Peter Coyote

Ken Burns considers Coyote to be his "narrator muse," and Coyote never reads Burns' scripts in advance of performing the narrations.
Before becoming an actor at the age of 39, he spent 15 years in the counterculture movement during the 1960s. He wrote a memoir of that time in his life, called "Sleeping Where I Fall," which was published in full in 1998. It has gone through five hardback printings and is in its second paperback edition. "Carla's Story", a chapter from the book which was released earlier, won the Pushcart Prize for Excellence in Non-Fiction in 1993/1994.
Tested for the role of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). His clumsiness during this process endeared him to Steven Spielberg, who felt that the role of the childlike Keys in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) would be perfect for Coyote.
His father, Morris Cohon, was from a family of both Ashkenazi Jewish and Sephardi Jewish ancestry (from Russia, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Tunisia). His mother, Ruth (Fidler), was a Jewish immigrant from the Russian Empire.
He was paid just $28,000 for his role in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), his fifth feature film role, and his eighth overall. But when the film passed $300,000,000 in international box office, director/producer Steven Spielberg sent him a "thank you" check for $10,000, which Coyote considered very generous.

I'm a Zen-Buddhist student first, actor second. If I can't reconcile the two lives, I'll stop acting. I spend more time off-screen than on.
[on Marin Ritt] Working with Martin Ritt was a real pleasure. Most often you run into directors who are technically proficient, but empty. They don't understand story or structure, and they don't understand when an actor has a problem, how to help him or her out of it. I knew all about Martin's reputation as a director. I knew about his films, and I also knew somewhere about his background in group theater. It's very liberating to work with a very knowledgeable director because you can take risks and go places without worrying whether an inexperienced director will let it through.
[on lining in the 1960s] I lived on communes. I was involved with practically every kind of revolutionary movement of the period. My 'family' of people was called 'The Diggers.' We were a kind of 'out-there' tribe.
It's so funny; I was a much more important actor in Europe than I ever achieved in the United States. They liked all the ambiguity about me -was I a good guy or a bad guy? They appreciated that. The Americans always wanted to know who's wearing the white hat and who's wearing the black hat. I did a movie called, A Man In Love, which put me on the cover of every magazine in Europe; huge hit. Both people who saw it in America loved it.