One of the few American actors whose stage experience equals that of their film work, William H. Macy (sometimes credited as W.H. Macy) struggled for years to make others realize what mentor David Mamet knew from the very beginning, that here was an astonishing "cleanup hitter" (Macy's description for a character actor). Early on, his boyish handsomeness led to typecasting as the callow youth ("dead or weeping by the end of the play") or the boy genius with the solution to the play's central conflict. When he first moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s to pursue a film career, he was mostly