Jesus H. Christ, F. Murray Abraham is one of the best actors on the planet.

I never knew much about his background until reading Alex Suskind’s Guardian piece about the performer. He was a gang member as a youth–somehow I’m not surprised–but had within him a brilliant actor waiting to be born, the way some people mysteriously have something sewn inside them that’s greater than their circumstances. An excerpt:

Abraham grew up in El Paso, two blocks from the Rio Grande. The son of an Italian mother and Syrian father, Abraham learned how to fix things at a young age: cars, toilets, electrical systems. His father, Frederick (Abraham’s inspiration for putting the ‘F’ in his name), was a mechanic. Although the skills he learned were valuable, they didn’t get him far. By the time Abraham was 14 he had joined a gang.

‘Things were not very good,’ he says. ‘I was crazy.’

Abraham would spend his free time over the border, in Juarez, doing “stupid things, stealing cars and wrecking them.’

This was a tumultuous period for Abraham – he was fighting, stealing, getting arrested, even sleeping with prostitutes. ‘How we came away without any diseases is astounding,’ he says.

But then a teacher named Lucia P. Hutchens stepped in and introduced him to acting. His first play, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, by JM Barrie, won him a scholarship to college. He ended up failing every class except for theater, so he packed his bags, stuck his thumb out, and hitchhiked to Los Angeles to pursue his newfound dream.•