Draft:Alfred Jay Spielmann

Alfred Spielmann was born in the Bronx, New York in the 1960s. His parents, who had been “greasers” in the ‘50s, became hippies and took him to Woodstock and a Janis Joplin concert. They moved to Berkeley, and Alfred grew up poor. He learned to play pinball and would rack up replays that he sold for money. In the mid 70’s his family moved to rural Sonoma County, which was a total culture shock.

In high school he did every extracurricular activity he could. He was on the track, basketball, cross-country and soccer teams. He wrote for the school newspaper, announced on the radio station, was in student government, the debate team, choir, and took drama, where he discovered a love for performing. In his sophomore year in high school he was hired as a sportswriter for his town newspaper. He joined a rock band as lead singer, then went to college.

In college he was in several theatrical productions and graduated from California State University, San Francisco with a broadcasting degree. He got a job at a radio station writing commercials and occasionally being a DJ. He then worked for Metro Traffic Control doing traffic reports on many Bay Area radio stations. He also got hired as a mobile disc jockey and MC,–a job he would hold for 25 years. He worked at various newspapers as a reporter, and at a news radio station as air talent and writer. He moonlighted as background for TV and movies, and as a writer, actor and voice over for local TV commercials.

He graduated from University of California School of Law, San Francisco and worked for 25 years as a criminal defense trial lawyer, primarily as a deputy public defender, providing legal representation to clients who could not afford to hire private counsel.

He kept his love for performing alive, appearing in community theater productions including 12 Angry Men, and was a contestant on Wheel of Fortune.

A few years ago, he took an early retirement to pursue his dream of acting. Since then he has been cast in more than 25 short and feature films and appeared in many commercials, provided voice over for animation and video games, live-announced high school sports events, and appeared in videos and TV shows, including a co-star in Peyton’s Places, where he acted with NFL stars Peyton Manning and George Kittle.

He has studied acting from John Rosenfeld Studios, Hollywood, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, PIT Theatre, T.J. Mannix, Jessica Bettancourt, Annie Sertich, Killian McHugh, Dennis Sakamoto, Casey Feigh, Christopher Renfro and many others. He is studying voice acting at Voice One, Real Voice Los Angeles and The Voice Actors Studio. He has studied improvisation at Second City, UCB, Groundlings, Magnet Theatre, and from bRachael Mason, Armando Diaz, Susan Messing, Jimmy Carane, David Razowski and others, and performs with Comedysportz San Jose and Roll the Dice Improv.