Background and career
David Michael Schramm (August 14, 1946 – March 28, 2020) was an American actor. He was best known for playing the role of Roy Biggins, the curmudgeonly rival airline owner in the TV series Wings.
Schramm was born on August 14, 1946, in Louisville, Kentucky. His father was a bookie. Schramm revealed in a 2008 interview that at the age of 17, "(my parents) always came to see me in school, where I won trophies for speaking, and then in those big outdoor dramas we have in Kentucky, and then as an apprentice actor at the playhouse that eventually became the Actors Theater of Louisville." Schramm also earned $25 a week for cleaning toilets and for being in a play. "I had been acting non-stop since I was a teenager," Schramm said in a 2012 interview. "But really I got started in acting because others helped me push into it. When I was a kid, it was other actors getting me to do it. Then I had a series of teachers who told me I was going to do it. John Houseman got me under his wing, and I went along with it happily." Schramm took acting classes at Western Kentucky University, where he got a full scholarship to the Juilliard School from Mildred Howard. Schramm attended Juilliard from 1968 to 1972 and took classes that were taught by Michael Kahn. Schramm graduated from Juilliard afterwards. He is also a founding member of The Acting Company.
Houseman offered Schramm to play King Lear in an Off-Broadway production of William Shakespeare's play of the same name. In 1979, Schramm appeared on Broadway opposite Judith Ivey in Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce. He played the role of Malcolm. In 1980, Schramm performed in Howard Sackler's Goodbye Fidel at the Ambassadors Theatre. In 1985, he assumed the role of the sinister, rat-faced General D. in Raggedy Ann: The Musical Adventure (then-titled Rag Dolly) at the New York State Theatre Institute and remained with the cast the following year, when the show played for packed houses in Russia. In 1988, Schramm appeared at the Pasadena Playhouse opposite Rebecca DeMornay in a production of Born Yesterday. In September 1989, he performed in Ayckbourn's A Chorus of Disapproval at the South Coast Repertory.
Schramm appeared in the television movie, The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story (1990), and the miniseries, Kennedy (1983), in which he portrayed Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Schramm also made appearances in Another World and Wiseguy. In 1990, he appeared opposite Sandra Bullock in the short-lived series Working Girl, based on the 1988 film of the same name. He also had a major part in Miami Vice season 5 episode 7 (Asian Cut) where he played a serial killer Professor Eric G. Halliwell.
Films he appeared in include Let It Ride (1989), Johnny Handsome (1989) and A Shock to the System (1990).
Schramm gained national recognition for portraying the blustery, cantankerous airline owner Roy Biggins, in the sitcom Wings, which aired from 1990 to 1997. He appeared in all 172 episodes of the show. When asked what he remembered most from Wings: "I knew when we started it was going to be a success. Not just because the writers had been involved with Cheers, Taxi and Mary Tyler Moore. But when we sat around the table reading the first script, and I saw this buffoon they created for me, this pompous guy who said garish things to women, and all the other rich characters, I turned to Rebecca (Schull, who played Fay) and said, 'I think we've landed in a tub of butter.' And we did. If only I put the money I made under my mattress instead of in the stock market."
