Biography

Daniel was born and raised on the northwest side of Chicago. He began studying voice in his last year of high school, and after graduation, attended Wright Jr. College, majoring in music. During the summer break after his freshman year, he took an acting workshop at Columbia College and got hooked on the challenge of acting. So the following fall, instead of returning to college, he enrolled as a full-time student at the prestigious, Goodman Theater School of Drama, the Theater Arts arm of the Chicago Art Institute. Following Goodman, he volunteered for the draft and served a hitch in the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany. Upon full-filling his tour of duty, he moved to New York City, taking up residence in Manhattan, and resumed his studies at the HB Studio, studying first with Herbert Berghof, and then with Uta Hagen. While working at various survival jobs as he attended acting classes, he also continued to study voice, and also began dance training, starting jazz dance with Matt Mattox and soon after, classical ballet at the Ballet Russe.When the summers came around, he would interrupt his training by leaving town to work in summer stock, then return to the city in the fall and resumed his pursuits. After only a year and a half of an intense training schedule, and desperate for a job in a show, he gave a go at his first Equity dance audition and won the gig. After relocating to California, he was dancing in an Equity musical comedy stage show within a month after he arrived in Hollywood, and continued to perform in shows for the first year and a half, all the while continuing his training between shows at the American School of Dance, until he was signed by a top commercial and modeling agency and immediately began to work in TV commercials and print. With auditions, fittings and bookings, there was hardly enough convenient time to continue to go to dance class regularly, so he withdrew from the discipline and quit dancing. He focused instead on the much more lucrative activity of working in advertising media. At the same time however, he concentrated again on his singing, starting with performing at the, Horn, in Santa Monica, a nightclub venue that was to singers, what the various comedy clubs are to stand-up comedians, a place to try material and perform in a club environment. He also continued with acting classes, studying with Estell Harman and then with Stella Adler every summer that she would come out from New York to teach her master class in Los Angeles. During other times he studied acting with Kenneth McMillan, musical scene study with Charles Nelson Reilly and audition presentation with David Craig, and continued voice training with various teachers and coaches. In his late thirties, as a personal challenge to see what sort of shape he could get back into, he returned to jazz dance classes at the Roland Dupre' dance facility and gave it a go for about a year, until the reality of diminished capacity convinced him to put his dance bag away for good. Also, by then he was working as an actor in all venues of media. Presently, he is semi-retired and lives in the Cahuenga Pass area of the Hollywood Hills.
- IMDb mini biography by: Danko Productions