A celebrated and durable American stage actor whose TV and film appearances have not captured the commanding power he elicits in the theater, Fritz Weaver portrayed both sympathetic and calculatingly villainous characters, often demonstrating an upper-crust bearing made more plausible by the long, thin, pinched appearance of his trademark nose. He is perhaps best known worldwide for his portrayal of Dr. Josef Weiss, the doomed patriarch of a Berlin Jewish family, in the 1978 NBC miniseries "Holocaust".

The Pittsburgh native began his professional stage career with the Barter Theatre in 1952.