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Born Arthur William O’Daly in West Covina, Calif., Artie O’Daly grew up in Diamond Bar just north of the Orange County line. Fullerton College’s annual High School Theatre Festival caught his attention, so he enrolled in 1994 and spent four years “heavily involved” in the Theatre Arts Department. In fact, he says he took enough theater classes alone “to fill a four-year program” and appeared in student productions of “Assassins,” “Macbeth” and “The Philadelphia Story,” among many others.
Fullerton College in the mid-1990s, O’Daly recalls, “was the perfect bridge between high school and university. I like to say it had the body of a college with the heart of a high school.” His “only desire was to be an actor,” and Theatre Arts Department instructors like Gary Krinke and Mela Hoyt-Heydon “instilled the ethics of preparedness, creativity, and professionalism” while giving him “a sense of how a professional gig may operate.”
For O’Daly, those skills propelled him to attend an acting conservatory in New York and earn a degree in theater from CSU Fullerton. He has since become a staple in series television, appearing in “Vegas,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Scrubs,” and many others. As such, he’s living the dream fostered by his student years at Fullerton College.
Fullerton College was more than just a school for Artie O’Daly — “it gave me focus, it gave me encouragement, and it reflected back to me who I am.”
— Artie O’Daly, August 19, 2012
“I don’t think there’s anything about my experience at Fullerton College that hasn’t impacted me. It’s where I discovered my friends, it’s where I got to know myself, it’s where I explored acting and writing and music, it’s where I learned about professionalism and it’s where I absolutely knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”
— Artie O’Daly, August 19, 2012
May 24, 1976
1994-1998
Theatre Arts Department