Russ Banham - Early Career

Early Career

Banham early on had hoped to become a playwright or theatre director. Instead, he fell into acting after college, making his Broadway debut in The Merchant, which starred Zero Mostel as Shylock, and was directed by two-time Tony award-winning director John Dexter. Mostel died upstage right after the first public performance of the play in Philadelphia. Banham also appeared in several Off- and Off-off-Broadway plays, and co-starred in the ninth biggest movie of 1979, Meatballs, directed by Ivan Reitman and starring Bill Murray in his first film role. That year he was cast as Brad Hopkins in producer Norman Lear's short-lived television situation comedy, Joe’s World, opposite Christopher Knight from The Brady Bunch. The series ran for 12 episodes on NBC before it was cancelled.

With prospects as an actor quickly dimming, Banham tried his hand at producing plays. He produced the world premiere of Oliver Hailey’s Kith and Kin at the Dallas Theatre Center and later at the White Barn Theatre in Greenwich, Connecticut, the latter directed by Tom O'Horgan, Tony-award nominee for the original production of Hair. He also produced the Off Broadway premiere of Hailey’s Red Rover, Red Rover, with Tony-award winners Phyllis Newman and Helen Gallagher, at the Park Royal Theatre. Both received mixed reviews and failed commercially.

At the same time, he began his career in financial journalism, writing articles for The Journal of Commerce. The daily business newspaper, then owned by Knight-Ridder, asked him to join its staff in 1983 as a reporter and editor covering insurance and risk management. Banham left the paper in 1987 to pursue work as a freelance journalist. He quickly found a niche writing for numerous trade and business periodicals. Early stories covered insurance and risk, but he soon added finance, technology, global trade and investing to his reporting subjects.