His father, Neil Welliver, was a well-known American landscape painter who was a professor of fine art at Yale University before becoming dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Fine Art. His mother, Norma Cripps, was a fashion illustrator.[1] He studied drama at New York University in the early 1980s before his film and television career began.[3] He befriended Adam Sandler in a comedy writing class while attending New York University.[4]
On television, he had a recurring role as a doctor on NYPD Blue and was one of the stars of the CBS police drama Brooklyn South. Moreover, he is well known for playing the semi-regular character Silas Adams on the HBO series Deadwood. He played "The Representative" in two episodes of Prison Break, portrayed Kyle Hollis (a.k.a. Reverend Orson Parker) in the NBC series Life, and appeared in the season five finale of Lost as the "Man in Black", which he continued to portray during the sixth and final season. In 1999 he appeared in an episode of Touched by an Angel titled "The Occupant", where he played a man who was "occupied" by a demon. In 2002 he played Tom Landricks, a rapist, on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
He was introduced into FX's Sons of Anarchy midway through season two, in which he portrays Irish gun kingpin Jimmy O'Phelan. In 2009, he started playing the role of Prosecutor Glenn Childs, a rival of Chris Noth's character, in the CBS series The Good Wife. He joined the cast of the apocalyptic drama The Last Ship in a recurring role for its first two seasons, as Thorwald, a local warlord fighting underground in a dying world infected by a global pandemic.
He plays the title role in the TV series Bosch from Amazon Studios. The series is based on the novels centered on the character of the same name by Michael Connelly. The first season of the series was released on Amazon Prime Video on February 13, 2015.[5] The series was renewed for a seventh and final season on February 13, 2020.[6] The Bosch series was followed by a May 2022 spin off entitled Bosch: Legacy in which Bosch has left the LAPD and has become a private detective and his daughter, Madeline, (played by Madison Lintz) is a rookie police officer, still set in Los Angeles.
Outside of acting, Welliver appeared in the eighteenth season of Hell's Kitchen when he attended the fifth dinner service as one of the red team's diners.
He has narrated several audiobooks, including Robert B. Parker's series of American western novels, Appaloosa, Brimstone, Blue-Eyed Devil and Ironhorse. He has also narrated several of the Michael Connelly Bosch series of crime fiction novels, including The Crossing, The Burning Room and The Wrong Side of Goodbye.
Personal life
He has been married five times (with four ending in divorce and one ending due to death of his spouse). He has three children.[3]
He revealed in several interviews the link between his own experience of loss and his interpretation of Harry Bosch.[8]
