TOLEDO – Had he not been so successful as an actor, Jeff Daniels could always have found a job with his family’s business, the Chelsea Lumber Co. in Chelsea, Mich.
But as everyone knows, his acting career took off and he never needed a backup plan. That didn’t keep him from pursuing some formidable side hustles, including playwright and singer-songwriter.
“Much as I love acting, I don’t do it every day,” Daniels explains on his website. “The only thing I do every day, the only thing I want to do, the only thing I have to do, is play my acoustic guitar.”
He’ll be coming to Toledo to sing, play guitar, and tell stories in a show titled “An Evening with Jeff Daniels” at the Valentine Theatre on Nov. 22.
Daniels, 70, began playing guitar after moving from Michigan to New York to pursue an acting career.
“Back in ’76, I bought a Guild D-40, tossed it into the backseat of a beat-up Buick and chased a dream,” Daniels says. “I had no idea I was bringing along my best friend. The one I would need, the one I would turn to, the one I would rely on. And now, decades later, the one who knows what I’m all about.”
Nowadays, he plays Martin-brand guitars including a model made to his preferences, the Martin OM Jeff Daniels Signature Edition. His collection includes vintage Martins from the 1920s and 1930s, and he’s been known to strum a cigar-box guitar on tour.
He has recorded seven albums, including his latest, Alive and Well Enough. The wryly titled album, like earlier releases such as Grandfather’s Hat and Live and Unplugged, showcases Daniels’ unique blend of humor, commentary, and romantic love songs, all driven by his nimble guitar work.
Daniels doesn’t hold back in his lyrics, letting his thoughts and feelings flow freely on tunes such as “Trumpty Dumpty Blues,” which he said he wrote as a preemptive reply to the president if he were ever the target of a presidential hate Tweet (none so far, he adds); “Jesus Was a Stoner,” explaining that “it doesn’t take much research to realize that it’s a distinct possibility,” and “Al Kaline,” an ode to his childhood hero after the Detroit Tigers’ Hall-of-Famer died in 2020.
Daniels made his film debut in 1981 in Ragtime and has shown his versatility playing roles in 70 movies including Terms of Endearment (1983), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), The Squid and the Whale (2005), Steve Jobs (2015), and the iconic comedy Dumb and Dumber (1994).
He won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2013 for playing TV news anchor Will McAvoy in the series The Newsroom, and performed the role of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird during a year-long run on Broadway.
Daniels also is an accomplished playwright, with 20 full-length plays presented at The Purple Rose Theatre, including the current production of Norma & Wanda. The theater was built in 1991 using materials from Chelsea Lumber.
Daniels still serves as artistic director of the theatre, and will direct the next play, Richard Johnson’s The Classic King, which is set to premiere on Jan. 29.
He bought a house on Cavanaugh Lake, on the outskirts of Chelsea (population: 5,306) in 1986, leaving New York and skipping Hollywood, preferring to raise his children in the Midwest. “It’s where your roots are deepest that you grow the most,” he says.
Daniels told a People Magazine reporter that, even when he was a proven box-office star, he never trusted fame. “I never bought it. I knew how fleeting it was and I didn’t trust it for a second, so I moved to Michigan.”
