Bronson Pinchot

Gangly, sweet-faced actor Bronson Pinchot was born in New York and raised in California, then returned to the East Coast to study at the Yale School of Drama. The common misconception is that Pinchot sprang fully grown as a comedian with his performance as an effete, bizarrely accented art gallery assistant in Beverly Hills Cop (1984). Actually he'd been in films since 1982, but his Cop appearance was his breakthrough role, and was instrumental in his receiving the starring assignment of Balki Bartokomous ("Doan be reedeeculus!"), ingenuous immigrant from the mythical country of Mypos, in the popular TV sitcom Perfect Strangers (1986). Pinchot and his co-star, Mark-Linn Baker, worked together as though they'd been a team for years. In fact, they did have something in common: Both had appeared in Woody Allen films, and both had had their scenes cut before release. Since the cancellation of Perfect Strangers, Bronson Pinchot has appeared in important feature-film roles, generally amusing in nature; he was far less funny as the megalomaniac villain of the 1995 Stephen King TV miniseries The Langoliers. - Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide