Ed O’Neill Biography

Stage and screen actor Ed O’Neill is best known for playing Al Bundy, the coarse and sluggardly husband in TV’s Married with Children, which aired originally on the Fox Network from 1987 to 1997. A one-time football player for Youngstown State University, O’Neill had a shot to play professional football with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1969, but didn’t make the cut. He returned to his native Youngstown and worked odd jobs and got involved in theater at the Youngstown Playhouse. He moved to New York in 1977 to pursue acting, appearing in regional theater, on Broadway and in occasional TV and film roles. His big break came when Fox Network was lining up its first-ever season of shows and O’Neill was cast as Bundy. The show was derided by critics as lowbrow comedy, but it ran for eleven seasons and is still being aired in syndication. O’Neill has appeared in several films in a wide range of roles, including Dutch (1991), The Bone Collector (1999) and the David Mamet films The Spanish Prisoner (1997), Spartan (2004) and Redbelt (2008). Attempts at another TV series fell short with Big Apple (2001), L.A. Dragnet (2003) and John from Cincinnati (2007), but O’Neill hit it big again as one of the stars of the hit ABC series Modern Family, beginning in 2009.