Best Known As: Titular star of Being John Malkovich
John Malkovich is an unconventional leading man of stage and screen, perhaps best known for lending his name and persona to the film Being John Malkovich (2000, starring Malkovich and John Cusack). Malkovich began acting in college in Illinois and was one of the founders of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company. He won an Obie award in 1983 for an off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard's play True West, then starred with Dustin Hoffman in 1984's Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman. He began appearing in the movies in 1984, and got an Oscar nomination right away, for a supporting role opposite Sally Field in Places in the Heart. Malkovich has since proved himself a reliable character actor or leading man in a variety of dramas, costumers and offbeat, subtle comedies. He received another Oscar nomination for his performance as a creepy assassin in the Clint Eastwood thriller In the Line of Fire (1993), and his best-known movies include Empire of the Sun (1987, with young Christian Bale), Con Air (1997, with Nicolas Cage), and the 1998 version of Alexandre Dumas's The Man in the Iron Mask (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jeremy Irons).
Malkovich, John (b. 1953), actor. The unconventional leading man, who specializes in threatening yet mesmerizing characters, was born in Christopher, Illinois, and educated at Eastern Illinois State and Illinois State University before going to Chicago and co‐founding the Steppenwolf Theatre where he acted and directed for seven years. Malkovich made an impressive Manhattan debut in 1982 as the dissolute Lee in True West and has returned to the New York stage for such intriguing portrayals as the lost son Biff in Death of a Salesman (1984) and the volatile Pale in Burn This (1987).
Career Highlights: Being John Malkovich, Dangerous Liaisons, Places in the Heart
First Major Screen Credit: The Killing Fields (1984)
Biography
One of the leading actors of his generation and an important figure in world cinema, John Malkovich made the term "icy calm" his trademark. After winning acclaim for his characterization of the scheming Vicomte de Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, he became associated with a series of roles that, to put it plainly, essentially required him to be an evil bastard.
The product of a large, highly intellectual family, Malkovich was born December 9, 1953, in Christopher, IL. Initially a portly youth, he underwent a self-imposed physical transformation, emerging as a star high school athlete. He went on to attend Eastern Illinois University, where he originally aspired to be a professional environmentalist. With his friend Gary Sinise, Malkovich helped co-found Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 1976. Seven years later, he won an Obie award when the Steppenwolf production of Sam Shepard's True West was brought to New York. He next appeared on Broadway with Dustin Hoffman in the 1984 revival of Death of a Salesman; when it was transformed into a television movie a year later, Malkovich won an Emmy for his efforts. While he was working on Broadway, he made his film debut, playing a blind transient in Places in the Heart (1984), which earned him an Oscar nomination. He also had a starring role in The Killing Fields the same year.
Although certainly capable of projecting warmth and pathos, Malkovich became best-known for his ice-water-in-the-veins roles. In addition to praise for his performance in Dangerous Liaisons, Malkovich won recognition -- and Oscar and Golden Globe nominations -- for his portrayal of the chameleon-like political assassin in Wolfgang Peterson's In the Line of Fire (1993). Other sinister Malkovich characterizations include Kurtz in the 1994 TV-movie version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the secretive Dr. Jekyll in Mary Reilly (1996), and Isabel Archer's dastardly husband in The Portrait of a Lady (1996). In 1999, Malkovich played what was undoubtedly his most unusual role -- himself -- in Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich. Both the subject of the film and one of its stars, he had the surreal duty of letting the film's other characters into his mind, something many audience members had no doubt been dreaming of doing for years. The film provided Malkovich's career with a sort of popular resurgence, and the following year found him essaying the role of a wild eyed F.W. Murnau in the dark horror comedy Shadow of the Vampire. The second feature by experimental filmmaker E. ELias Mehrige, Shadow of the Vampire took a magic realism approach to documenting the production of Murnau's legendary 1922 classic Nosferatu.
In the years that followed Malkovich continued his trend of alternating roles in high-profile Hollywood fare with more artistically gratifying foreign films, and after turning up in the German miniseries Les Miserables (2000) and Je rentre a la maison Malkovich turned up opposite Vin Diesel in the box office flash Knockaround Guys (2001). In 2002 Malkovich picked up where Matt Damon left off in the thriller Ripley's Game before traveling back in time for the historical adventure drama Napoleon. After cracking up international audiences in Johnny English (2003), fans got to see Malkovich take on the role of a Stanley Kubrick imposter in the fact based Colour Me Kubrick.
After a string of decidedly small films, Malkovich surfaced in 2005 in the sci-fi comedy blockbuster The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Based on the cult novel by Douglas Adams, the picture cast Malkovich as an alien guru and gave him a chance to flex some of his sillier chops.
Maintaining his theatrical ties while tending to his successful film career, Malkovich appeared in the 1993 Broadway production State of Shock, and has periodically returned to Chicago to both act and direct in local presentations. For a number of years, he was married to fellow Steppenwolf alumnus Glenne Headly. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
"Where women are concerned, the rule is never to go out with anyone better dressed than you."
"It's not a field, I think, for people who need to have success every day: if you can't live with a nightly sort of disaster, you should get out. I wouldn't describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that the ghosts you chase you never catch."
"I only have two rules for my newly born daughter: she will dress well and never have sex."
Malkovich was born in Christopher, Illinois, of Croatian descent on his father's side and of Scottish and
German ancestry on his mother's.[1][2][3] He grew up in Benton, Illinois in a large house on South Main St. His father, Daniel Malkovich, was a state
conservation director and publisher of Illinois Magazine, a conservation magazine.
His mother, Joe Anne, owned the Benton Evening News (a local newspaper in Benton), as well as the
Outdoor Illinois.[4][5] Because of
his father's work, the Malkovich family is widely acknowledged as one of the founding families of the environmental movement in
Illinois. By high school, he had transformed himself physically and was an athlete. He transferred to Illinois State University from a university where he only spent one semester with an interest
in ecology, but he soon changed his major to theatre.
Of the many people he has worked with, Malkovich is often associated with Gary Sinise, a
fellow Steppenwolf alum. Also, Joan
Allen was a fellow drama student at Eastern Illinois University whom
Malkovich brought into Steppenwolf. He met actor John Mahoney in a Chicago acting class
years later, and advised him to join Steppenwolf.
On April 42005, while speaking at Illinois State University, Malkovich was awarded a diploma in theatre. When attending the university as a student in the 1970s, he failed to
take his last remaining graduation requirement, the U.S. Constitution test.
This requirement was waived in order to award him the diploma.
In the United Kingdom in 2002 at the Cambridge Union Society, when asked whom he would most like to "fight to the death," he replied
that he would "rather just shoot" journalist Robert Fisk and British MP George Galloway.[8] Fisk reacted with outrage.[9] Galloway brings it up frequently on his radio show with great amusement. [10][11][12] When
interviewed by The Observer, Malkovich elaborated on his comments: "I hate somebody
who is supposed to be a Middle Eastern expert who thinks Jesus was born in Jerusalem. I hate what I consider his vile
anti-semitism. This being said, I apologize to both Fisk and Galloway; they seem like good
men... but if they make such a heinous mistake again, I will not hesitate to murder them brutally by way of the gallows".
Malkovich then added: "I'm a [Christopher] Hitchens fan myself. But no one has
thinner skins than journalists, in my experience, and I come from a family of them... They can dish it out but they can't take
it. But the reason I don't like the topic, why I don't really say anything about a whiner like Fisk, is it gives them more
oxygen."[13]
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