About Michael Dunn
Michael Dunn’s performances have thrilled audiences throughout the country. Trained at New York’s famed Juilliard School, Dunn enjoyed a lengthy award-winning theatrical career in his native Chicago, where he was honored several times by the Joseph Jefferson Awards for his portrayals in works ranging from Shakespeare to Lerner and Loewe, as well as leading roles in national touring companies of such hits as “Forbidden Broadway” and “The Cocktail Hour.”
As a resident member of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, where he portrayed Octavius Caesar in “Antony and Cleopatra,” Dunn studied for several years with artistic director Barbara Gaines, absorbing the First Folio-based method of Shakespearean acting. He also studied the acting methods used in Elizabethan times as taught by director Richard Fletcher of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Michael’s favorite roles in the Bard include Jaques in “As You Like It” and Feste in “Twelfth Night.” Rounding out his education, Dunn earned a Bachelor’s Degree in the humanities from Shimer College.
After moving to Los Angeles to pursue a writing career, Mr. Dunn worked in film development, where his deep understanding of storytelling enabled him to evaluate numerous projects for CBS Entertainment, and for such prominent Hollywood figures as director Michael Mann (“Last of the Mohicans,” “Heat,”), and Oscar-winning producer/actor Michael Douglas.
Michael Dunn’s deep interest in Charles Dickens led him to resume his performing career in a one-man show of “A Christmas Carol”, which has been winning standing ovations from delighted audiences since 1995. As a journalist, Michael’s hilarious and poignant Dickens columns have appeared regularly in local papers in the Los Angeles area.
A lover of Shakespeare since childhood, Michael describes himself as “amazed and thrilled” when he first discovered the Shakespeare Mystery. Originally among those who scoffed at the notion that anyone but Will Shakspere of Stratford wrote the immortal works, earnest study has inspired him to create “Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Mystery,” humbly joining the company of such illustrious names as Sir John Gielgud, Sir Derek Jacoby, Sigmund Freud, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and three modern U.S. Supreme Court Justices in rejecting the Stratfordian authorship, and urging deeper study of what must surely rank as one of the great mystery stories of all time.