JERRY HARDIN Born Nov. 20, 1929, in Dallas, Texas, the venerable and versatile Jerry Hardin has made countless film and TV appearances since the 1950s. He remains active to this day, in such films as the upcoming Extreme Dating, in 2002 guest-spots on the series Philly and First Monday, and recently on Broadway opposite Woody Harrelson in The Rainmaker. Raised in a small town outside Dallas, where his father was a rancher, Hardin performed in speech and drama events in school, and won a scholarship to Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. He later won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Art in London. After two years in Europe, he returned to the United States, made an uncredited film debut in the 1958 Robert Mitchum feature Thunder Road, and by 1961 had amassed more than 75 stock and regional-theater credits. Hardin spent the 1970s and '80s as a character actor in such films as Mitchell, Steven Spielberg's 1941, Joan Micklin Silver's Head Over Heels a.k.a. Chilly Scenes of Winter, Reds, Missing (the true-life account of a U.S. citizen killed by an American-backed right-wing dictatorship, with Hardin playing a military man involved in Deep Throat-like covert acts), Cujo, The Falcon and the Snowman, Big Trouble in Little China, The Milagro Beanfield War and Little Nikita. Hardin's early TV appearances range from Gunsmoke to Bosom Buddies. Chris Carter had seen and liked Hardin's work in The Firm (1993), in which Hardin played one of the deadly corporate mob-lawyers pitted against Tom Cruise. That role had just the kind of three-piece-pinstripe, covert-conspiracy resonances that the character of Deep Throat needed. "I really was not aware that they were going to recur the role," Hardin recalled, "so it looked like a one-time trip to Vancouver," where The X-Files was initially shot. He soon found himself returning frequently. "I often was only notified a week beforehand. The producers would call and ask, 'Are you available? We would like to include Deep Throat next week.' And you get on a plane and you go to Canada and you shoot." Hardin "liked the elliptical way in which the character was presented. That's a nice, juicy kind of writing, and I thought that would be fun to do." Hardin was also well aware of the need for the character to drop in, fit some plot points together, and keep the story moving quickly. "That's one of the acting problems of the character. How do you get all this information out in a way that sounds like it's interesting and fresh?" As for who Deep Throat really was, Hardin guesses that "this man was placed highly in government, perhaps not in an official position so much as an unofficial position — perhaps a member of the president's 'Kitchen Cabinet.' He had access to extraordinary amounts of information and high-placed friends, but he was less likely to be somebody who's highly placed in the CIA or somewhere else." Hardin's other genre credits include episodes of The Incredible Hulk, Starman, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Quantum Leap, Brimstone, Sliders and the "Food" episode of the SCI FI series Strange World. He memorably played Lyndon B. Johnson in the "Profile in Silver" episode of the 1980s The Twilight Zone. Hardin is married to actress and acting teacher Diane Hill Hardin, who helped train Leonardo DiCaprio, Hilary Swank, Stephen Dorff, the late River Phoenix, Kellie Martin and Chris Masterson. The Hardins' daughter, prominent actress Melora Hardin, starred in the USA Network series Cover Me: Based on the True Life of an FBI Family. Their son, Shawn, was chief operating officer in charge of product for NBC-I in San Francisco. close window