Gary Sinise, the Forrest Gump actor who quit Hollywood and is telling his son’s story

Gary Sinise

Photo: U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 17, 1955 Blue Island, Illinois, United States
Occupation	Actor and director
Known for	Forrest Gump, The Green Mile, Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Awards	Golden Globe · Emmy · 3 SAG Award · Tony Award (shared) · Presidential Citizens Medal · Sylvanus Thayer

There is a scene in Forrest Gump that Gary Sinise has, in one way or another, never stopped playing. Lieutenant Dan Taylor, legless and furious, sits in a New York apartment cursing the private who dragged him out of the jungle and denied him the death his family tradition demanded. By the end of the film he walks into Forrest’s wedding on metal legs, at peace. Sinise was a Chicago stage actor and director when he took the part. He came out of it with an Oscar nomination and something more durable: an audience of soldiers and veterans who kept telling him that the character was them.

What he did with that audience became the second half of his life. He named a band after the character and took it to military bases, built a foundation for wounded service members and first responders, and then, at the age when most actors of his generation settle into late character parts, stopped acting. The cause was not what pulled him off the screen. His family was. This month he publishes the book about that decision, and about the son he lost.

A Chicago kid and a theatre company

The son of Robert Sinise, a film editor, he was born in Blue Island, Illinois, on March 17, 1955, into a family whose Italian line ran back to a great-grandfather from Ripacandida, in Basilicata. He finished at Highland Park High School, north of Chicago, and spent time at Illinois State University. The education that mattered happened elsewhere. In 1974 he founded the Steppenwolf Theatre Company with two friends, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry, a group whose ensemble would come to include John Malkovich, Joan Allen, Laurie Metcalf and John Mahoney.

Steppenwolf built a reputation for loud, physical, unsentimental acting, and Sinise was as often the director as the actor. His production of Sam Shepard’s True West, in which he also starred opposite Malkovich, earned him an Obie Award for direction in 1983 and later reached television. In 1985 the company received the Regional Theatre Tony Award. He made his first feature as a director, Miles from Home, with Richard Gere in 1988, and two years later was nominated for a Tony as Tom Joad in Steppenwolf’s Broadway staging of The Grapes of Wrath.

Lieutenant Dan and the run that followed

His second feature as director was also his first major film role. In 1992 he directed, produced and starred in Of Mice and Men, playing George Milton to Malkovich’s Lennie in a faithful, unhurried version of Steinbeck’s novel. Robert Zemeckis cast him in Forrest Gump two years later, opposite Tom Hanks, and the Academy nominated him for Best Supporting Actor. The same year he played Stu Redman in the television adaptation of Stephen King‘s The Stand.

The next five years were the busiest of his career. He played Harry S. Truman for HBO in Truman and won the Golden Globe for it. In Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 he was Ken Mattingly, the astronaut grounded days before launch who helps bring the crew home from a simulator on Earth. He was the kidnapper in Howard’s Ransom, opposite Mel Gibson. For John Frankenheimer he played the segregationist Alabama governor in George Wallace, a performance that won him the Primetime Emmy. He closed the decade back beside Hanks in Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile, their third film together.

The record is less tidy than the trophies suggest. None of the genre films that followed made him a dependable leading man in cinema: Brian De Palma‘s Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars, the heist thriller Reindeer Games, the Philip K. Dick adaptation Impostor. His most honoured screen work stayed in two television films about real politicians, and his longest role would come on network television. There is another irony in how he is remembered. Lieutenant Dan is not a recruiting poster. He is a man who blames his country, his God and the soldier who saved him, and the film’s argument is that he has to be dragged into survival. The public figure Sinise became, in steady service to the military, kept the gratitude and set aside most of the rage.

Mac Taylor, the band and the foundation

From 2004 to 2013 he played Detective Mac Taylor in CSI: NY on CBS, a role he also produced from the second season onward. He returned to network crime in 2016 as Special Agent Jack Garrett in Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, which ran for two seasons. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2017.

Off screen the work kept growing. In 2003 he co-founded the Lt. Dan Band with Kimo Williams, playing bass in a cover group that tours bases and military hospitals with the USO. In 2011 he set up the Gary Sinise Foundation, which builds adapted smart homes for severely wounded veterans and supports first responders. He has co-hosted the National Memorial Day Concert in Washington since 2006, received the Presidential Citizens Medal and West Point’s Sylvanus Thayer Award, and in 2019 published Grateful American, a memoir written with Marcus Brotherton.

The caregiver years

Sinise has been married to the actress Moira Harris since 1981, and they have three children. In 2018 the family received two diagnoses: Moira with breast cancer, and their son McCanna, known as Mac, with chordoma, a rare cancer of the spine. Sinise retired from acting in 2020 to care for them. He has described himself as the primary caregiver for both, fighting with hospitals and doctors on their behalf. Moira’s cancer is in remission. Mac, a drummer and composer who had worked for his father’s foundation, died on January 5, 2024, at 33, after finishing an album he called Resurrection & Revival.

That loss is the subject of Graceful Warrior: The True Story of a Son, a Father, and a Family Who Carried Each Other Through, which Thomas Nelson publishes on November 10, 2026, the day Mac would have turned 36. “This is not a book about cancer; it’s a book about the blessings and hope you need throughout the battle,” Sinise told Publishers Weekly. He reconstructed his son’s last years from songs and notes Mac had left behind, and he reached for his old television job to describe the method: “I’m a pretty good CSI investigator. I followed the clues.”

The rest of his public year has followed the familiar track. In May he co-hosted the Memorial Day Concert on the West Lawn of the Capitol and accepted the Ford’s Theatre Lincoln Medal. With the Lt. Dan Band he has now played all fifty states, and the foundation’s current focus is the mental health of veterans. On November 24 he goes back to Steppenwolf, the company he started with two friends more than half a century ago, for a single evening with artistic director Audrey Francis about the theatre’s history and the book. The theatre that made him an actor will hear him talk about his son.

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