Biography

Samuel Whitehill began film acting in student productions while living in Austin, Texas, in his 20s. After a hiatus of several decades, he returned to acting in 2015. He has since played principal roles in around 200 feature films and shorts, TV shows, music videos and commercials. In 2024 Whitehill named Best Supporting Actor at three international film festivals for his role in Michael Boston's 2024 dystopian long short/short feature "Political Prisoner." He played a major supporting role in the 1923 feature "Mickey Hardaway," which was nominated for Best Diaspora Feature at the 2024 African Movie Academy Awards. He was co-lead in the short "The Touch of the Master's Hand," winner of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Jury Award: US Fiction. He was named Best Supporting Actor for his role Boston's "Jesus Rides a Harley," and he was nominated Best Actor for his role as a racist cafe owner in Marcellus Cox's monumental short film "Rolling in the Deep." He played a major supporting role as an eccentric British anthropologist in "Hallucinations," an award sci-fi feature by M. Wild. He is also the recipient of nine ensemble awards. for his roles in films by Boston and Cox. Whitehill brings to the screen not only his six years of on-camera training with veteran character actor Steve Eastin, but also decades of life experience as husband, father and grandfather, as a lawyer from Lubbock, Texas and Washington, DC, importer-exporter, high school and college teacher, and as world traveler, polyglot and published poet and translator. He holds a law degree, along with a master's degree in English and a graduate minor in Hebrew literature, from the University of Texas at Austin, with an undergraduate degree in English, with minors in Geology and French, from Texas Tech University. Whitehill speaks English, Spanish and Hebrew, has a working command of French and speaks some Mandarin Chinese, and has has published four books of original Hebrew poetry in Israel, where he is known as Robert Whitehill-Bashan. He has also translated the works of Israeli authors into English and poetry by Walt Whitman into Hebrew. He has worked as an English-to-French translator for one film, and has been studying Mandarin Chinese for many years. Whitehill has been married 46 years, has four adult children, eight grandchildren and a rescue dog named Button. He lives in Burbank, CA.
- IMDb mini biography by: Jasper

Samuel Whitehill is also a Hebrew poet, with four books of original poetry published in Israel, along with individual poems published in literary journals. He is a member of the Hebrew Writers Association of Israel. His pen name, Robert Whitehil Bashan can be found on Google, including in Wikipedia and other websites.

Whitehill's first acting job was in the 1970s in two student films at the University of Texas at Austin. In one film, a modern Western, he played lead and wanted to use that film as a jumping-off point to begin his acting career. Unfortunately, the film died in the cutting room and all that survived was a black-and-white screen shot now displayed on IMDb.

Whitehill waited until moving to Los Angles in 2015 to reboot his career. He signed up as an extra at Central Casting, then began taking acting lessons with Steve Eastin. His adult sons and daughters, as a Father's Day present, paid for his first head shots, and he began auditioning. "That was in 2015, and I've been at it ever since. My kids created a monster!".