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Willem Dafoe
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Willem Dafoe is one of Hollywood's more provocative and engaging actors. He began acting as a teenager, joining Milwaukee's experimental Theater X troupe. He moved to New York where he was a founding member of The Wooster Group theater company. His breakthrough film role in Platoon earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Dafoe has four films coming out this year; first up is Fox Searchlight's, The Clearing.
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For 25 years, Willem Dafoe has been one of cinema's most versatile character actors. A two-time Academy Award nominee for his performances in Platoon and Shadow Of The Vampire, Dafoe's list of memorable roles includes Jesus Christ in The Last Temptation Of Christ, The Green Goblin in the Spider-Man movies, the psychotic Bobby Peru in Wild At Heart, and the guy who got completely nude and performed cunnilingus on Madonna in Body Of Evidence. In recent years, Dafoe has split his time between successful studio projects like Finding Nemo and Inside Man and low-budget independent features seeking distributors on the festival circuit. Two recent Dafoe films—the serial-killer thriller Anamorph and Abel Ferrara's long-gestating comedy Go Go Tales—fall into the latter category, though he ... recently appeared as a pretentious film director in the decidedly un-edgy Mr. Bean's Holiday. Dafoe recently spoke with The A.V. Club about his professional duality as a Hollywood insider who occasionally steps outside the system to rail against it.
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Willem Dafoe played mostly bad guys and weirdos until an Oscar-nominated role in Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986) made him a star. Compelling and intense, Dafoe started in the movies in the 1980s after extensive work in experimental theater. Instead of going the leading man route, Dafoe showed tremendous range in a variety of roles: he played Jesus in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), a very gnarly bad guy in David Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990, starring Nicolas Cage), a troubled son and brother in Affliction (1998, with Nick Nolte) and a creepy, bloodsucking actor in Shadow of the Vampire (2000). A versatile and hard-working actor, he's a familiar face at the box office. His films include To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Body of Evidence (1993, with Madonna), The Boondock Saints (1999), The Clearing (2004, with Robert Redford), and, playing the Green Goblin, the Spider-Man movies directed by Sam Raimi (2002-07).
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Born in Appleton, Wis., on July 22, 1955, Willem Dafoe majored in theatre arts at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. After a series of smaller parts in films such as The Hunger (1983) and Streets of Fire (1984), Dafoe received high praise for his work in To Live and Die in L.A., Platoon, The Last Temptation of Christ and Mississippi Burning. Platoon (1986) earned him his first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
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Willem Dafoe was born in the American mid-west on July 22, 1955, the second-youngest of eight children. He concedes that his desire to perform probably developed as a way to get his parents' attention. "You know, it's just a bunch of little piggies reaching for the teat. That's where it starts and then it develops into something else."
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In one scene of LIGHT SLEEPER (1991), John LeTour (Willem Dafoe) is shown sitting on his bed watching old photographs and listening to some CDs. One of the CDs is the soundtrack from Walter Hill's STREETS OF FIRE (1984), which was his first starring role.
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Willem Dafoe