Michel is a first generation American born in Manhattan on April 16,1960 to parents who narrowly escaped the Holocaust. They themselves sprung from the Great Diaspora, which began for their parents in Moscow, Odessa, Kiev and the Ukraine. Michel's mother, Nadine Gill, lives in New York, his father, James Vladimir Gill, lived in Switzerland until his death in 1995. James was less pre-occupied with having survived the horrible events of the 30's and 40's and more concerned about how he was going to survive survival. Michel has three sisters and often wondered, growing up, if he shouldn't have been named Andre. Nina, Kitty and Natasha are sprinkled around the globe and have no desire to return to Moscow ... so ... there endeth the Chekhov analogy. His first language was French his second, English ... then came studies in Latin, Greek, German, Italian and Russian. At this juncture, he's amazed he can ask where the 'john' is in one of them!
Michel was thrilled to play POTUS in the NETFLIX production of "House of Cards." His fascination with US Presidents began in 1963, the year he and his family lived in Paris. Although he was only 3 years old, he can recall studying the picture of that boy saluting a casket on that famous edition of Paris Match. Michel felt he was that boy ... dressed the same way; shorts, powder-blue coat ... We were all that little boy and we had all lost a father figure. How could a nation heal from such devastation? What untold secrets rested not so peacefully at Arlington Cemetery? Michel has always been absorbed with the indelicate balance between the secrets presidents keep and how little, we the people, know. How, as a nation, we offset those two and inform ourselves without tipping over into invention, conspiracy theory or pettiness. As President Garrett Walker, he could finally pretend to know. Information was on tap in the Gill residence; at any given time, a telex was chickchickchick-ing away with AP, Reuters, Commodity Exchange and Foreign Exchange updates. James was in the world of high finance but was like the proverbial Jewish mother with a thermometer, taking the geo-political temperature every 30 minutes. Such was the way in the Gill household, where James wanted to insure that if the world were ever to go mad again he would know about it before anyone else did and get us all out.
Back from his year in France, Michel, now 4, became best friends with a boy named Michael who happened to be the son of a violinist named Isaac. One day, this fella Isaac leaned in close to Michel and fiddled a few bars of the Bach double violin concerto ... or it may have been 'Happy Birthday' ... and Michel's eyes welled up with tears. This prompted Isaac to perform an impromptu hearing test on this very sensitive boy and to James' great delight, diagnosed him with really really good pitch. Nothing could have been more exciting to James than the thought of having sired a wunderkind. And, just like E.F. Hutton, when Isaac spoke, you listened! And so, soon thereafter, Michel began taking violin classes with the father of a kid named Yo-Yo, and before he knew it, he and his violin were thrust into explosive relationships; the former with a fiendish spirit called Perfectionism, and the latter with walls. And although it took Michel years to shake off that demon, he always knew he wanted to be just like Isaac and that whatever he was going to do with his life, he would somehow draw a bow on his own heart strings and create his very own sound.
Michel began his acting career at the tender age of 5 when he pretended to be ecstatic about the birth of his 3rd sister Natalie. Since then, he has pretended to be some of the most important characters in dramatic history, starting with Chief Sitting Bull, at the age of 7, doing his great rain dance-and-chant around the fire pit at that Jewish-Indian camp up in Maine, Hey-yey-yey-yey-yey-yey-yey-yey-OY-yoy-yoy-yoy-yoy-yoy-yoy-yoy ...
Michel participated in his first presidential campaign in 1968, passing out Bobby Kennedy buttons in front of the Red Apple supermarket on the Upper Westside in New York City. But after Bobby and Martin were gunned down, and Tricky Dicky was voted in, James decided the US was no longer a safe place for his family; escape was all he knew ... and so, in 1970, he moved the family to Lausanne, Switzerland, where Michel pretty much remained until he graduated from Aiglon College. He dropped out of Tufts University after his freshman year, worked in the film and video library at ABC News for a year and lived in London for another; a workshop at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art convinced him that theatre was where his passions lay. He auditioned for and was accepted at the Juilliard School of Drama in 1981. He graduated Group 14 in 1985.
