Micky Dolenz
Micky Dolenz is an actor, born 1945.
George Michael Dolenz Jr. was already a working child actor in the mid-1950s, with the series Circus Boy among his earliest credits, before the job that defined the rest of his life. In 1966 he became one of the two primary vocalists of the Monkees, the pop-rock band assembled in a deliberate Beatles shape for the producer Don Kirshner, and a co-star of the Emmy-winning sitcom that carried the group's name from 1966 to 1968.
The sitcom is the part people underrate. It ran on physical comedy and jump-cut chaos at a speed American television was not otherwise attempting, and Dolenz was its most elastic performer: he could take a scene from deadpan to slapstick with no visible seam. Head, the film the band made in 1968 as the show ended, threw the entire apparatus in the bin. Angry, disjointed and commercially disastrous, it then spent decades being reappraised.
The screen career since has been mostly voice work and cheerful self-reference. He voiced Arthur in the 1994 Tick series and Ralph in The Secret Files of the Spy Dogs, took supporting voices on The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour, played Donny Shotz in the 1997 Love Bug film and Derek Allen in Rob Zombie's Halloween, and has turned up as himself in Muppets Tonight, Difficult People and Mega Python vs. Gatoroid.
He is the last surviving Monkee, following the deaths of Davy Jones, Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith, which has left him the group's default custodian.
Movies (7)
TV (12)
- Pacific Blue (1996)
- The Monkees (1966)
- Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law (1971)
- Difficult People (2015)
- Muppets Tonight (1996)
- The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour (1976)
- Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (2000)
- The Secret Files of the Spy Dogs (1998)
- The Tick (1994)
- The Ben Stiller Show (1992)
- Circus Boy (1956)
- Monty (1994)
Where to start with Micky Dolenz
Begin with the sitcom, because nothing substitutes for it. The Monkees is half an hour of anarchic slapstick with two songs bolted into it, and the reason the band was ever taken seriously as performers. Any episode works, which is rather the point of the format.
Then Head, the genuinely interesting one. A psychedelic anti-film built to demolish the group's own image, it makes almost no sense on first contact and considerably more on second, and it is the only place the Monkees were allowed to be difficult on purpose. The Tick is the best of the voice work, Arthur being one of the great put-upon sidekicks in American animation. Halloween and Mega Python vs. Gatoroid are curiosities, and Difficult People uses him exactly as knowingly as you would expect.