Ben Woolf

Actor Ben Woolf parlayed his dwarfism into an acting career that was capped by appearances as two memorable characters in the first and fourth seasons of "American Horror Story" (FX, 2011- ). Born Benjamin Eric Woolf on September 15, 1980 in Fort Collins, Colorado, he was raised in Fairfield, Iowa, where his parents discovered that his small stature was due to pituitary dwarfism. Standing just 4'4" as an adult, Woolf initially worked as a preschool teacher, which he considered his primary occupation. He considered acting a hobby of sorts, and began dabbling in features and television in the late 2000s. By 2010, he had left the Midwest for Los Angeles, where he played an array of unusual and often otherworldly figures, including a spectral child in the horror feature "Insidious" (2010) and a Pookah, a figure from Irish mythology, in Charles Band's "Unlucky Charms" (2013). His most prominent screen work came in the anthology series "American Horror Story," which tapped Woolf's unique appearance for two separate roles in its first and fourth season. In the former, he played the Infanta, a monstrous spirit of a murdered baby, while in the latter season, Woolf was Meep, a dwarf sideshow performer saddled with serving as a "geek" - a seemingly deranged figure who bit off the heads of live chickens. Meep's name was also the extent of his vocabulary, but to Woolf's credit, he was able to use the word to convey a wide array of emotions. After completing "Horror Story," Woolf was cast as another strange figure in "Tales of Halloween" (2015), an anthology feature film directed by "Saw" franchise helmer Darren Lynn Bousman. However, he did not live to see the film's release: on February 19, 2015, Woolf was struck in the head by the side-view mirror of a moving car in Hollywood and died from a stroke related to his injuries on February 23 of that year.