Birthdate: Oct 2, 1946
Birthplace: New Jersey, USA
Character actor Dale Soules is best known as tough, tattooed inmate Frieda Berlin on the hit Netflix series, Orange is the New Black (2014-2017), and is the voice of character Darby Steel in Disney-Pixar’s Lightyear (2022), with Chris Evans, Keke Palmer, and Taika Waititi. After training as an actor in New York City, the New Jersey-born Soules landed a major role in the original Broadway cast of the hit 1968 musical, Hair. Her considerable stage credits include Stephen Schwartz’s The Magic Show (1974) and the musical version of Hands on a Hard Body.
Soules began to work more steadily in movies in 2006, with two films by writer-director Katherine Dieckmann: Diggers (2006), with Paul Rudd, Sarah Paulson, and Lauren Ambrose, and Motherhood (2009), with Uma Thurman. Soules played supporting roles in notable recent American indie films, including Brian Shoaf’s Aardvark (2017), with Zachary Quinto, Jon Hamm, and Jenny Slate, and Desiree Akhavan’s Sundance-competing The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018), with Chloe Grace Moretz and Marin Ireland. As well as voicing in Lightyear, Soules is also a voice character in Signe Baumane’s animated feature, My Love Affair with Marriage (2022), with Dagmara Dominczyk, Matthew Modine, and Stephen Lang.
Born in New Jersey and raised in West Milford, New Jersey, Dale Soules gained acting experience in summer stock theater on the East Coast. Soules trained as an actor at HB Studio in New York City’s Greenwich Village, founded by actor Herbert Berghof. Dale Soules has been openly lesbian for several years.
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