Hedaya was born in New York City, to a Sephardic Jewish family from Aleppo, Syria.

[3] He worked as a junior high school teacher for many years before deciding to pursue acting full-time.

He played the estranged father of Mallory Keaton's boyfriend, Nick, on the sitcom Family Ties.

More recently, he played an Italian-American priest in the controversial and quickly cancelled NBC series The Book of Daniel.

He played Julian Marty, a cuckolded husband who plots his wife's murder in the first Coen Brothers film, Blood Simple.