Born July 22, 1955 in Appleton, Wisconsin, Willem J. Dafoe is an American film, stage, and voice actor, and a founding member of the experimental theater company The Wooster Group. He has had roles in wide range of films including Streets of Fire, To Live and Die in L.A., Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, The English Patient, The Last Temptation of Christ, Mississippi Burning, Wild at Heart, The Boondock Saints, Inside Man, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Spider-Man, Shadow of the Vampire, The Aviator, American Psycho, Antichrist, and voice roles in Fantastic Mr. Fox and Finding Nemo.
The sixth of eight children, Willem Dafoe is the son of Muriel Isabel, a nurse and Boston native, and Dr. William Alfred Dafoe, a surgeon. His ancestry includes Irish, Scottish, German, and Canadian. After attending Appleton East High School, he studied drama at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, only to leave before graduation in order to join the newly formed avant-garde group, Theatre X. Dafoe spent the next few years touring with the group around the United States and Europe, performing in productions of “Offending the Audience,” “Phaedre” and “Razor Blades.” He left Theatre X and moved to New York City, where he began a long-running association with the Wooster Group after debuting with a performance in “Nayatt School.”
Meanwhile, he made his feature debut as a leather-clad biker-poet in director Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, “The Loveless” (1981), a clash-of-cultures drama that examined the effects of a rebellious biker gang taking over a small conservative town. Following a small part in the David Bowie vampire flick “The Hunger” (1983), he starred as a streetwise hitchhiker picked up on the road by a straight-laced yuppie in the rather staid action flick, “Roadhouse 66″ (1984). A year later he starred as the leader of a motorcycle gang in The Loveless (and later played a similar role in Streets of Fire), but his first breakthrough film role was as the compassionate Sergeant Elias in Platoon (1986).
In 1988, Dafoe starred in another film set during the Vietnam War, this time as CID Agent Buck McGriff in Off Limits. He has since become a popular character actor. He is often cast as unstable or villainous characters, such as the Green Goblin in Spider-Man and Barillo in Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Before that, he was briefly considered for the role of The Joker by Tim Burton and Sam Hamm for 1989′s Batman. The role ended up going to Jack Nicholson. However, Dafoe also faced challenges of being typecasted to playing villanous roles. When he played Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), he remarked “To this day, I can’t believe I was so brazen to think I could pull off the Jesus role”, though Dafoe received acclaim despite the controversy surrounding the film.
In 1991, Willem Dafoe portrayed a Manhattan drug dealer in the film Light Sleeper. Dafoe played an eccentric FBI agent in The Boondock Saints (1999) and a private investigator in American Psycho (2000). He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1986 for Platoon and 2000 for Shadow of the Vampire. He played a rare heroic film role when he provided the voice of Gill in the animated film Finding Nemo. Dafoe also played as a leading man and hero in “Triumph of the Spirit”, playing a Greek Jew, Salamo Arouch, who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau through his prowess as a boxer, based upon a true story.
In 2011, Dafoe began narrating a series of television commercials for the Greek yogurt company Fage. Additionally, the actor is featured in Jim Beam’s “Bold Decisions” television ad campaign, which began airing April 2011. Dafoe starred alongside Marina Abramovi? in ‘The Life and Death of Marina Abramovi?’ a theatrical masterpiece which premiered at the Manchester International Festival in 2011.
Dafoe met director Elizabeth LeCompte at the Performance Group and began a relationship. Their son, Jack, was born in 1982. The pair eventually split in 2004. Dafoe married Italian director and actress Giada Colagrande on March 25, 2005. The couple spends most of the year in Colagrande’s native Italy.
Willem Dafoe Photo Gallery
