The road between his first acting gig in a beer commercial (in which Duchovny tosses pretzels into the air and catches them as they freefall towards his mouth) and his current role, was paved with film roles in The Rapture, Kalifornia, Chaplin, Working Girl, and Beethoven (the canine, not the composer). Not to mention his ongoing stint as narrator of Showtime's soft-core anthology, the Red Shoe Diaries.

An untypical denouement for a Princeton grad who was once pursuing a PhD in English Literature at Yale (thesis topic: Magic and Technology in Contemporary Poetry and Prose), and who not only writes poetry and reads it publicly but is also conversant about Proust, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Charles Bukowski, and Pynchon (in as much as anyone is lucid about Pynchon).

Born in Manhattan in 1960, Duchovny is a hybrid with a Russian Jewish father and Scottish mother, perhaps accounting somewhat for his trademark understated sense of humor (not unlike Mulder's) and Hebraic sense of irony. The only thing that presages his current role is that he used to play baseball in a local church cemetery where the bases were marked with headstones.

Two years ago, Duchovny married actress Téa Leoni in a private ceremony in New York City. Best wishes to them both.

This year Téa gave birth to Madelaine West Duchovny. Congradulations to David and Téa.