Willem Dafoe Bio
Willem Dafoe Bio
Willem Dafoe (born July 22, 1955) is an American film, stage, and voice actor, and a founding member of the experimental theatre company The Wooster Group. He has had roles in a wide range of films, including Platoon, Affliction, Off Limits, Streets of Fire, To Live and Die in L.A., Born on the Fourth of July, The English Patient, The Last Temptation of Christ, Mississippi Burning, The Boondock Saints, Spider-Man, and The Aviator, and voice roles in Fantastic Mr. Fox and Finding Nemo.
Dafoe has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor twice. The first was for his role in Platoon in 1986 and the second time for his performance in Shadow of the Vampire in 2000.
Willem Dafoe: Early life and career
Dafoe was born William J. Dafoe in Appleton, Wisconsin. One of seven children of Muriel Isabel (née Sprissler) and Dr. William Alfred Dafoe, he recalled in 2009, "My five sisters raised me because my father was a surgeon, my mother was a nurse and they worked together, so I didn't see either of them much." In high school, he acquired the nickname Willem. His ancestry includes Irish, Scottish, German, and Canadian.
Dafoe studied drama at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but left after a year-and-a-half to join the experimental theater company Theatre X in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before moving to New York City in 1976. There he apprenticed under Richard Schechner, director of the avant-garde theater troupe The Performance Group, and became romantically involved with the group's Elizabeth LeCompte, 11 years his senior and who, with her former romantic partner Spalding Gray and others, edged out Schechner and created the Wooster Group. Within a year Dafoe was part of the company.
Willem Dafoe: Theater and film
Hafsat Abiola, Dafoe and Bianca Jagger at the dropping knowledge's Table of Free Voices at Bebelplatz, Berlin, in September 2006Dafoe, who would continue with the Wooster Group into the 2000s, began his film career in 1981, when he was cast in Heaven's Gate only to see his role removed from the film during editing. As Dafoe recalled of his first film experience, in which he played a cock fighter,
In the mid-1980s he was cast by William Friedkin to star in To Live and Die In L.A., in which Dafoe portrays counterfeiter Rick Masters. A year later he starred as the leader of a motorcycle gang in The Loveless, and later played a similar role in Streets of Fire. He became "very conscious" that he might be typecast as a villain, saying in 1998,
Dafoe would go on to gain his widest exposure to that time playing the compassionate Sergeant Elias in Oliver Stone's Platoon. He enjoyed the opportunity to play a heroic role, and said the film gave him a chance to display his versatility. "I think all characters live in you. You just frame them, give them circumstances, and that character will happen."
Dafoe at the 2009 Toronto International Film FestivalIn 1988, Dafoe starred in another film set during the Vietnam War, this time as CID Agent Buck McGriff in Off Limits. He has since become a popular character actor. He is often cast as unstable or villainous characters, such as the Green Goblin in Spider-Man and Barillo in Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Before that, he was briefly considered for the role of the Joker by Tim Burton and Sam Hamm for 1989's Batman. Hamm recalls "We thought, 'Well, Willem Dafoe looks just like The Joker.'" The role eventually went to Jack Nicholson.
He starred in the erotic drama Body of Evidence with Madonna. In 1991, Willem Dafoe portrayed a Manhattan drug dealer in the Paul Schrader film Light Sleeper. Dafoe played an eccentric FBI agent in The Boondock Saints (1999) and a private investigator in American Psycho (2000). He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1986 for Platoon and 2000 for Shadow of the Vampire. He played a rare heroic film role when he provided the voice of Gill in the animated film Finding Nemo. Dafoe also played a heroic leading man in Triumph of the Spirit, playing a Greek Jew, Salamo Arouch, who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau through his prowess as a boxer. In 1998 he was the brother of Nick Nolte and son of James Coburn in another Schrader film, Affliction.
He worked briefly as a model in a 1990 Prada campaign. In 2004, Dafoe lent his likeness and voice for the James Bond video game Everything or Nothing as the villain Nikolai Diavolo, and starred as NYPD detective Stan Aubray in the thriller Anamorph (2006).
In 2011, Dafoe began narrating a series of television commercials for the Greek yogurt company Fage. Additionally, the actor is featured in Jim Beam's "Bold Decisions" television ad campaign, which began airing April 2011.
Dafoe starred alongside Marina Abramovich in the 2011 Manchester International Festival premiere of the play The Life and Death of Marina Abramovich.
Dafoe since 2010 voices the Birdseye polar bear mascot on UK TV commercials.
Willem Dafoe: Personal life
Dafoe met director Elizabeth LeCompte at The Performance Group and began a professional and personal relationship there and at its successor company, the Wooster Group. Their son, Jack, was born in 1982. The pair eventually split in 2004. Dafoe married Italian actress, director and screenwriter Giada Colagrande on March 25, 2005, a year after the two had met in Rome at the premiere of one of her films. Dafoe said in 2010, "We were having lunch and I said: 'Do you want to get married tomorrow?'". They did so the following afternoon at a small ceremony with two friends as witnesses. The two worked together on the film Before It Had a Name. The couple divide their time among Colagrande's native Italy, New York City, and Los Angeles, California.
Dafoe said in 2008 he is no longer a vegetarian.
Dafoe's brother, Donald Dafoe, is a transplant surgeon and researcher.
Willem Dafoe: Other awards and nominations
Camerimage
San Sebastian International Film Festival
