Bronson Alcott Pinchot (; born May 20, 1959) is an American actor. He made his television debut as Dennis Kemper, one of the earliest regular gay characters on an American television series, on the 1985 NBC sitcom Sara. Pinchot is known for playing Balki Bartokomous on the ABC sitcom Perfect Strangers (1986–1993), for which he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, and Serge in the Beverly Hills Cop film series (1984–2024).
Pinchot has also performed in films including Risky Business (1983), The Flamingo Kid (1984), After Hours (1985), True Romance (1993) and The First Wives Club (1996), and in television series such as Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1994–1995), Ray Donovan (2015), Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020), Lodge 49 (2019) and The Residence (2025). In 2012, he starred in his own reality series, The Bronson Pinchot Project, on the DIY Network.
Pinchot has worked extensively as an audiobook narrator, with over 400 recordings as of 2024. In 2010, he was named as AudioFile magazine's Best Voice in Fiction & Classic and Audible's Narrator of the Year. Pinchot has also won six Audie Awards, including for Best Male Narrator for his rendering of Christopher Healy's The Hero's Guide to Being an Outlaw (2012).
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Early life
Pinchot was born in New York City on May 20, 1959. He grew up with his mother, two brothers, and a sister. His mother, Rosina, was a typist and house cleaner, while his father, a bookbinder born in New York and raised in Paris, abandoned the family. This abandonment plunged the family into poverty. Pinchot's paternal grandparents were Russian immigrants who settled in France following the Russian Revolution. Upon returning to the United States, his father changed the family surname from Poncharavsky to Pinchot.
