Perhaps the best actor of his generation not to win an Academy Award, John Malkovich has played a wide variety of roles in distinguished, if not always popular, films. Despite not possessing leadingman looks, John Malkovich has nevertheless used charm, odious at times, to seduce beautiful women, and he has successfully played villains.
Born in Christopher, Illinois, to intellectual parents, he overcame weight problems and became a star athlete in high school. After graduation, he attended Eastern Illinois University intending to be an environmentalist but turned his efforts to drama.
He and his friend Gary Sinise, with whom he would later costar in the film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1992), cofounded Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater in 1976.
When the Steppenwolf production of Sam Shepard’s play True West moved to New York in 1984, John Malkovich won an Obie for his performance. That same year, he appeared on Broadway with DUSTIN HOFFMAN in a revival of Death of a Salesman; when the two reprised their roles for television in 1986, John Malkovich won an Emmy.
To cap his 1984 achievements, his role as a blind drifter in Places in the Heart won him an Oscar nomination, and he received plaudits for his role in the Oscar-rich The Killing Fields. Dangerous Liaisons (1988) was his next significant film. He and costar GLENN CLOSE played rich, amoral French aristocrats toying with the feelings and affections of other people.
His repeated rendering of “It’s beyond my control” in response to the jilted MICHELLE PFEIFFER’s plea for an explanation for the breakup established him as an effective and dastardly villain. His role as the spooky, chameleonlike assassin in In the Line of Fire (1993) was similar and won him Oscar, Golden Globe, and British Academy nominations for Best Supporting Actor.
He also had a wide variety of roles in the 1990s. He was the hulking, intellectually challenged Lennie in Of Mice and Men; he was the American expatriate searching for truth in North Africa in The Sheltering Sky (1990); Dr. Jekyll in Mary Reilly (1995); a general in Mulholland Falls (1995); Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (1994); and Isabel Archer’s awful husband in Portrait of a Lady (1996).
In 1999, he achieved a first: He starred in a film in which he, John Malkovich, was the subject: Being John Malkovich took audiences inside the mind of John Malkovich, a frightening journey. He was named Best Supporting Actor by the New York Film Critics for his role. In 2003, John Malkovich tried his hand at directing and producing in the film The Dancer Upstairs.
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1. Robert Aldrich produced many social and political movies
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