Charles Leggett

Charles Leggett makes his living as a professional actor based in Seattle, Washington, USA. He is also an award-winning filmmaker, a widely published poet, and a musician. Upon earning a BFA from the conservatory actor training program at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1989, he moved to Seattle and has stayed put, working regularly with the Seattle Repertory Theatre, A Contemporary Theatre (ACT), Intiman Theatre, the Seattle Children's Theatre, the Seattle Shakespeare Company, Portland Center Stage, and numerous smaller companies. His stage work has garnered a Theatre Puget Sound Gregory Award for Outstanding Performance amid four nominations, as well as two Genius Award nominations from Seattle's weekly news rag The Stranger. He has also recorded over 20 unabridged audio-books for Seattle's Cedar House Audio. Charles's poetry publication history begins in 2005, includes journals in the UK (England, Scotland, and Wales), Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, India, and Singapore, as well as in nearly half of the United States, red and blue alike; his work has been nominated for inclusion in the Pushcart Anthology three times. Charles's new poetry short film, To Fondle Nothing, is an Official Selection in 10 film festivals in the US (New York, Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania), the UK, France, Sweden, Turkey, and Portugal, and has won events in four of these for Best Mobile Phone Short, First-Time Director, and Comedy Short. He also played Edie Falco's boorish husband in the late great Lynn Shelton's independent feature Outside In, with Jay Duplass and Kaitlyn Dever. A San Francisco native, Charles left the Bay Area for an eight-year sojourn in the Midwest (Wausau, Wisconsin and Cherokee, Iowa) as his adoptive father, Dr. Robert D. Leggett, switched out of anesthesia and into psychiatry. His mother, Elizabeth Swanson Leggett, was in the Army Nursing Corps during WWII in North Africa and Italy, went on to teach nursing through a Baptist mission in China, India and the Philippines, and eventually forged a career as an administrator in nursing/medical facilities. The Leggetts returned to Northern California, where Charles completed secondary school and high school in Stockton, and one year at California State University, Sacramento, before crashing a set of auditions for actor training programs and alighting in Pittsburgh, PA at Carnegie-Mellon. His academic mentor at Sac State, Dr. Gerard A. Larson, used to brag about having also mentored a young Tom Hanks. Before joining Actors Equity in 2000, Charles banged about extensively in Seattle's ever-burgeoning Fringe theatre scene, and fronted two blues bands on vocals and harmonica, gigging regularly in Pioneer Square and making appearances at the Mercer Arena for the 1998 NW Folklife Festival, at the Stadium Exhibition Center for the 2001 MLB All-Start Game FanFest, and on studio albums for several local recording artists. He has performed his solo show, The River's Invitation, at theaters in NoCal and Oregon as well as Seattle. It is the pandemic lock-down that got Charles started making films. In addition to writing, performing, directing, editing and scoring To Fondle Nothing, Charles contributed to The Stranger's "Message to the City" video series in June 2020 with a rendering of NYC poet Kyle Dacuyan's "Legal Tender," with his permission, and, for the Intiman Theatre annual gala, filmed a performance of some verse he wrote (and has since published) while onstage in that theatre's acclaimed 2008 production of The Streetcar Named Desire. Plans for his next poetry short, tentatively titled The Restless Online Troubadour, are shaping up.