Information from: http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Network/3183/
David Duchovny - source: "The Duchovny Files" by Paul Mitchell. Only when acting could he feel free to express the sort of hidden desires that cannot be risked in real life - for Duchovny acting would become a substitute for therapy, a way of uncovering deep emotions and impulses in a safe manner. The "boring" facts":
Born - date: August 7th, 1960
Born - place: Lower east side of Manhattan
Full name: David William Duchovny
parents: Meg and Amram, who divorced when David was 11
the rest of the family: an older brother, ... and a younger sister, Laurie.
spouse: T�a Leoni; they were married ....1998?
children: Madeline West Duchovny; born April 24th 1999
His name:
David: Named after David, the famous statue by Michelangelo that stands in the Uffizi museum in Florence.
Duchovny: means spiritual in Russian.
Education:
collegiate school
Princeton - undergraduate degree.
-Thesis submitted in March 1982: "The schizophrenic critique of pure reason in Beckett's early novels".
-won a Mellon Fellowship to Yale University
Yale:
-in his second year at Yale he became a teaching assistant and was permitted to teach undergraduates, the first instructing experience on the way to becoming a professor.
-Master's degree: sat for a slate of oral examinations to qualify for the M. A., during which professors ask questions to ascertain the breadth and depth of the student's knowledge of literature, which he passed.
-started to work on his Ph.D., his dissertation; a major effort in which a student is expected to make an original contribution to literary criticism, which can take years of reseach and writing. Duchovny was nothing if not ambitious, and the title he came up with was to say the least impressive: "Magic and technology in contemporary American fiction and poetry".
-also during his second year at Yale, Duchovny started making friends with students at the Yale Drama School. He had begun to have doubts about becoming a teacher, a profession he had pursued out of a desire for stability rather than out of love. The academic world seemed too protected and unreal to him, cut off from real life. The drama students seemed to be having a lot more fun than he was, and he preferred hanging around with them than with other English majors. However, he wasn't thinking about acting but about writing plays and screenplays and he managed to talk his way into a playwrighting class. Later he would not be able to remember the full title of the first play he wrote, but described it as "kind of funny and tragic, like me".
Jason Beghe, Duchovny's best friend from collegiate school, was himself just beginning as an actor in New York City when he convinced his friend to audition for some tv commercials. He thought there was something about his friend that would appeal to the camera. Certeinly the awkward young boy who consedered himself an ugly duckling had grown into the beautiful swan. He was six feet tall, with thick brown hair and a lock falling over his eyes like a mischievous Tom Sawyer. Moody hazel eyes with an actual twinkle in them. A mole on his right cheek. His body was handsomely well proportioned and modestly muscular without being pumped up like some cartoon hero. His voice wasn't strong, he even sounded at times as if he had marbles in his mouth, but there was something seductive and intimate about it. But perhaps what made him most appealing was not his gook looks but that quiet brooding quality, the sense that there was some hurt visible in his eyes and the turn of his mouth.
Duchovny's first tv commercial job was for L�wenbrau beer. On the set, a noisy bar, Duchovny found himself not just nervous but terrified, yet he managed to do what he was told, which was to throw a pretzel in the air and catch it in his mouth.For this feat of dexterity he was paid $9000, twice his yearly salary for teaching at Yale. His mother had told him that hard work would pay off, but she hadn't told him anything about earning fast money by throwing pretzels and looking good for the camera.
Duchovny continued to study and work at Yale, even if his desire for the academic life slipped away even more.
The commercial work led to some auditions for television pilots and different shows. Once he had to phone the Yale office - from poolside at a hotel in LA - to tell them he was sick and would miss teaching his first classes because the auditions/tests took longer than expected.