Thompson, Fred Dalton (1942-2015), was an American actor and politician. He represented Tennessee in the United States Senate from 1994 to 2003.
Thompson was born on Aug. 19, 1942, in Sheffield, Alabama. He received a bachelor’s degree from Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) in 1964 and a law degree from Vanderbilt University in 1967. From 1969 to 1972, he was assistant U.S. attorney for Middle Tennessee. In 1973 and 1974, many years before he became a senator, Thompson was minority counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, more commonly known as the Watergate Committee. For much of the next two decades, he worked as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C.
Thompson was also an actor and appeared in a number of motion pictures. He often played a lawyer, a business executive, or a military officer. In Marie (1985), his first film, he played himself. He also appeared in The Hunt for Red October (1990), Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990), In the Line of Fire (1993), the HBO cable TV movie Barbarians at the Gate (1993), and Secretariat (2010). From 2002 to 2007, Thompson appeared on the long-running television series “Law & Order.”
In November 1994, Thompson was elected to finish the term of Senator Al Gore, who had resigned prior to his inauguration as vice president of the United States in 1993. In November 1996, Thompson was reelected to a full six-year term. Thompson chaired the Senate’s Governmental Affairs Committee from 1997 to 2001. He did not seek reelection in 2002, and retired from office when his term ended in January 2003. He then returned to his acting career. In 2007, Thompson began an unsuccessful campaign for the 2008 Republican nomination for president. Thompson wrote a memoir, Teaching the Pig to Dance (2010). He died on Nov. 1, 2015.
