Widely respected among peers for his fearless commitment, Michael Anthony Claudio Wincott was born to an English father and Italian mother in Scarborough, a working class suburb of Toronto. His career began fortuitously in 1976 at the CBC, cast by Deidre Bowen, Clare Walker and director Mike Newell as the troubled protagonist, Cole Buckley, opposite Kate Reid in writer Rochelle Kosar's Earthbound. He continued his novitiate in the city's leading contemporary theaters, working with Ken Gass at Factory Theatre Lab, Bill Glassco at The Tarragon Theatre and William Lane at Toronto Free Theatre. Supported by grants from The Ontario Arts Council and The Canada Council of The Arts, he moved to New York City to study on a full scholarship at The Juilliard School. There he performed, among other roles, Teddy in Mark Medoff's When You Comin' Back Red Ryder?, Flute in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Soranzo in John Ford's T'is Pity She's A Whore and Tilden in the school's much-lauded first production of a Sam Shepard play, Buried Child.
In the spring following graduation, Wincott began a rewarding relationship with Joseph Papp's Public Theater both on and off Broadway with his creation of the role of Kent in Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio. He last appeared onstage in New York opposite John Malkovich, originating the role of Stubbs in Shepard's States of Shock. Michael has worked with some of cinema's most gifted reprobates, including Anthony Hopkins, Gary Oldman, Julian Schnabel, Gerard Depardieu, Jim Jarmusch, Ridley Scott, Terence Stamp, Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, Dennis Hopper, Michael Cimino, Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, John Hurt, David Bowie, Javier Bardem, Benicio Del Toro, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and Jordan Peele. Among those he hasn't, he has expressed a wish to work with the great French actress, Isabelle Huppert.
"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion" - Albert Camus