Mark Feuerstein

A comic actor who enjoyed his greatest success in television, Mark Feuerstein also made his mark on the legitimate stage. Born June 8, 1971, and raised in New York City, his father was a lawyer and his mother a school teacher. As a teenager, Feuerstein was a gifted wrestler and won a state championship title. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in Princeton, intending to study International Relations. But after being cast in a student drama, Feuerstein decided that acting was his true ambition, changed his emphasis to Theater Arts, and later received a Fulbright scholarship to study his craft at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. Upon returning to New York, he worked extensively in off-Broadway theater and appeared in a handful of television commercials before landing a recurring role on the daytime drama Loving. In 1996, Feuerstein was cast in an eight-episode run of the situation comedy Caroline in the City as a veterinarian who was dating cartoonist Caroline (Lea Thompson). NBC, encouraged by the enthusiastic response to Feuerstein's performance on the show, cast him as a philosophical bartender on a new sitcom called Fired Up; the show, however, was not well received, and lasted less than half a season. The network gave Feuerstein a third shot at sitcom stardom by giving him the title role on the show Conrad Bloom; but it proved to be an especially high-profile failure, and Feuerstein began to focus his attention elsewhere. He appeared on Broadway in Alfred Uhry's The Last Nights Of Ballyhoo, and made his feature-film debut with a small role in Practical Magic in 1998. Feuerstein balanced film work with recurring roles on Once and Again and The West Wing for several years until he finally struck small-screen gold with his fourth sitcom, Good Morning, Miami, in which he was cast as a television producer brought in to save a hapless morning news show. Feurstein appeared in largely unremarkable television and film roles throughout in the mid-2000s (with the exception of a small part in the war drama Defiance (2008), but he is better known for his role on The USA Network's Royal Pains.