Willem Dafoe                                     

 Nominated for: Best Supporting Actor

Breif Biography:

       Willem Dafoe doesn't see himself as a 20-million-dollar man. He eschews the Hollywood limelight, jealously guards his privacy, and when he's not making films, lives to create notably odd characters in avant-garde theatre pieces. His roles over the years have been actors' dreams — drug dealers, soldiers, poets, even the Son of God — and audiences have come to trust that when they see Dafoe's name in the opening credits, they're in for something just a little different.

       Raised in Wisconsin, Dafoe is the second-youngest of eight children who all look and sound alike. But the similarities end there: Willem was the only Dafoe to follow an artistic bent, while the rest of the brood took the well-trod professional route, becoming lawyers, nurses, and doctors. Dafoe's acting career got off to a rather infamous start with an appearance in a so-called soft-porn video, an endeavor for which high school disciplinarians rewarded the young "thespian" with a suspension. (For his part, Dafoe defended his work in a video magazine: "I was profiling three people in the school that were out of the ordinary.") Drama courses at the University of Wisconsin failed to hold his interest, so Dafoe set out for the big city — Milwaukee, that is — where he joined the avant-garde Theatre X. Two years of touring with the company showed him the greater part of the U.S. and Europe. Dafoe's next stopover was Manhattan, where, in 1977, he landed a promising role in a production with the Performance Group. Not knowing that the director who cast him was about to be canned, Dafoe showed up to the first rehearsal along with the rest of the players. Performance Group artistic director Elizabeth LeCompte, who had already handed Dafoe's role over to another actor, significantly changed the tenor of the meeting by responding to his presence with the announcement: "I don't know who the fuck this guy is, but get him out of my house." It was an odd beginning to a relationship that didn't end then and there as might be expected — today, Dafoe and LeCompte share the same house and a son named Jack.

      Dafoe and LeCompte eventually broke from the Performance Group to become founding members of the now-celebrated Wooster Group, home also to offbeat monologist Spalding (Swimming to Cambodia) Gray. The group's unique multimedia-deconstructionist style of theatre prepared Dafoe well for some of the more diverse roles he's played throughout his career. Dafoe remembers one piece, Hula, in particular: "I had to dance while wearing nothing but a cellophane grass skirt, sometimes with my penis painted green." In another, he portrayed a chicken heart. ("You get under a red tent and make it pulsate.") After dozens of shows, he made his film debut as a featured extra in Michael Cimino's ill-conceived Heaven's Gate. Bouncing back from what turned out to be one of the biggest cinematic bombs of all time wasn't easy, but Dafoe managed to do just that with his subsequent role as a poet-biker in Kathryn Bigelow's The Loveless. In 1985, he landed his first sizable role in William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A., in which he imbued his memorably twisted counterfeiter with a depth and viciousness lacking in most screen villains. A year later, he earned a breakthrough (and Oscar-nominated) role as the messiah-like Sergeant Elias in Oliver Stone's Platoon. The image of the betrayed sergeant fallen to his knees and peppered with bullets as his own men leave him behind remains indelibly etched in the minds of American moviegoers.

       Non-mainstream performances in mainstream films followed: Alan Parker cast Dafoe as a straight-laced F.B.I. agent in 1988's Mississippi Burning, and the following year, Stone tapped him to play a bitter disabled veteran in Born on the Fourth of July. That same year, Dafoe found himself in the headlines due to his title-role assignment in one of the most controversial films of all time: Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. There are few actors that could, or would, walk that kind of razor's edge — and fewer still who share Dafoe's biggest filming obstacle. . . . While shooting the crucifixion scene, take after take was ruined because of a — how shall we say it? — control problem that required the ministrations of two assistants (both female), whose duty it was to take turns taping the offending member to his thigh.

       It's been quite some time since Dafoe has had to make a film for the money, so he's had the luxury of being discriminating in his choice of roles: "I don't get paid seven million for the movies I do, and when I'm top banana, they're not big studio movies. . . . I can switch hit, I can go and make a small movie, I can make a big movie." He definitely has divided his efforts between big and small projects: In the early '90s, he played the loathsome Bobby Peru in David Lynch's Wild at Heart, a redemptive drug dealer in Light Sleeper, T.S. Eliot in Tom & Viv, and a lawyer who finds himself crotch-deep in some very nasty Madonna-related business in Body of Evidence. In recent years, Dafoe has popped up as the ill-intentioned Caravaggio in the sweeping 1996 epic The English Patient; continued his mean streak by playing the heavy in the execrable Speed 2: Cruise Control; co-starred alongside Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek in writer-director Paul Schrader's shattering adaptation of the Russell Banks novel Affliction; and visited the virtual-reality realm in the David Cronenberg sci-fier eXistenZ.

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Weirdness is not my game. I'm just a square boy from Wisconsin.

- Willem Dafoe-