Dafoe, Willem

▪ American actor

original name  William J. Dafoe 

born July 22, 1955, Appleton, Wis., U.S.

      American actor known for his versatility and willingness to appear in controversial roles.

      Dafoe, the son of a surgeon and a nurse, was one of seven children. He studied theatre at the University of Wisconsin but left school to join Theater X, an experimental Wisconsin-based theatre troupe with which Dafoe toured for four years. In 1977 he moved to New York City and joined The Performance Group. There he met the actress and director Elizabeth LeCompte, who founded the deconstructionist theatre company the Wooster Group, with which Dafoe later performed.

      Dafoe made his film debut in Heaven's Gate (1980) and appeared in numerous other movies in the early 1980s. He gained prominence for his role in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), in which he played a counterfeiter attempting to elude capture by the police. Perhaps his best-known role was as Sergeant Elias Grodin in Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), which earned Dafoe his first Academy Award nomination. Dafoe was critically lauded for his performances in a number of controversial films released in the late 1980s. He played Christ in Martin Scorsese (Scorsese, Martin)'s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)—a film based on Níkos Kazantzákis (Kazantzákis, Níkos)'s revisionist novel of Christ's life and relationship with Mary Magdalene—and starred as an FBI agent investigating the disappearance of civil rights activists in the 1960s in Mississippi Burning (1988).

      Throughout the 1990s Dafoe continued to appear in roles that allowed him to explore moral ambiguity in characters. He played a tormented T.S. Eliot (Eliot, T.S.) coping with his wife's emotional disintegration in Tom and Viv (1994) and appeared in The English Patient (1996), an adaptation of the novel by Michael Ondaatje (Ondaatje, Michael). In the cult film The Boondock Saints (1999), he portrayed a detective tracking down two renegade killers who believe their actions to be righteous. Dafoe received his second Academy Award nomination for his role as Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a fictionalized account of the making of the classic vampire film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922; “Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror”). Dafoe also flourished as an actor in such mainstream films as Spider-Man (2002) and its two sequels (2004, 2007), in which he played the comic villain the Green Goblin; the animated Finding Nemo (2003), for which he provided the voice of a fish; and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), a comedy about an idiosyncratic marine-documentary crew.

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