Inside Peter Dinklage's marriage to Erica Schmidt and that night 'elephants walked through Manhattan'
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: Peter Dinklage is easily one of the most familiar faces in cinema, having starred in a number of films and series since his breakout role in 'The Station Agent' in 2003. However, not much is known about the actor's wife Erica Schmidt.
The 'Game of Thrones' star tied the knot in 2005 and the couple have since welcomed two children together. While the pair prefers to keep their personal life rather private, Schmidt has a resume that is equally as impressive as that of her husband, who played the lead role in 'Cyrano', a movie musical she wrote.
READ MORE
Dwarf actors blame Peter Dinklage for Disney's decision to 'rethink' Snow White remake
'GoT' star Peter Dinklage spotted spending quality time with daughter in NYC
Who is Peter Dinklage's wife?
Erica Schmidt is a reputed playwright-director who is mostly known for writing 'Cyrano' but has received a plethora of accolades for her body of work. She was awarded the Robert and Gloria Hausman Theater Honor in 2001 from the Princess Grace Foundation, which is dedicated to supporting up-and-coming performers in theatre, dance, and film. Schmidt's 2019 all-female adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy 'Macbeth' received Drama Desk Award nominations for outstanding direction and outstanding revival, as well as a nomination for the Lucille Lortel Award.
Among Schmidt's other directorial credits are 'The Play Company' -- which garnered a Callaway Award nomination -- and 'Chashama' -- which won the New York International Fringe Festival Award for best direction. Her play 'Humor Abuse' also won a Lucille Lortel Award. "Unlike a lot of other people in our profession where film is the ultimate goal, theater is sacred to her. It's not entertainment; it's art," Dinklage gushed about his wife to The Guardian in 2015. "She's very inspiring. She's definitely the artist of the family. ... I am just the TV actor who pays the bills."
Dinklage previously admitted he begged his wife for the lead role in 'Cyrano'. "Erica told us, that you begged her for the part?" CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl asked the actor. "Begged'? Yeah. I mean, essentially, yes, that's true," Dinklage responded. "For an actor, you always wanna do something that — for me at least — that scares you … I just never had sung since I was a kid." In 2015, the couple worked together on Schmidt's stage adaptation of 'A Month in the Country.'
How Peter Dinklage met Erica Schmidt
Dinklage said crossing paths with Schmidt was something straight out of a "crazy, romantic movie." They met at a mutual friend's place in New York City, he told The New York Times in 2021. "It was about 18 years ago now. We were all at a friend's house and someone said, 'They're walking the elephants through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.' The circus was in town and it was snowing, and they were walking the elephants through Manhattan, a long line of them. It was like something out of a beautiful, fantastical, end-of-the-world, crazy, romantic movie," the actor recounted. "See? I always think about movies. So that's the night we met, the night the elephants walked through Manhattan."
The pair eloped in Las Vegas in 2005. "I was going there for a charity event," Dinklage told The New York Times in 2016. "And then while we were there, we just decided to do it. It was a bit lonely. We got a VHS videocassette of the wedding that no one will ever see, that we've buried in a box deep beneath the earth's core." They welcomed a daughter in 2011 and another child in 2017. The secretive couple has yet to share the sex of their second child. Meanwhile, the kids' names are also a mystery to the public, People reported.