Peter Coyote

Peter Coyote (born Robert Peter Cohon; October 10, 1941) is an American actor, director, screenwriter, author and narrator of films, theatre, television, and audiobooks. He worked on films such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Cross Creek (1983), Jagged Edge (1985), Bitter Moon (1992), Kika (1993), Patch Adams (1998), Erin Brockovich (2000), A Walk to Remember (2002), and Femme Fatale (2002). Coyote's voice work includes his narration for the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics and Apple's iPad Retina Display campaign as well as the introduction of the NeXT Computer. He narrated the PBS series The Pacific Century (1992), winning an Emmy, and eleven documentaries directed or produced by Ken Burns: The West (1996), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Dust Bowl (2012), The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014), The Vietnam War (2017), The Mayo Clinic: Faith--Hope--Science (2018), Country Music (2019), Hemingway (2021), Benjamin Franklin (2022), The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022), and The American Buffalo (2023). He won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Narrator in 2015 for his work on The Roosevelts. Coyote was one of the founders of the Diggers, an anarchist improv group active in Haight-Ashbury during the mid-1960s, including the Summer of Love. Coyote was also an actor, writer and director with the San Francisco Mime Troupe from which the Diggers evolved; his prominence in the San Francisco counterculture scene led to his being interviewed for the book Voices from the Love Generation. He acted in and directed the first cross-country tour of The Minstrel Show, and his play Olive Pits, co-authored with Mime Troupe member Peter Berg, won the troupe an Obie Award from The Village Voice. Coyote became a member, and later chairman, of the California Arts Council from 1975 to 1983. In the late 1970s, he shifted from acting on stage to acting in films. In the 1990s and 2000s, he acted in several television shows. He speaks fairly fluent Spanish and French. Early life Coyote was born Robert Peter Cohon on October 10, 1941, in New York City, the son of Ruth (née Fidler) and Morris Cohon, an investment banker. His father was of Sephardic Jewish descent and his mother came from a working-class Ashkenazi Jewish family. Her father, trained as a rabbi in Russia, escaped being drafted into the Imperial Russian Army, and eventually ran a small candy store in the Bronx.