Anthony Marc "Tony" Shalhoub

The ninth of ten children in a Lebanese Catholic house on Doty Street, he still talks about Packers Sundays as if he never quite left.

He was born October 9, 1953, and raised on the east side. His father, Joe, had come through Ellis Island in 1920 as an eight-year-old orphan from Zahle and made a living peddling Sheboygan sausage from a refrigerated truck. His mother, Helen Seroogy, a second-generation Lebanese American, kept the household chaos from tipping into mutiny. Recruited at six into a sister’s production of The King and I, Tony stood on the wrong side of the curtain at dress rehearsal and was hooked anyway. He attended Green Bay East High—where he once fell into the orchestra pit, broke a leg, and still made the year’s last play—spent a brief freshman year at UW–Green Bay (where he met Milwaukee’s Jane Kaczmarek), earned a drama degree from the University of Southern Maine, and finished Yale School of Drama in 1980.

Then came Wings, Monk (three Emmys as lead), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and the stage Tony. When he graduated from Yale, Joe and Helen drove from Wisconsin; Joe wept that his own parents had been illiterate and his son now held a Yale diploma. Summers in Door County and a childhood that smelled like German sausage remain part of how he tells the story.