exactly the way mine does in the movie, his relationship with his father was I'm sure very similar, his family was in the fruit business like the family in the film. In other words it's a personal film, and you wonder should I copy his mannerisms or not? Things like that. But John is good with actors. I'm sure he was filled with a million ideas about how things actually happened, and he lets you know, and a lot of times it's helpful, but he knows when to give and when to let you be. He does not take your magic." "I didn't mind doing the bee scene, but I was nervous about it. I told John before we started that I would give him three stings and that would be it. If I got stung more than that, he had to double me. Well I got stung three times in the first five minutes, but by then everybody was ready to go and we were filming and I didn't want to look chicken. And you know the more people around, the more courage you get. That, and the fact that a lot of crew weren't even wearing bee suits, I figured I should just go ahead and do it. "When we put the bees in the mask, that was another story. They were drones, they look like other bees but they don't have stingers. Now John knows a lot about bee keeping, so he was the one who picked out the drones from the hive. There's a whole new element to trusting the director when he's shoving bees under your collar." Rebecca Harrell Rebecca made her acting debut in 1989 as 8-year-old Jessica Riggs in John Hancock's film Prancer, of which Roger Ebert said, " What really redeems the movie, taking it out of the category of kiddie picture and giving it a heart and gumption, is the performance by a young actress named Rebecca Harrell, as Jessica. She's something. She has a troublemaker's look in her eye and a round pixie face that's filled with mischief. And she's smart ­ a plucky schemer who figures out things for herself and isn't afraid to act on her convictions. Her dialogue in the movie is fun to listen to because she talks like she thinks, and she's always working an angle." She returned to northern Indiana from her family home in Vermont to portray a different character, Happy Buchanan, Bob Tredici's secretary and love interest, in A Piece of Eden. She credits John's decision to cast her in Prancer as launching her career and was honored to have been asked back to be a part of his most recent project. "I'm really thrilled with her performance," Hancock said of the 18-year-old actress. "I don't know how she does it. She's a natural. She just has it." She says, "A lot of what I do is on instinct. Every time I do a scene it's like where I am at that moment. When I play a character, as soon as they say roll, or five minutes before, I just sort of become that person. Which is interesting in this case because I'm only nineteen, and Happy is twenty-three. I mean it was really my first adventure out of childhood, and here I was an adult and getting married and everything, which was pretty crazy considering I'm not even near the stage of getting married. How do I know what it feels like? Because a lot of times actors pull from what they know. If you have a crying scene, you make yourself cry because you know how to draw from some experience. But when you have never been through the experience of being twenty-three or being married, it's really hard to know what it feels like. So I just imagined what it would be like for me one day in that character, and that is how I played it." After Prancer, Rebecca says she found it difficult to readjust to her life in Vermont. "Classmates began to look at me like I was different." She currently resides in Los Angeles where she is pursuing acting, modeling, and singing. Frederic Forrest Frederic Forrest plays Paulo Tredici. He says he misses the days when Hollywood writers, directors and actors teamed to create films about people and emotions, instead of special effects. "Nothing seems to be made for people over thirty anymore. It's like they don't care about story, they write the stunts and the action first. That's why I don't see many movies anymore, because I can't relate to them. They're all about sex, violence and action. That's what attracted me to this script, because it's about love and the love of a family." Reflecting on Dorothy's Tristan's screenplay, Forrest said "It reminded me of the films that made me want to become an actor. It has humor and sadness. It has everything in it that I think is drama." Born in Waxahachie, Texas, Forrest began acting in the theatre and got his first film break in 1971 in When the Legends Die, receiving a Golden Globe nomination for Best Newcomer. Forrest later was cast in five different projects with director Francis Ford Coppola including his role as Chef in the critically acclaimed Apocalypse Now. He then moved on to star with Bette Midler in The Rose earning him the National Film Critic's Award for Best Supporting Actor and a nomination for both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. Other film credits include Tucker, The Music Box with Jessica Lange, The Two Jakes with Jack Nicholson, Falling Down with Michael Douglas and the HBO movie Citizen Cohn. Fred Forrest's affection for A Piece of Eden and his time in LaPorte County is evident, "I have worked on a lot of filmsbig ones, little ones, and in between ones, but I have seldom seen the dedication that I have seen on this film. The people cared so much about what they did, it was very inspiring. I loved it, I had a great time." Tyne Daly Tyne Daly was interested in the role of Aunt Aurelia because she saw it as "a chance to play a simple, good woman, someone without an agenda, who just wanted the best for her family." Daly is best known to audiences for her role on TV's Cagney and Lacey, for which she won four Emmy awards. She received her fifth Emmy in 1996, making her the most honored dramatic actress in the award show's history, for Outstanding Supporting Actress in the drama series Christy. Daly also played Mama Rose in a revival of the musical Gypsy, for which she received the Antoinette Perry award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Broadway Musical. Feature films include Zoot Suit, John & Mary, The Enforcer, and Movers and Shakers. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1995. She currently is starring in the CBS series, Judging Amy. Tristan Rogers Known to half the women in America for his portrayal of heartthrob Robert Scorpio on General Hospital, Tristan Rogers was a natural for the part of soap opera star Victor Hardwick in A Piece of Eden. Born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, Rogers began his career in front of the camera as a model and musician in Australia before embarking upon an acting career in the early '70's. He moved to the U.S. in 1979. With the death of Scorpio in 1992, Rogers appeared on such series as Babylon 5, Walker, Texas Ranger, Perry Mason, and One West Waikiki. Rogers has devoted himself to the American Cinema Awards Foundation since 1984. He is an avid car racer who competed in the Los Angeles Grand Prix. He also enjoys sailing, fishing and scuba diving. Speaking of his role in A Piece of Eden, Rogers explains, "I play a soap star Bob Tredici hires to do a public appearance on behalf of their business, and I start hitting on the guy's wife. It's really very funny and I'm enjoying it enormously." Robert Breuler Robert Breuler plays the father, Franco Tredici. He has acted in over 75 productions on the stage. A member of Chicago's renowned Steppenwolf Theatre Company, he is currently in A Death of a Salesman on Broadway. After completing A Piece of Eden, he appeared in Love and Action in Chicago. Previous film credits include The Crucible, Shimmer, Trial by Jury, Miles from Home, and Meantime. Guest appearances have been made on such television shows as Early Edition, NYPD Blue and The Untouchables. He has appeared on Broadway in Carousel, The Song of Jacob Zulu and Grapes of Wrath. The recipient of the Jefferson Award for Best Actor in A Walk in the Woods, Robert Breuler is a fine addition to the cast of A Piece of Eden. He says, "Bed acting (not bad acting) is challenging and strangely exhausting. One must make the stillness and inactivity passionate. I found I would need to rest, even sleep, between takes to conserve energy for the scenes." "At Franco's funeral I was the guest of honor. The extras enjoyed every chance of seeing me get in and out of the coffin (by the way, they're very uncomfortable). It was a case of 'Dead Man Walking.' "The writing contained wellsprings of emotions. Dorothy nailed some truths actors love to play with, a mixture of the tear and the laugh." Irma St. Paule "The wrong actress in the role of the grandmotherand you could've sunk the ship," said John of Irma's character in A Piece of Eden. "We were very lucky to have Irma. I'd work with her again on anything, she's fabulous." Irma had no trouble bringing life and laughter out of her role as Bob's grandmother in A Piece of Eden. Her performance is not surprising, given her vast experience as an actress: she says she's been acting for "a hundred thousand years." "I trained as a young girl in Chicago at the Actors Company on Wabash. I did Shakespeare and the classics. But what I really wanted to do was become a dancer. My mother didn't think her daughter should show her legs. This is ballet, right, but my poor mother, what did she know? So when I was finally grown up, I went to New York. I knew I was too old to start, but I wanted to dance. "I trained really hard for two years. I took four or five dance classes a day, which is an incredible amount. I studied every technique, ballet, modern and even flamenco. Martha Graham saw me in one of their senior classes and asked me to join her company. However I had trained too fast and too late, of course, so naturally I injured my back. I figured my dancing career was over. I went home and stuck my head in the oven. But lucky for me the apartment was so poor, there were too many leaks around the windows, and I didn't die. "I came to. I was sicker than a dog, but little by little, life came back into my brain and my bones. And slowly I became involved in acting again because it was the only thing I knew how to do. "At the beginning it was only stage work. I was an idiot, I thought film and TV was not art. Only stage was art. Took me a while to wake up. But I woke up." Irma has appeared in over one hundred plays, including The Rose Tattoo on Broadway. On television she's been in Third Watch, Law and Order, Saturday Night Live, and several rock videos. Her feature films are Where the Money Is with Paul Newman, Things you can Tell by Looking at Her with Glen Close, Cemetery Club with Olympia Dukakis, Thinner, The Twelve Monkeys, Household Saints, Kiss Me Guido, Awakenings, and Mortal Thoughts. Andreas Katsulas Andreas Katsulas plays the patriarch, Giuseppi Tredici, who brings the family to America. A cross between apple pie and baklava, he was born in St. Louis, Missouri, majored in theatre at St. Louis University, and received a Master's Degree in theatre from Indiana University. Most commonly remembered as G'Kar on Babylon 5, or the one-armed man in The Fugitive, Katsulas' credits are numerous. After college, he performed in plays in St. Louis, New York, and Boston for three years and then began a fifteen-year heart and soul involvement with Peter Brook's International Theatre Company, performing around the world with a challenging combination of improvisational theatre in every imaginable circumstance and space, and "prepared" theatre pieces in traditional, as well as unconventional, theatre spaces -- from Lincoln Center and Kennedy Center to the mean streets of Brooklyn and remote African villages; from elite theater festivals in Iran, Avignon and Belgrade, to prisons, mental institutions, rock quarries in Australia, barrios in Venezuela, sewage plants in Switzerland, fields with farm workers in California, lakes of Minnesota with NativeAmericans, in snow, in rain, and in extreme heat. His television career dates back to 1982 and his film experience to1979. "Andreas, of course, takes your heart", Dorothy said of his role in A Piece of Eden. John couldn't be happier with his performance. They had already worked together in Steal the Sky. He said, "Katsulas is a very gratifying actor to direct. Everything he does is so full and good. I never want to do another film without him." The feeling is returned. After a screening Katsulas said, "I'm trying to figure out why the exteriors of the film have impressed me so deeply. There are hundreds of films with incredible, vast panoramic views of Nature and wilderness, etc., but for some reason, these smaller, more contained images of a farm stir something deeply appealing, something mysteriously familiar, but not on the tip of the tongue."   Marshall Efron Marshall Efron plays the farm hand, Andres. He was in George Lukas' first movie THX 1138, as well as Pound, Doc, Blade, and The Road to Wellville. Marshall and John Hancock have worked together on many occasions. "Marshall was in the theatre company in San Francisco Ken Kitch and I had. Then he went with us to Pittsburgh and New York," John recalls. "He was in Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet (the first film I made), Bang the Drum Slowly and California Dreaming. In addition to motion pictures, Marshall has made a career out of television, cartoons, voice-overs and writing children's books. He is perhaps best known for his take-off on Julia Childs on The Great American Dream Machine, and Marshall Efron's Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Sunday School TV series.