
He has had roles in a wide range of films, including Streets of Fire, To Live and Die in L.A., Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, The English Patient, The Last. 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. Willem Dafoe Movie Trailers.
Films he appears in include 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. Willem Dafoe (born July 22, 1955) is an American film, stage, and voice actor, and a member of the experimental theater company The Wooster Group. He’s dressed in hipster casual — black jeans, white T-shirt and a scruffy graying beard (a remnant from his recent turn as Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s upcoming biopic, At Eternity’s Gate) — but in a few hours he’ll spruce himself up, slip into a suit and step onto a stage to accept the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Vanguard Award, honoring what the program calls his “unique contributions to film.”Willem Dafoe. Today, for instance, the 62-year-old Oscar nominee — he’s up for best supporting actor for his role in The Florida Project, A24’s $2 million slice of life about kids from low-income families living in cheap motels near Orlando’s Disney World — lounges on a shady terrace at a hotel overlooking downtown Santa Barbara, where he’s about to take another lap around the awards season circuit as it hurtles toward the finish line. Every one of them is pretty unusual. We picked five of them to show his versatility and skill in moving from one genre to an other.Of course, what makes Dafoe different from most people — aside from enjoying laundry — is that in his life there’s really no such thing as a typical day.
And that’s just scratching the surface of his résumé — there’s also his lesser-applauded performances in 1993’s Body of Evidence (in which Madonna dripped hot wax onto his naked body) and in Lars von Trier’s 2009 drama Antichrist (in which Charlotte Gainsbourg crushed his testicles), along with a slew of other roles big, small and occasionally completely overlooked. He shared a foxhole with Charlie Sheen in Oliver Stone’s 1986 Vietnam War epic Platoon (which got him his first Oscar nomination), wore 6-inch-long fingernails and a prosthetic pointy head to play silent film star Max Schreck in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire (which got him his second) and zoomed around New York on a flying hoverboard as the Green Goblin in 2002’s Spider-Man (and its two sequels). He has played everybody from Jesus (in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ) to a tropical fish (in Finding Nemo).
He’s gotten plenty of nominations, and the critics adore him. Despite his prodigious output and near-ubiquitous onscreen presence during the past four decades, he’s never quite popped as a full-fledged movie star. Actor Born in Wisconsin 8.But here’s the thing about Willem Dafoe. They also have a son named Jack Dafoe Willem Dafoe Popularity. Elizabeth, who is a theater director of The Wooster Group, and Willem were together for 27 years. Elizabeth LeCompte (1977-2004) The two met at the Performance Group and began dating in 1977.
So he slouches into his chair on his hotel terrace, gives his gray beard a couple of tugs and, for a few of hours anyway, lets a stranger rummage in his laundry bag.For starters, his real name is not Willem. He says it makes it easier to “disappear into roles.”Still, disappearing isn’t exactly a winning strategy when you’re up for an Academy Award. Dafoe insists he doesn’t want to be a bigger star than he already is and prefers that nobody know about his offscreen life. Fans let him wash his underpants in peace at laundromats. Photographers don’t camp outside his home (or even know where it is).

“I didn’t know anybody that made their living in the entertainment industry. “But I never thought acting could be a profession,” he says. But he didn’t want to stick around Appleton, anyway, so he bolted for Milwaukee, where he camped out on a friend’s sofa, started sitting in on drama classes at the university and eventually fell in with a small theater troupe where he first began learning to act. If he got a term paper assignment, he’d find a way to act it out in class instead of writing it.”Occasionally, Dafoe’s creative spirit landed him in hot water, like the time he borrowed his high school’s video camera to shoot a documentary and got expelled for making what the principal called “pornography” (“There was a bare bottom in it,” Dafoe says). I remember once when he was 10 or 12 years old, he got ahold of a gorilla costume and climbed the side of a building in downtown Appleton, like King Kong.” Adds brother Richard, 65, a commercial litigation attorney in Dallas who also attended the Santa Barbara ceremony, “He was always doing creative things.
Willem Dafoe S License And Passport
“It’s not like I was looking around for a stage name,” he says, “But I knew that I didn’t want to be a William or a Bill or a Billy.” It turned out to be a smart move the new cool moniker helped him fit in with the downtown crowd he was hanging with. That’s around the time he gave his name a Dutch makeover, dropping the “ia” and adding an “e” (although “William” is still on his driver’s license and passport). I thought maybe I’d end up joining the Merchant Marines or the Army.”He started taking acting more seriously when he came to New York in the mid-1970s.
“And so my life changed.”After the breakup, Dafoe was “excommunicated” from the Wooster Group, where LeCompte remains as director. “I wasn’t looking for anything, but I fell in love,” he says matter-of-factly. Theater director Elizabeth LeCompte was 33 and Dafoe was 22 when they began a relationship that lasted for nearly three decades (their child, Jack Dafoe, is now a 34-year-old public policy researcher) until they parted in 2004, after Dafoe met Italian director Giada Colagrande, 42, while shooting The Life Aquatic in Rome. The critics weren’t always kind, and money was always a problem ( Dafoe made extra bucks by doing figure modeling for art classes), but it was here that he met his mentor and muse — and, for a long time, his partner.
Dafoe spent three months on the set of that infamous train wreck as a “glorified extra” before getting fired. But that film’s release was delayed for two years, so Dafoe’s first appearance in movie theaters ended up being a small part in Michael Cimino’s much more high-profile Heaven’s Gate. Technically, the first film he shot, in 1980, was The Loveless, a low-budget biker drama co-directed by Monty Montgomery and a young first-time auteur named Kathryn Bigelow.
He was even talked about for the Joker in 1989’s Batman, until Jack Nicholson snagged the role. An hour later, I was presented with a plane ticket and told to go home.” He can’t recall what the joke was but remembers “it was something dirty.”Dafoe never had the face of a leading man — “I’m like the boy next door, if you live next door to a mausoleum,” he once said of himself — but even in his 20s and 30s he had the right bone structure and wild intensity to play villains, like the counterfeiter in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. Cimino whirled around, looked at me and said, ‘ Willem, step out!’ and he sent me back to my hotel room.
So we changed the character to white and looked around for an actor who had a different sort of face. “But we couldn’t find a Native American actor for the part. Who gets riddled with machine gun fire in a rice paddy at the end of Platoon. Gordon Elias, the kindly G.I. “Originally, the part was supposed to be for a Native American,” says Oliver Stone of Sgt.
He’s stayed an actor.”After his nomination for Platoon, Dafoe was offered just about everything — and, judging from his rambling credits, he didn’t turn much away. He hasn’t fallen into the movie star trap. But that’s why he’s still working. “He’s not good looking in that way. “He’s not a movie star,” Stone says.
