Actor Greg Thornton will return to his roots at the Saint Vincent Theatre after a 37-year professional career on stage, film and television.

Thornton, a native of New Jersey who graduated from Saint Vincent College in the early ‘70s and performed with the fledgling Saint Vincent Theatre for two years, will join the Saint Vincent Company for the first two shows. He will appear as Harold in A Bench in the Sun, directed by Joe Reilly, from May 28 to June 15. He will also play Owen O’Malley in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Twentieth Century from June 25 to July 13.

“Fr. Tom Devereux, O.S.B., who founded Saint Vincent Summer Theatre, recruited me for a student production of the Music Man,” he recalled. “A few years later, he gave me my first professional stage experience.” Thornton played Fred Sterrol in Fallen Angels, Mr. Rogers in The Show-Off, and Reverend Lionel Toop in See How They Run in the summer of 1970.

Coming from his home in Montgomery, Alabama, where he has performed with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival for two decades, Thornton brings a lifetime of professional experience, playing over 70 different characters including starring roles in Cyrano de Bergerac and Macbeth. He also had an opportunity to teach in the associated artists program at Alabama. Among his students were Norbert Leo Butz, who won a Tony for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Michael Emerson, who won an Emmy for his work on Lost.

He says he was very lucky to work for nearly a decade at the McCarter Theater at Princeton University, and had several opportunities in New York City in the 1980s, where he appeared in minor roles in The Marathon Man and in the TV series Law and Order, Tales from the Dark Side, and Another World.

While he was always passionate about the theater, Thornton originally contemplated a different role, the monastic life of a Benedictine monk. He joined the community at St. Benedict Abbey in Newark, which sponsored St. Benedict Prep School where he had gone to high school. “They assigned me to go to Saint Vincent and get my college degree, but after two years I decided I wanted something else. I spent a semester at New York University before returning to Saint Vincent to complete a bachelor of arts degree in English.” His father had graduated from the College in 1942 (and would later give Greg the middle name of Vincent).

Now 59, Thornton is proud that he has been able to make his livelihood from acting. He and his wife, Pat, a graduate of Seton Hill whom he met while he was at Saint Vincent, will celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary this summer. The couple has two children, Sarah, 24, an actress in New York City, and Michael, 21, who is finishing his junior year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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