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Bob Balaban
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Trivia

Cousin of director Burt Balaban and nephew of Barney Balaban.

Played the head of NBC in both "Seinfeld" and "The Late Shift".

Son of Elmer Balaban (1909-2001) who was last surviving of seven Balaban brothers who dominated the theater business in Chicago and much of the Midwest. The Balaban boys, sons of immigrant Jewish grocery-store owners in Chicago, built city's first "supercolassal" theaters, the 700-seat Circle and the 2,000-seat Central Park. Older brother Barney became chairman of Paramount Pictures in Hollywood and wanted to pass the torch to Elmer, but he declined. Elmer has been credited with devising an early version of pay TV, based on a set-top box that would show first-run movies at home by accepting quarters.

Played Frank Bouffay, Phoebe's father, on Friends.

Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:

During the late 1970s and 1980s, producers looking for physically unprepossessing, soft-spoken intellectual types rarely got past the letter B in their casting directories. No one surpassed Balaban in those roles-and the more dispassionate or loathsome the character, the better he was. He first attracted attention in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), playing a cartographer drafted to be François Truffaut's interpreter. (He later wrote a book on the making of the film.) He also appeared in Altered States (1980), Absence of Malice Whose Life Is It, Anyway? (both 1981), Dead-Bang (1989), Amos & Andrew (1993), and Greedy (1994), to name just a few. Balaban made his directorial debut with the black comedy Parents (1989) and then helmed My Boyfriend's Back (1993).

Bob Balaban stared in: