[shortly]
name: Sam Rockwell. (no middle name)
born: November 5th, 1968.
height: 5'9
fan mail address:
Sam Rockwell
c/o The Gersh Agency
130 West 42nd Street
New York, New York 10036
USA

note: while the above adress is correct as far as i know, i don't know of anybody who has gotten a reply so far. sorry. he also had an e-mail address for a short while, but he himself is not online and therefore has no access to the e-mail most of the time. if i get any indication that his access has improved and has an address that works well, i'll post it asap. :)
---

[extra]
february 23-26, 2001, sam could be found online briefly thanks to his fabulous friend, leif tilden. below are a few irrelevant but fun sam tidbits:

last movie: "Pollock." I liked it... Ed Harris is the man!
last cd: a roberta flack cd..
favourite cheesy movie: "Summer of '42"

and of course, the answer to the most burning question on all fans minds (apparently, it was on mine..).. does sam like cereal? why, yes he does! oh, the shock.

sam: "i'm a cereal junkie... usually the last thing i eat before going to bed... corn chex and grape nuts sometimes froot loops (or one of those healthy alternatives to fruit loops)"

such a probing webmistress, don't you think?
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[long version]

Sam Rockwell was born Nov. 5, 1968, in Daly City, Califonia. At the time, his parents were both actors. (Trivia: Sam is the grandson of a theatre professor [mother's side] and a testpilot [father's side].)

The family moved to New York when Sam was two years old, living first in the Bronx and later in Manhattan. When Sam was five years old his parents split up. Sam and his father moved to San Francisco where he spent most his time while summers were spent with his mother in New York.

"Both my parents were artists, so I grew up in a very unconventional, bohemian way. (...) I'd visit my mom in the summer and there'd be wild, flamboyant men out of an Andy Warhol movie smoking dope on roofs, having sex, whatever. I saw some pretty crazy shit when I was younger, I guess. But most of the time my dad was really like my father and my mother." -- Sam in the times, 971115

Sam made his debut acting when he was 10 years old alongside his mother and later attended J. E. McAteer High School within a program called SOTA (School of The Arts.)

"Well, the first thing I did was a play when I was ten years old. I used to visit my mom in New York in the summer, and that's how I got into acting, through improvisational theater in New York and through the East Village downtown scene." -- Sam in Esquire, 1998.

While still in high school, Sam got his first big break when he appeared in the Francis Ford Coppola made for TV film Clownhouse. The plot revolves around 3 escaped mental patients who pretend to be clowns and terrorize 3 brothers who are home alone; Sam played the eldest of the brothers.

The next big break was supposed to come in 1989 when Sam was slated to star in a short lived NBC tv-series called Dream Street, but he was promptly fired from it.

"They replaced me with someone a little more all American. I had a bit of baby fat on me, I think I looked a little too 'street'." -- Sam in The Times, 1997

After graduation Sam returned to NYC for good, and spent two years in private training at the William Esper acting studio. He appeared in a variety of roles, such as the ABC after school special Over the Limit, HBO's Dead Drunk (playing an alcoholic in both), the head thug in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, and guest starring in an Emmy winning episode of Law & Order while working a string of regular dayjobs and perfoming in plays.

"I worked in a lot of restaurants. Busing, mostly. I was a food runner. I was an extra on soap operas. An extra on commercials. Typical actor, huh? I delivered burritos by bicycle. All that stuff. My last real job was delivering food for this trendy restaurant. That sucked." -- Sam in The Daily Bruin, 1997

In 1994, a Miller Ice beer commercial finally enabled him to quit his various day jobs to concentrate on his acting career. This lead to him having five movies out in 1996 -- Basquiat, The Search for One-Eye Jimmy, Glory Daze, Mercy and Box of Moonlight -- and it was Box of Moonlight that would prove to be Sam's real break-out movie in the film industry.

In Tom Dicillo's Box of Moonlight, Sam found himself playing a peculiar backwoodsman called The Kid. His character is a manchild living in a half-built mobile home in the middle of nowhere with a penchant for dressing like Davy Crockett, who manages to bring some much-needed chaos into the life of an electrical engineer played by John Turturro.

The movie was not a box office success, but managed to generate a lot of critical acclaim for itself and Sam, and in 1997 he found himself the star of another critical hit film, Lawn Dogs.

Once again Sam portrays a societal outcast in the form of Trent, a working class man living in a trailer, earning a living mowing lawns inside a wealthy gated Kentucky community. Soon Trent finds himself befriended by 10 year old Devon (Mischa Barton), and the movie deals with the difficulties in their friendship and the outside world.

"I think it's a beautiful story about people from two different backgrounds who make a human connection [...] People who wouldn't normally be connected become connected. They're not really allowed to, but they do it anyway. It's a buddy movie, a princess and a pauper." -- Sam in Hollywood.com, 1998

The role won Sam the Best Actor awards at the Montreal Film Festival as well as the Film Festival in Barcelona, Spain.

Sam also made strong perfomances in the quirky, independent comedy Safe Men, in which he plays one half of a pretty awful singing duo (the other half played by Steve Zahn) which gets mistaken for two safe-crackers by the jewish mafia, and the offbeat hitman trainee in Jerry & Tom against Joe Mantegna.

A few smaller appearances in Woody Allen's Celebrity and the 1999 movie version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (in which he played Flute) later, Sam found himself with large parts in two of the bigger hit movies to emerge late 1999 - The Green Mile and Galaxy Quest, wowing audiences and critics alike with his chameleon perfomances as a crazed killer in the former and a goofy actor in the latter.

After returning to the theatre briefly the summer of 2000 during the acclaimed Williamstown Theater Festival in the Lanford Wilson play Hot L Baltimore, Sam scored another box office hit in the fall with Charlie's Angels.

The new century started well for Sam, as he starred in several big projects. Sam worked with Gene Hackman in the David Mamet movie The Heist, and against Nicholas Cage in the latest Ridley Scott film called Matchstich Men, while making time for indie projects such as a short film called big love, written and directed by Sam's friend Leif Tilden, which premiered at the 2001 edition of the Sundance festival.

Perhaps the most exciting acting pairing for Sam may have been George Clooney in Welcome to Collinwood, though. While the movie didn't make it big, Clooney was so impressed by Sam that he championed Sam to star in Clooney's first directorial effort, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

So what does the future hold for Sam? Piccadilly Jim is heading for post-production, and the very recent announcement that Sam has been cast as Zephod, the two-headed president of the galaxy in the upcoming filmatization of Douglas Adams the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy guarantee Sam'll pop back up on our movie screens soon enough. Go, Sam!