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).
"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."
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
Malkovich was born in Christopher, Illinois, and is of Croatian, Scottish and German ancestry.[2][3][4] He grew up in Benton, Illinois, in a large house on North Main Street. His father, Daniel Malkovich, was a state conservation director and publisher of Outdoor Illinois, a conservation magazine. His mother, Joe Ann, owned the Benton Evening News (a local newspaper in Benton, Il.), as well as Outdoor Illinois.[5][6] Because of his father's work, the Malkovich family is widely acknowledged[citation needed] as one of the founding families of the environmental movement in Illinois. Malkovich was a popular student, and was both an actor and athlete at Benton High School. He appeared in plays and the musical, Carousel. He was also a member of a folk/rock musical trio, and was an organizer and member of a local summer theater project in 1972, where he starred in Jean-Claude Van Itallie's America Hurrah. Upon graduation from high school, he entered Eastern Illinois University, and then transferred to Illinois State University, where he majored in theatre.
In an 2008 interview on College Hour, Malkovich revealed that he has been discussing making a motion picture adaptation of the Arnon Grünberg novel The History of My Baldness.[8]
Malkovich was married to Glenne Headly from 1982 to 1988. They divorced after Malkovich became involved with Michelle Pfeiffer, his co-star in Dangerous Liaisons.[7] He later met his long-term partner Nicoletta Peyran on the set of The Sheltering Sky where she was the second assistant director, in 1989. They have two children; Amandine (born 1990) and Loewy (born 1992).
Malkovich is a political conservative but, contrary to journalistic myth, is not a supporter of the death penalty.[9]
In a 2002 appearance at the Cambridge Union Society, when asked whom he would most like to "fight to the death," Malkovich replied that he would "rather just shoot" journalist Robert Fisk and British MPGeorge Galloway.[10] Fisk reacted with outrage.[11] 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 later 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."[12]
Malkovich is fluent in French and for nearly 10 years, lived and worked in a theatre in southern France. He and his family left France in a dispute over taxes in 2003,[7][12] and since then he has also lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[13] In a 2008 interview on The Late Show With David Letterman, Malkovich said he had just spent five weeks that summer living in France.
In April 2005, while speaking at Illinois State, Malkovich was awarded his bachelor's degree in theatre. When attending the university as a student in the 1970s, he failed to take his last remaining graduation requirement, a test on the Constitution of the United States; this requirement was waived for Malkovich.
