Peter Coyote (born October 10, 1941) is an American actor and author, and has narrated many documentaries and audio books. His voice work includes narrating the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics. He has also served as a producer during Oscar telecasts. He is one of the cofounders, with Emmett Grogan, of the San Francisco Diggers, a radical anarchist group active in Haight Ashbury during the mid 1960's. The Diggers were known for operating without money and fed nearly 600 people a day for "free" as well as running a Free Store, Free Medical Clinic, and even a short-lived Free Bank. Coyote was also an actor, writer director with the San Francisco Mime TroupeHe acted and directed the first cross-country tour of the Minstrel Show, and his play (co-authored with Mime Troupe member Peter Berg) Olive Pits, won the Troupe a coveted OBIE from the New York Village Voice.. Coyote became a member, and later chairman, of the California State Arts Council from 1975 to 1983. In the late 1970s, he shifted from acting on stage to acting in films. In the 1990s and 2000s, he acted in several television shows.

Coyote was born Robert Peter Cohon in New York City, the son of Ruth (née Fidler) and Morris Cohon, an investment banker. His father was of Sephardic Jewish descent and his mother came from a working-class Ashkenazi Jewish family. Her father, trained as a rabbi in Russia, fled the Czar's draft, and eventually ran a small candy-store in the Bronx. Coyote was raised in a "highly intellectual" and "cultural" family involved in left-wing politics. He grew up in Englewood, New Jersey and graduated from Dwight Morrow High School there in 1960. After graduating from Grinnell College with a BA in English Literature in 1964, and despite having been accepted at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Peter Coyote moved to the West Coast where he studied in the Master's Degree in Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University.

After a short apprenticeship at the San Francisco Actors' Workshop, he joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a radical political street theater whose members were arrested for performing in parks without permits. Coyote acted, wrote scripts, and directed in the Mime Troupe. He directed the first cross-country tour of The Minstrel Show, Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel, a controversial play closed by authorities in several cities. The cast was arrested several times before a tour of eastern colleges and universities, ending triumphantly in New York City, where they were invited and sponsored by comedian Dick Gregory. The following year, a play, Olive Pits, that Coyote co-wrote, directed and performed in, won a Special Obie Award from The Village Voice newspaper.

Coyote was one of the organizers of a group of twelve students who traveled to Washington, D.C. during the Cuban Missile Crisis supporting U.S. President John F. Kennedy's "peace race." Kennedy invited the group into the White House (the first time protesters had ever been so recognized) and they met for several hours with McGeorge Bundy.

From 1967 to 1975, Coyote became a prominent member of the San Francisco counter-culture community and a founding member of the Diggers, an anarchistic group who supplied free food, free housing and free medical aid to the hordes of runaways who appeared during the Summer of Love. The Diggers evolved into a group known as the Free Family, which established chains of communes around the Pacific Northwest and Southwest. Coyote was the best known resident of the Black Bear Ranch commune in Siskiyou County, California.

After dropping out in the Sixties and Seventies, Coyote became a dedicated practitioner of American Zen Buddhism, and is ordained in that tradition.. His audiobook recordings of Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Paul Reps's Zen Flesh, Zen Bones and Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge are well-known and well-respected. He was a friend of Rolling Thundera Shoshone Medicine man who cured him of an illness using traditional medicine. He has also been a friend of Leonard Peltier since the Sixties and along with author Peter Mathiessen, is one of Peltier's two, non-native advisors.

From 1975 to 1983 Coyote was a member of the California State Arts Council, the state agency which determines art policy for the state. After his first year, Coyote was elected chairman by his peers three years in a row and during his tenure as chairman, the Council's overhead expenses dropped from 50% to 15%, the lowest in the State, and the Arts Council budget rose from $1 million to $16 million. More importantly, his council introduced the idea of artists as "creative problem solvers" and by paying artists to "solve problems for the state" rather than make art, they by-passed the objections of many conservative law-makers. Coyote engineered relationships with 14 departments of State which began to use artists in a variety of capacities, paying 50 cents on the dollar for it, to boot. It was an immense success and gave him the confidence (after 12 years in the counter-culture) to try his hand at film-acting.

In 1978, Coyote began acting again ("to shake the rust out") appearring in plays at San Francisco's award-winning Magic Theater. While playing the lead in the World Premiere of Sam Shepard's True West, a Hollywood agent approached him, and his film career began in 1980 with Die Laughing. Coyote chose his nom de plume after a spiritual encounter with a coyote while on peyote. In recounting the story to Paiute-Shoshone shaman, Rolling Thunder, he took the name as a way of honoring the encounter. He did supporting roles in Tell Me a Riddle, The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper,1981's Southern Comfort, and as the mysterious scientist "Keys" in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Coyote's first starring role was in the 1982 sci-fi adventure Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swan.

As Leonard Maltin once wrote, "Coyote's no rubber-stamp leading man," but he seems comfortable with that. "I'm a Zen Buddhist student first, actor second," Coyote has said. "If I can't reconcile the two lives, I'll stop acting. I spend more time off-screen than on." In addition to his movie work in more recent films such as Sphere, A Walk to Remember, and Erin Brockovich, Coyote has also appeared in many made-for-TV movies and miniseries, and he does commercial voice-overs. Coyote was cast in lead roles on several television series: The 4400 in 2004 and The Inside in 2005. After The Inside was cancelled, Coyote returned to The 4400 as a special guest star for their two-part season finale, then joined the cast of ABC's series Commander in Chief as a Vice-Presidential nominee.

Also in 2005, Coyote served as the narrator for several prominent projects including the documentary film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and the National Geographic-produced PBS documentary based on Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. He also narrated an episode of the series Lost in April 2006.

As a writer, Coyote has a mythopoetic style reminiscent of Michael Ventura, the product of many years of self-examination. Peter Coyote's left-wing politics are evident in his articles for Mother Jones magazine some of which he wrote as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and his disagreements with David Horowitz in his autobiography Sleeping Where I Fall. In 2007 he aired Outside the Box with Peter Coyote starting on LinkTv's special, Special: The End of Oil - Part 2.

Many of Coyote's stories from the 1967 to 1975 counter-culture period are included in his memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, published by Counterpoint Press in April 1998. One of the stories incorporated into his book is "Carla's Story," which was awarded the 1993–1994 Pushcart Prize, a national prize for excellence in writing, published by a non-commercial literary magazine.

*Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1988) *Hatchet by Gary Paulsen *The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter *The Breathtaker by Alice Blanchard *The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda *The West by Ken Burns *The History of Sex (1999) *National Geographic: The Battle For MidwayProd by Michael Rosenfeld; 1999 *In the Light of Reverence (2001) *Out of the Blue (2002 film) *The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz *Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

*Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle autobiography by Peter Coyote; 1998 ISBN 1-58243-011-X

*Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps by Emmett Grogan; 1990

(selected roles) *Five Dollars a Day (2008) .... Bert Kruger *Brothers & Sisters (2007) *Shadows of Atticus (2007) *Behind Enemy Lines II (2006) *The 4400 *Commander in Chief *Deepwater (2005) .... Herman Finch *The Inside .... Special Agent Virgil "Web" Webster *Grand rôle, Le (2004) .... Rudolph Grichenberg *Bon voyage (2003) .... Alex Winckler *Femme Fatale (2002) .... Watts *Jack the Dog (2001) .... Alfred Stieglitz *Erin Brockovich (2000) .... Kurt Potter *Patch Adams (1998) .... Bill Davis *Sphere (1998) .... Captain Harold C. Barnes *Breach of Conduct (1994) *Kika (1993) .... Nicholas *Bitter Moon (1992) *A Grande Arte (1991) *Heart of Midnight (1988) .... Sharpe/Larry *Un homme amoureux (1987) .... Steve Elliott *Jagged Edge (1985) .... Thomas Kasny *The Legend of Billie Jean (1985) .... Detective Ringwald *E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) .... Keys *Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann (1982) .... Porter Reese *Die Laughing (1980) .... Davis

*Official website * * *The Diggers Archives *The Free-Fall Chronicles excerpts from Sleeping Where I Fall *Heyoka Magazine Interview with John LeKay