Ty Burrell life and biography

Ty Burrell is an American actor and comedian. He currently stars in the ABC comedy Modern Family as Phil Dunphy. He has been nominated for two Emmy Awards, winning in 2011, and a Screen Actors Guild Award for his role. He also shared the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series with his co-stars.

Tyler Gerald Burrell was born in Grants Pass in Southern Oregon, and grew up in the Southern Oregon town of Applegate near the California border. He attended Hidden Valley High School where he played football and was a lineman for the Hidden Valley Mustangs. After graduating from Hidden Valley High School in Grants Pass, he enrolled at Southern Oregon University in Ashland and graduated with a bachelor's degree in theatre arts in 1993. Burrell was the commencement speaker at the school in 2008. While in college he worked as a bartender at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Burrell continued his education at the Pennsylvania State University, where he earned an MFA. In 1999, Burrell worked as a festival actor at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Burrell has also stated that for a period of time in graduate school, he lived out of his van to save money.

Tall and dark actor Ty Burrell has the kind of deep-set eyes and sharp features that make him ideal for roles such as the self-absorbed yuppie who cast a cold gaze in Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead and the authoritative yet undeniably vain plastic surgeon on the CBS sitcom Out of Practice. And while Burrell's background may indeed be in repertory theater, it is in the worlds of film and television that he has truly come into his own.

Equally comfortable on screens both large and small, Burrell found his footing before the camera thanks to walk-on roles on Ellen and The West Wing before supporting performances in Ivan Reitman's Evolution and Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down singled him out as a talent to watch for on the big screen. Never one to stay away from the stage for too long a stretch, the Ashland, Oregon, native subsequently returned to the boards to star in the Signature Theatre off-Broadway production of Burn This opposite Edward Norton and Catherine Keener.

While subsequent television roles in Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit served well to prepare Burrell for his regular role in the comedy series Out of Practice -- a lighthearted affair about a dysfunctional family of physicians -- big-screen roles in Dawn of the Dead, In Good Company, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, and National Treasure: Book of Secrets virtually ensured a lasting career in film as well. In 2007, he was cast as a regular on the Kelsey Grammer/Patricia Heaton local-news sitcom Back to You as field reporter Gary Crezyzewski, but the show only lasted one season. Burrell bounced back in a big way with a prominent supporting role as Dr. Samson in the summer 2008 release The Incredible Hulk.

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