Peter Krause biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Born August 12, 1965 in Alexandria, Minnesota. Peter Krause's mother was an elementary school teacher, and his father was a social worker and high school English teacher. Krause grew up in a fairly troubled family, with his father hospitalized with severe depression through much of Peter's childhood. As a teenager, Krause also grew depressed and developed severe insomnia. "A week would go by without sleeping and I would start to hallucinate," he later recalled. "I lost the ability to let go of control." He even contemplated suicide. "There was a sense of meaninglessness that ran so deep inside me that leaving this world wasn't the worst possibility for me," he remembers. "It was something I considered pretty seriously. I started questioning everything, including terms and concepts taken from dictionaries or the Bible." Krause entered intensive therapy, which he says, "helped me tremendously in terms of dealing with myself."

In high school, Krause was far more interested in sports than drama. He was a track and field star as well as a gymnast until a pole-vaulting injury forced him to give up competitive sports. Without sports practices to keep him busy after school, Krause decided to go out for the school play. "There was a girl I wanted to get to know who was into the theater, so that's why I auditioned for that play," he explains. Similarly, after graduating from high school in 1983, Krause decided to attend Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota because, he says, "there were lots of cute Swedish blonde girls running around." Although he enrolled as a premed student, he soon switched majors to study English literature instead. Krause also continued acting, and while still in college he appeared in his first film, Blood Harvest, a low budget horror flick in which he played a man who gets killed by a demented clown played by Tiny Tim.

Aspiring Actor

Upon graduating from Gustavus Adolphus in 1987, Krause moved to New York City to study acting at New York University's prestigious Tisch School of the Arts. It was there that he immersed himself in the philosophy and craft of acting for the first time. Krause says of his time at NYU, "my job was to study human behavior, to be as flexible a person as I could possibly be so that I could understand another person's circumstances and life rules and desires ... fears, belief systems, all that stuff. That was part of the training at NYU, learning how to neutralize yourself. You learn how to do that physically, mentally, emotionally." While studying at NYU, Krause appeared in productions of Macbeth, Uncle Vanya and Arms and the Man, and he also worked as a bartender at the Palace Theater, where his manager was acclaimed television producer Aaron Sorkin.