When he was a young man, the actor Bob Gunton took joy in settling in front of the TV with his dad to watch reruns of the one and only season of Jackie Gleason's The Honeymooners. And as much as Gunton adored Gleason's antics, it didn't create any desire in him to consider a life on the stage. Instead, Gunton set his sights for the priesthood and, after time at the seminary, was drafted into the United States Army as a radio operator in Vietnam. Two years later, upon arriving home to Southern California, he didn't have a clue to what to do, professionally speaking. Through a series of chance events, he embarked on an acting career now more than fifty years in the making, which includes his having created the role of Juan Peron in Evita (1979) alongside original cast members Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin.

"The Great One" was the moniker coined by Orson Welles awarded to Jackie Gleason, who reveled in the honorarium. One year on the Tony Awards broadcast, Gleason was introduced not by name, but rather by an off-camera voice simply announcing, "Ladies and gentlemen: the Great One," and out he strolled. Bob Gunton is a great one, too, as anyone who has seen him in starring roles over the last five decades can attest (Sweeney Todd, anybody?), as well as achieving screen immortality by way of the juicy supporting role of Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption. On stage he's played everything from the smooth-talking Harold Hill in The Music Man at Lincoln Center, to a former boxer desperate for a sex-change operation in the 1987 Broadway musical, Roza (photo below). That kind of versatility was on full display earlier in the eighties, when he played twenty-two characters in the off-Broadway play How I Got That Story, by Amlin Gray. Casting directors quickly took note, as well as director Alan Pakula, who after seeing How I Got That Story, hired Gunton to play opposite Jane Fonda in Rollover. Thus began a long string of work in major motion pictures.

And movies weren't even a part of Gunton's growing up. "I didn't go much but I did like John Barrymore. More from my reading about him than seeing his movies, though... I was mostly into folksingers. They were the onstage personas that I looked up to; groups like the Limeliters."