Dan Hedaya is a familiar face from his work in films and on TV, where he often plays a villain (although he had a good comic turn as the charmingly sleazy Nick Tortelli, Carla's ex-husband, in Cheers and its short-lived spin-off The Tortellis). He has also done much stage work, appearing opposite Alien: Resurrection star Sigourney Weaver in "The Conjuring an Event" at the American Place Theater. Other stage performances include Broadway roles such as "The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel" and many New York Shakespeare Festival productions.
He had a minor role in Oliver Stone's Nixon and later played Nixon himself in Dick Graduated from Tufts University in 1962. Although he mostly plays Italian-Americans, Hedaya is actually of Syrian heritage and comes from a tight-knit Sephardic-Jewish family. Before becoming an actor he taught junior high school for several years.