Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke

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Birth name: Ethan Green Hawke 
Date of birth: 6 November 1970
Place of birth: Austin, Texas, USA
Nickname: Etan
Height: 5′ 10½” (1.79 m) 
Spouse: Uma Thurman (1 May 1998 – 20 July 2004) (divorced) 2 children

Famous Quote: “People look at your life and see things as a big deal that aren’t a big deal to you. What I mean is, the chapter breaks are different for me. I’ll read about my divorce, and what people think about it, and, well, it’s so inaccurate, usually, but the fact is, I wouldn’t want it to be accurate. Because it’s my truth. When I was younger, it was more important to me to come off well. Now, I just want to try to be good at what I do.”

Contact Address and Autograph: Addresses and fan mail information

Ethan Hawke
3 Arts Entertainment
9460 Wilshire Blvd. 7th Floor
Beverly Hills, CA 90212, USA 

Biography: Ethan Green Hawke (born November 6, 1970) is a two-time Academy Award-nominated American actor, writer and film director. A self-described “slob” who has been named repeatedly to People magazine’s Worst Dressed List, Ethan Hawke began fashioning his career as a Gen-X Renaissance Man, publishing a modestly-acclaimed novel, co-founding a Manhattan theater company, and stepping behind the camera to helm music videos and films, in addition to acting. 

Possessing WASP-ish good looks and a disarming air of sincerity, he began taking acting classes at Princeton University’s McCarter Theater, and his stage debut there at age 13 in “St. Joan” led to a successful audition for “Explorers” (1985), Joe Dante’s underappreciated teen sci-fi film (which also marked the feature debut of River Phoenix). The film flopped, and Hawke, encouraged by his mother, left acting for several years before returning with a well-received performance as a shy, sensitive prep school student in Peter Weir’s “Dead Poets Society” (1989), followed quickly that same year by “Dad”, in which he played Jack Lemmon’s grandson.

Hawke was born in Austin, Texas, the son of Leslie Carole (née Green) and James Steven Hawke. His maternal grandfather, Howard Lemuel Green, served five terms in the Texas Legislature and was a minor league baseball commissioner. Hawke’s parents were students at the University of Texas at the time of his birth, and separated five years later. When he was ten, he moved with his mother from Atlanta to New York, where he attended the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights and then moved to West Windsor, New Jersey, where he attended what is now West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South. He transferred to and graduated from the Hun School of Princeton in 1988. He took acting classes at the McCarter Theatre. His first paid role was at the age of twelve, in McCarter’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan.

At the age of fourteen, he made his feature film debut in Joe Dante’s Explorers (1985). Hawke studied acting at the British Theatre Association in England and at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He twice enrolled in New York University’s English program and is one of the founding fathers and artistic director of Malaparte, a former New York City theatre company. Malaparte productions included A Joke!, Wild Dogs, Good Evening, Sons and Fathers, It Changes Every Year, Veins and Thumbtacks, Hesh, and The Great Unwashed. In 1988, Hawke was cast in a role in director Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society; the film’s success was considered Hawke’s breakthrough. He left school and appeared in A Midnight Clear, Alive, Reality Bites, Before Sunrise, Gattaca, The Newton Boys, Great Expectations, and many other movies.

Hawke’s early films invariably cast him in coming-of-age roles, and though he gave a strong performance as a young prospector in the Disney version of Jack London’s adventure “White Fang”, he also took the black comedy “Mystery Date” (both 1991), despite realizing the script had problems. He made his Off-Broadway debut in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of “Casanova” that year before returning to student mode for “Waterland” (1992), an arresting British film about a desperate, middle-aged high school history teacher (Jeremy Irons) seemingly trapped by his past. Hawke was also forceful and credible as the narrator and reluctant squad leader in the underrated but eloquent, antiwar drama “A Midnight Clear” (also 1992), adapted from the WWII-era novel by William Wharton. During a busy 1993, he appeared in three features (most notably “Alive”, a surprisingly upbeat story about survival after a plane crash in the Andes); wrote, directed and edited the short film “Straight to One” about a pair of young honeymooners; and co-founded Malaparte., a not-for-profit theater group in NYC.

Hawke enjoyed a high profile lead as Winona Ryder’s grubby, cynical boyfriend with artistic pretensions in the Gen-X romantic comedy “Reality Bites” (1994), which opened to extremely mixed reviews and disappointing box office. He went on to team with Richard Linklater for the first time on “Before Sunrise” (1995), a radical departure from the Texas slacker scene of the director’s first two features. A European train journey introduces Hawke to the beautiful Julie Delpy, and their mutual attraction causes them to detrain and explore Venice, sharing their first kiss on the same Ferris wheel Orson Welles featured in “The Third Man” (1940). Linklater’s literate, sensitive treatment of a brief romantic interlude between two young people with their lives stretching out before them upped Hawke’s sensitive hunk quotient with the ladies, who were certain he was just the man to listen attentively to their hopes and aspirations. He then disappeared from the screen for two years to write a novel, “The Hottest State” (Little, Brown, 1996), which garnered him ridicule, despite some good reviews and one critic telling him, “Well, I was going to put it on my list of the year’s 10 best books. But then I figured you didn’t need it.” (Daily Telegraph, February 11, 2000).

After undergoing an intense exercise regimen with a personal trainer, Hawke returned to the screen looking buff for his first “adult” role in the futuristic thriller “Gattaca” (1997), his biggest-budget feature to that time. He delivered a strong performance as a genetically-inferior man who assumes the identity of a superior athlete in order to realize his dream of space travel. He also got the girl on screen and off, later marrying co-star Uma Thurman. Alfonso Cuaron’s modern-day version of “Great Expectations” (also 1997) teamed him romantically with Gwyneth Paltrow and gave him a chance to act with Robert De Niro, though the box office numbers were uninspiring. He then reteamed with Linklater alongside Matthew McConaughey, Skeet Ulrich and Vincent D’Onofrio for the Texas director’s biopic of the bank-robbing “The Newton Boys” (1998), playing Jess Newton, the drunken, charming brother. He also had small roles in “The Velocity of Gary”, which reunited him with executive producer-star D’Onofrio, and in “Joe the King” (both 1999), the feature directorial debut of his Malaparte. mate Frank Whaley.

Hawke once again provided a film’s still center as star of Scott Hicks’ “Snow Falling on Cedars” (1999), essaying an American journalist in a doomed interracial love affair. Having never remained long from the stage, he appeared as Kilroy in that year’s Williamstown Theatre Festival revival of Tennessee Williams’ “Camino Real” before taking on the Bard as Michael Almereyda’s Gen-X “Hamlet” (2000), delivering the immortal “To be or not to be” monologue in the aisles of a Blockbuster video store. The youngest actor to ever play the role onscreen, Hawke’s “slacker prince” came across a bit too bland, allowing supporting players Sam Shepard (as the ghost of Hamlet’s father) and Kyle MacLachlan (as the usurping Claudius) to steal this engaging “Hamlet”-lite. 

He reteamed with Julie Delpy for one scene in Richard Linklater’s eye-popping animated feature “Waking Life” and then starred with his wife, Uma Thurman, and Robert Sean Leonard in Linklater’s digitally-shot “Tape” (both 2001). That same year, Hawke held his own opposite Denzel Washington playing a rookie L.A. policeman paired with a loose cannon partner who plays by his own rules in the uneven “Training Day”. While Washington earned the lion’s share of critical acclaim, Academy voters didn’t overlook the younger actor’s contributions and bestowed on Hawke a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. 

In 2001, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Training Day.[2] Hawke directed Chelsea Walls and has written two novels, The Hottest State (in 1996) and Ash Wednesday (in 2002).[2] In 2005, he received his first screenwriting Oscar nomination for co-writing the 2004 film, Before Sunset (a sequel to Before Sunrise). From October 2006 through May 2007, he was in The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard at Lincoln Center in New York, playing Mikhail Bakunin. For this performance, he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play.

Having directed a short and a music video, it was only to be a matter of time before Hawke would turn his attention to feature filmmaking. Joining the ranks of those intrigued by digital video, he shot “Chelsea Walls” (filmed in 1999; released theatrically in 2002), an adaptation of Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milkwood” set at NYC’s famed Chelsea Hotel. Among the ensemble cast were Thurman and old Malaparte. pals Frank Whaley, Steve Zahn and Robert Sean Leonard. 

Hawke also had a featured role in Whaley’s second film “The Jimmy Show” (2002) and found time to write and publish a second novel, “Ash Wednesday” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). His next project, which came on the heels of his highly publicized spilt from Uma Thurman amid allegations of infidelity on his part, was the subpar erotic thriller “Taking Lives” (2004) opposite Angelina Jolie. The actor fared better in the well-assembled remake of the police thriller “Assault on Precinct 13″ (2005), playing a burnt-out desk sergeant mourning the death of two partners who must defend his precinct house against a violent invasion to free a drug lord. 

On March 26, 2006 Hawke’s personal business office in New York City was destroyed by a fast-moving fire. He was in the middle of directing and starring in a movie version of his first novel, The Hottest State. The fire broke out in a newly renovated office on the second floor of the office building and the blaze quickly spread to the fifth floor. It destroyed Hawke’s fourth-floor office and his post-production studio. Master tapes and negatives from Hawke’s film were being stored off-site and were reportedly not destroyed by the fire. In the summer of 2006, he appeared in the Sidney Lumet-directed film Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead with Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. He directed The New Group’s world premiere of Jonathan Marc Sherman’s play Things We Want which began previews October 22, 2007.

On May 1, 1998, Hawke married actress Uma Thurman. The couple had two children, daughter Maya Ray Thurman-Hawke (born July 8, 1998) and son Levon Roan Thurman-Hawke (born January 15, 2002). They separated and divorced in July 2004.

Hawke lives in Chelsea, a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, and owns a small flat in Tracadie, Nova Scotia. He has recently completed a screenplay with Tracadie neighbor, writer Charles Gaines, author of Pumping Iron and inventor of the game paintball. He is a Democrat.

His family includes half-brothers Matthew and Samuel, and his stepmother Gay. His father James is a high ranking official at Conseco. His mother has been honored for her ongoing humanitarian work in Romania, where she first went as a member of the Peace Corps in 2000. She founded and runs an educational charity for Roma children in that country.

Tennessee Williams was his great-uncle, on his father’s side. He is a fan of Guns N’ Roses. On January 30, 2008, Hawke announced he is about to become a father again, this time with Ryan Shawhughes, described as the former nanny to his children with Uma Thurman.

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