Christopher Coulson

The first acting image Chris Coulson recalls from the dim early 1960s of his childhood is Steve McQueen throwing that baseball against his prison cell wall. Growing up in a tiny 2-bedroom apartment forced Coulson into his imagination early, and he began watching movies and movie actors for ways his life could possibly be. His own father having died, actors like McQueen and Paul Newman were his fathers, mentors and models. Film moments became his life moments, and that concentration camp in "The Great Escape" was that anonymous red brick apartment complex in Kansas City behind the Holiday Inn. After working as a golf caddy, bartender, hospital orderly, morgue attendant, obituary writer, newspaper reporter, newspaper editor, managing editor and columnist of an art magazine, free-lance writer and fiction writer, Coulson still wanted to live in the movies. And that began on the set of Robert Altman's "Kansas City" with a small role as a 1930s drifter. When that film wrapped, Coulson packed up and left Kansas City following roughly the same highway west as the Altman production trucks. In Los Angeles, he studied acting under Sal Romeo, Judith Weston, Beth Ruscio and Candy Trabucco. Coulson has acted in many independent films, television, and theater including the Preston Sturges Jr. hit play "The Split." Three years after first acting for Robert Altman, he found himself in Holly Springs, Mississippi, acting for the director again in "Cookie's Fortune." He played small town southern deputy Clyde Docko, who never turns off his police cruiser "blues" because "it kills the engine." Most recently, Coulson stars as Dr. Peter Cochran in the lead role of "In The Land of Milk and Money," written and directed by Susan Emshwiller. The film, a wild and weird social satire, is hitting the film festival circuit worldwide.