James Todd Spader is an Emmy Award-winning American television and movie actor born on February 7, 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied at the Pike School, Brooks School, and Phillips Academy. He is known and occasionally typecast for playing blue-blooded yuppie types, as well as villains. Before he actively pursued his acting career, he worked as a yoga instructor, and actually met his future wife in a yoga studio. He is well-known for acting in a number of feature films, among them ex, lies and videotape, True Colors, and Stargate. He has also worked on TV shows such as Frasier, Seinfeld, and Boston Legal.

Alan Shore is portrayed by James Spader in the Emmy Award-winning legal drama series The Practice. He was born on 1962 in Dedham, Massachusetts, and is of Scottish descent. He slept with his best friend Paul's mother when he was 16 years old. At a certain point in his life, he had to get counseling from a sexual surrogate to deal with his attraction to his own mother, and his lustful thoughts of how she touched him when he was a child. He appears in The Practice as a lawyer hired by Young, Frutt and Berlutti. Though he earns vast amounts of money for them in the millions, he eventually gets fired for his greatly unethical methods and behavior. He then counter-sues and wins, getting paid even more by them, and goes on to work with Denny Crane's firm instead.



(Photo courtesy of ABC)