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John Gavin Malkovich (born December 9, 1953) is a two-time Academy Award-nominated American actor, producer and director. As a founding member of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble, John Malkovich was first noticed for his performance in the Sam Shepard play "Curse of the Starving Class" (1978) at the Goodman Theatre. He later shined as the corrupting older brother in Shepard's mythic "True West", directed by Gary Sinise, and helped establish Steppenwolf's national reputation with his OBIE-winning portrayal when the production relocated to New York. Two years later, Malkovich earned more praise and a second OBIE for directing Steppenwolf's 1984 revival of Lanford Wilson's "Balm in Gilead". Also in 1984, he debuted on Broadway as Biff in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman", co-starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy. His performance earned Malkovich a Drama Desk Award and later an Emmy after CBS adapted the play for television in 1985. Later that year, Malkovich made his Broadway directorial debut with Shaw's "Arms and the Man", replacing Kevin Kline during the run as the play’s star. Malkovich was born in Christopher, Illinois, of Croatian descent on his father's side and of Greek and German ancestry on his mother's. His paternal grandparents are from Ozalj, near Karlovac. He grew up in Benton, Illinois in a large house on South Main Street. His father, Daniel Malkovich, was a state conservation director and publisher of Outdoor Illinois, a conservation magazine. His mother, Joe Anne, owned the Benton Evening News (a local newspaper in Benton), as well as the Outdoor Illinois. Because of his father's work, the Malkovich family is widely acknowledged as one of the founding families of the environmental movement in Illinois. He was an athlete in high school. He transferred to Illinois State University from Eastern Illinois University, where he only spent one semester with an interest in ecology, but he soon changed his major to theatre. An unlikely leading man with gaunt features, thinning hair, and lanky frame, Malkovich entered film with two memorable character roles in 1984: as a jaded photojournalist in "The Killing Fields", and as the blind boarder, Mr. Will, in Robert Benton's "Places in the Heart". The latter earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Malkovich excelled as Basie, a soldier-of-fortune, in Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun" (1987), and displayed his comedic talent in the dual role of nerdy scientist and android in Susan Seidelman's offbeat "Making Mr. Right" (1987). His world-weary, misanthropic persona solidified when he played the decadent Vicomte de Valmont, high priest of seduction, in Stephen Frears' "Dangerous Liaisons" (1988). Always fond of offbeat material, Malkovich bought the rights to Anne Taylor's "The Accidental Tourist", becoming the executive producer on the project. Starring William Hurt and Kathleen Turner, the film enjoyed modest box-office success. Malkovich then played the brilliant, self-destructive Port Moresby (a thinly-veiled Paul Bowles) in Bernardo Bertolucci's atmospheric, but torpid "The Sheltering Sky" (1990). In the "Queens Logic" (1991)—a "Big Chill" knock-off—Malkovich played a man struggling with his homosexuality. In a sub-par Woody Allen effort, "Shadows and Fog" (1992), he played a clown having an extramarital affair with a trapeze artist, played by Madonna. He then reunited with Sinise for a remake of John Steinbeck’s "Of Mice and Men" (1992), reviving from his Steppenwolf days the role of simpleton Lennie. Despite strong performances, Malkovich failed to attract a wide audience for these films—the result of weak material. With his film career seemingly stalled, Malkovich reinvigorated himself in 1993 with a chilling performance as Mitch Leary, the cold-blooded assassin who taunts Clint Eastwood in Wolfgang Petersen's "In the Line of Fire". The unpredictability and humor Malkovich brought to the role made Leary more frightening than previous on-screen villains, and earned him another Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Meanwhile, Malkovich was featured as the insane Kurtz in Nicolas Roeg's faithful adaptation of Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" (TNT, 1994). Though a good match of director to material, the pedestrian script failed to capture the essence of Kurtz’s madness. The intelligence and duality he typically exudes lent the necessary edge to director Manoel de Oliveira's "The Convent" (1995), a peculiar drama about a literary scholar's emotional and metaphysical adventures. Malkovich then played the sensitive Dr Henry Jekyll and his fiendish alter ego Mr. Hyde in the revisionist misfire "Mary Reilly" (1996), co-starring Julia Roberts. Gilbert Osmand, the manipulative husband of Nicole Kidman's Isabel Archer in Jane Campion's "The Portrait of a Lady" (1996), became another name added to the actor’s long list of on-screen rogues. His eccentric nature and stone visage made Malkovich ideal for the gold-digging aesthete from the Henry James novel, but good performances and handsome production values were trumped once again by dull material. Then as the genius serial killer Cyrus ‘The Virus’ Grissom, Malkovich was one of ten dangerous criminals being transferred aboard a plane to a new maximum-security prison in the action thriller "Con Air" (1997)—a rare appearance in a Hollywood blockbuster for the actor. Throughout his career, Malkovich has preferred the stage, often decrying the piecemeal nature of filmmaking for compromising his performances. So adverse was the business to his comfort that he settled his family away from Hollywood to the south of France, where he filmed "The Man in the Iron Mask" (1998) and Luc Besson's "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc" (1999)—movies made close to his new home. He next played two characters out of the annals of film history: screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz in "RKO 281", the 1999 HBO drama about the making of "Citizen Kane" (1941), and director F. W. Murnau in "Shadow of the Vampire" (2000), a fictional telling about the making of the silent classic, "Nosferatu" (1922). In 1999, he took the rare position of playing himself in "Being John Malkovich", a surreal film about an unemployed puppeteer who stumbles upon a door that leads inside Malkovich’s head, and subsequently rents the space to those seeking their fifteen minutes of fame. Malkovich was surprisingly low-key—never straying into parody—as the film became a favorite with critics and earned Academy Award nominations for director, screenplay, and supporting actress. In 2002, Malkovich co-starred in several projects, including the ill-received mobster-comedy, "The Knockaround Guys". He made his feature directorial debut with an adaptation of Nicholas Shakespeare's novel, "The Dancer Upstairs" (2002), a story of mystery and romance set among South American revolutionaries. Malkovich then appeared in the international comedy hit "Johnny English" (2003), playing Pascal Sauvage, arch-nemesis of Roman Atkinson's accident-prone secret agent. Later that year, he played an older, wiser incarnation of career criminal Tom Ripley—a character first popularized on film by Matt Damon—in the stylish thriller "Ripley's Game" (2003). As Commandante John Walesa, Malkovich starred alongside Catherine Deneuve in “A Talking Picture” (2004), Portugal’s official entry for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Malkovich was married to actress Glenne Headly from 1982 to 1988. They divorced and Malkovich briefly dated Michelle Pfeiffer, his co-star in Dangerous Liaisons. He later married Nicoletta Peyran, with whom he has two children. He is fluent in French. For nearly 10 years, Malkovich lived and worked in the theatre in the south of France. Since 2003 he has lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Of the many people he has worked with, Malkovich is often associated with Gary Sinise, a fellow Steppenwolf Theatre Company alum. Joan Allen was a fellow drama student at Northern 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 4, 2005, 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. Politically, Malkovich has described himself as a libertarian. He is a supporter of the death penalty. When the serial killer John Wayne Gacy was executed in 1994, Malkovich organized a champagne party for himself and his friends. Actor William Hootkins, who worked with Malkovich in BBC television's Rocket to the Moon, stated "In fact he's so right-wing you have to wonder if he's kidding." 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. Fisk reacted with outrage. 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." |
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