David William Duchovny (born August 7, 1960) is an American actor, writer, producer, director, and singer-songwriter. He is known for portraying FBI agent Fox Mulder on the television series The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016-2018) and as writer Hank Moody on the television series Californication (2007–2014), both of which have earned him Golden Globe awards. Duchovny appeared in both X-Files films, the 1998 science fiction-thriller of the same name and the supernatural-thriller The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008). He executive-produced and starred in the historically based cop drama Aquarius (2015–2016). His film work includes minor roles in the coming-of-age black comedy Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (1991), and the family comedy Beethoven (1992). Also in 1992, he played Roland Totheroh in the biographical comedy-drama Chaplin with Robert Downey Jr. In the 2000's, he starred in Return to Me with Minnie Driver (2000), Evolution with Seann William Scott (2001), Connie and Carla with Nia Vardalos (2004), House of D with Robin Williams (2004), and The Joneses with Demi Moore (2009). Duchovny holds a B.A. in English literature from Princeton University, and a M.A. in English literature from Yale University, and has since published five books: Holy Cow: A Modern-Day Dairy Tale (2015), Bucky F*cking Dent (2016), Miss Subways (2018), Truly Like Lightning (2021), and The Reservoir (2022). Duchovny was born in New York City in 1960. He is the son of Amram "Ami" Ducovny (1927–2003), a writer and publicist who worked for the American Jewish Committee, and his wife Margaret "Meg" (née Miller), a school administrator and teacher.  He is the second son and the middle child of three children. He has an elder brother, Daniel (born 1956) and a younger sister, Laurie (born 1966). Duchovny's mother is a Scottish immigrant from Aberdeen, Scotland.  His father was Jewish, and his mother was Lutheran. His father dropped the h in his last name to avoid the sort of mispronunciations he encountered while serving in the Army. In the Polish language, duchowny means 'clergyman', and in the Ukrainian language it means 'spiritual'. Duchovny's paternal grandfather was a Jewish emigrant from Berdychiv, Ukraine, and Duchovny's paternal grandmother was a Jewish emigrant from Congress Poland (now in Poland). Duchovny attended The Collegiate School For Boys in Manhattan (where he was a classmate of John F. Kennedy Jr.) from which he graduated as head boy in 1978. He then attended Princeton University where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude in 1982 with an A.B. in English literature. He was a member of Charter Club, one of the university's eating clubs. In 1982, his poetry received an honorable mention for a college prize from the Academy of American Poets. The title of his senior thesis was The Schizophrenic Critique of Pure Reason in Beckett's Early Novels. He played junior varsity basketball at Princeton. He earned a Master of Arts in English Literature from Yale University and subsequently began work on a Ph.D. that remains unfinished.The title of his uncompleted doctoral thesis is Magic and Technology in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry. His great-great-grandfather and his family moved from Berdychiv (then in the Russian Empire, now in Ukraine) to Jaffa (then in the Ottoman Empire, now in Israel). In December 1914 his ancestors were among 6,000 Jews who were forcibly removed from their homes by Ottoman police, violently expelled from Jaffa, and deported by ship to Egypt.