[1][2] AudioFile magazine recognized him as Best Voice in Fiction & Classics for his 2010 renderings of Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (2009) and David Vann's Caribou Island (2011).

His mother, Rosina, was a typist and house cleaner, while his father, a bookbinder born in New York and raised in Paris, abandoned the family.

Despite these challenges, Pinchot excelled academically, graduating at the top of his class from South Pasadena High School.

[7] After college, a casting director discovered Pinchot, which led to his film debut in Risky Business..[7] Pinchot appeared in several feature films, such as Hot Resort, Risky Business, Beverly Hills Cop, The First Wives Club, True Romance, Courage Under Fire and It's My Party.

[9] Starting in 1986, Pinchot played Balki Bartokomous on the long-running ABC sitcom Perfect Strangers.

When the show concluded filming its eight-season run in September 1992 (with the condensed final season airing during the summer of 1993), Pinchot secured the starring role on a new sitcom for CBS, entitled The Trouble with Larry.

Pinchot would subsequently be rehired by Perfect Strangers producers Tom Miller and Bob Boyett for roles on two more of their sitcoms: Step By Step, where he played French hairdresser Jean-Luc Rieupeyroux in early 1997, and, that fall, on Meego, where he played an alien who crash-landed on Earth.

In 2008, Pinchot read the audio version of The Learners, author Chip Kidd's followup to The Cheese Monkeys.

He also voiced Max, the fully restored Black 1964 VW Beetle, in the 2009 Volkswagen "Das Auto" campaign.