Born on February 26, 1956 in Chicago, Illinois, Kevin Dunn is an actor best known for a string of supporting roles in a number of films since the 1980s and the 2007 award-winning ABC series Samantha Who?. the son of a nurse and a musician-poet, Dunn is the brother of actor comedian and onetime Saturday Night Live mainstay Nora Dunn. He graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1977. He received an honorary doctorate from the same school in 2008.
Dunn made his debut in the mid-1980s with a recurring role on the 1986 comedy drama Jack and Mike, where he starred opposite Shelley Hack and Tom Mason. What many consider to be his first breakthrough, however, is the civil-rights drama Mississippi Burning, where he played Agent Bird. In 1989, he was in Ghostbusters II, Blue Steel in 1990, Only the Lonely in 1991, Chaplin in 1992, and Dave in 1993.
As for other films, Dunn has appeared in Small Soldiers, Godzilla, Nixon, Mad Love, and 1492: Conquest of Paradise. He also played Mury Wilson in the 2000 miniseries The Beach Boys: An American Family, and Richard Nixon’s White House Counsel in Nixon. In the ABC miniseries The Pat to 9/11, he played Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor. He also appeared on an episode of Seinfeld called Male Unbonding. He also guest-starred on Lost, 7th Heaven, Prison Break, and Boston Legal.
Quite notably, Dunn appeared with Shia LaBeouf as the lead’s dad on the blockbuster action hit Transformers. The same year, he was with Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep in the drama Lion for Lambs. What gave him mainstream popularity, though, is his role on the sitcom Samantha Who as, once again, the father of the main character Christina Applegate. He was cast on the sequel of Transformers called Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.