David Alastair Lewis(1952-2024)

David grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York, the youngest child of a Presbyterian minister. After admission to Harvard College, David first aspired to be a foreign service officer, but the show business bug bit him while onstage frequently at Harvard's Loeb Drama Center and Hasty Pudding theatre, as well as under the summer stock mentoring of Fred Carmichael and Patricia Carmichael at the legendary Dorset Playhouse in Vermont, where David appeared alongside Elizabeth Franz and Fred Grandy. As President of Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals in his senior year, it was David who chose the script written by fellow Harvardian and then-aspiring writer Mark O'Donnell for the 1974 Pudding show, "Keep Your Pantheon." During his early years in Hollywood, David studied acting with Nina Foch and Lilyan Chauvin. He also directed stage productions of Shakespeare's Richard III at the old Hollywood Center Theatre and Pierre La Mure's adaptation of his own original novel about Toulouse-Lautrec, "Moulin Rouge," at the Masquers' Club. While evaluating scripts, pre-publication novels, and film directors' rough cuts for United Artists under several different management teams in the late 70s and early 80s, David also volunteered his time to help several student filmmakers at AFI's Center for Advanced Film Studies learn to work with actors. David and his wife, actress Rose Marie Perfect, left full-time show business in 1991 by moving to Vermont to raise their children. Since then they continue to work occasionally in independent films ("The Mudge Boy," "Landslide") and regional theatre. Most recently they have both appeared in the "It's All Relative," written by Alyssa Polacsek and directed by Rebecca Burton for Lakota Films.