Benicio Del Toro - Biography

Name: Benicio Del Toro

Born: 19 February 1967 (Age: 42)

Where: San Juan, Puerto Rico

Height: 6' 2"

Awards: Won 1 Oscar, 1 BAFTA, 1 Golden Globe

New stars come and go, but seldom do truly great screen actors appear, performers of such intensity and focus they are near-guaranteed a long, illustrious and award-strewn career. Such an actor is Benicio Del Toro. Like many Latino talents before him, he faced being typecast as a sleazy Mex villain but, through a combination of hard study and risky experiment, he rose above that demeaning destiny to become only the third Puerto Rican Oscar winner. For the most part steering clear of big budget mainstream Hollywood projects, he has cemented his reputation as both an artist and character actor - just like his past co-stars Robert De Niro, Sean Penn and, especially, Marlon Brando.

He was born in the Santurce section of San Juan, Puerto Rico on the 19th of February, 1967. As far as his future career would be concerned, this was a fortuitous birth-place. Though it's far closer to Venezuela than Florida, Puerto Rico is an American territory, and its population needs no visa to move to the States and no green card to work there. This would serve young Benicio well, both in his education and his work.

His father, Gustavo Adolfo Del Toro Bermudez, was a lawyer, popularly known as Don Gustavo, Lawyer of the Poor. So was his mother, Fausta Sanchez Rivera, known to her family as Piqui. Indeed many of his relatives were involved in the island's legal system. There was one brother, Gustavo, two years older than Benicio, who'd later become a paediatric oncologist, working his cancer-stricken children in Manhattan.

Puerto Rico was certainly not a bad place to grow up. There were no computer games so the Del Toro kids - Gustavo, Benicio and some 20 cousins - concentrated on sports and exploration, their imaginations developing at a rapid pace. Though young Benicio preferred the beach, they'd visit their parents' farm, the rainforests and the parks filled with literally thousands of caves. The young boy would spend many hours alone, creating his own world, his mind filled with the dinosaurs and reptiles that so enthralled him, as well as Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolf Man and the other screen monsters he'd quickly come to love. He'd dodge his grandfather, who hailed from a family of 11 policeman and was now quite paranoid. He'd always tell the kids to hush down as 'They' were listening. He'd move his bed away from the wall so They couldn't reach him, and anyone making a racket after 10 would be unceremoniously whacked on the head with a stick. On a more uplifting note, their mother gave them painting classes and read poetry with them. Benicio would try to make her laugh, perhaps his first acting performances.

Benicio also fondly recalls his mother taking him to see the film Papillon, a movie he loved. He'd remember the event very clearly when collecting his Oscar for Traffic. Looking down into the audience, he'd see Dustin Hoffman looking back at him. It was slightly surreal, very satisfying and also painful, for his mother had not lived long after that cinema trip. Enduring a hard battle with hepatitis, she'd died when Benicio was just nine years old. She was only 33.

Following this tragedy, life had become more difficult. Attending a Catholic school in Miramar, the Perpetuo Socorro Academy (translated as the Academy of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour), he was popular but became a troublemaker, mostly to gain the attention of his father, a strict disciplinarian. After his wife's death, Gustavo had a basketball court built across the road from their home and Benicio would spend much of his time there. He had always been very protective of his son, once punching a horse that bit him, and hanging a dog that dared a similar attack. Away from the basketball court, Benicio took up boxing, as he was often in fights, and would entertain the tourists by flinging himself into the sea from the Bridge of the Two Brothers, joining Condado and Old San Juan, sometimes performing the feat dozens of times a day.

Now with godmother Sarah Torres Peralta, another attorney, acting as his mother figure, Benicio was having a torrid time with his father, the situation growing worse when Gustavo remarried a couple of years after Fausta's death. Eventually, when Benicio was 13, his dad sent him to stay with cousins in Pennsylvania, where he'd attend the strict boarding school Mercersburg Academy, in the Appalachian Mountains some 40 miles from Gettysburg.

Naturally, here Benicio would have to surmount a language barrier, and his loneliness would bring an important period of self-examination. But his excellence on the basketball court allowed him to communicate and find status in other ways. He'd also have far easier access to the rock music he'd grown to love in Puerto Rico, and he discovered oil painting, a passion that would never leave him. It was fun, but laziness and lack of interest in academia meant that his grades were never good.

With most of his friends being older than himself, he matured quickly. He also kept up his reputation as a troublemaker, indulging in some peculiarly nasty pranks. Once, when a friend of a friend was burgled, Benicio called their house pretending to be a member of the robber-gang and threatening to return. Over and over he called, till the poor sods had no choice but to move. Then there was the time when, driving at night in Delaware and unsure of the route, he kept flicking his lights up and down, convincing a cop that he was taking the rise. He was taken to a 24-hour court where, pleading his own case, he was found guilty and fined. His first serious performance had been a failure.

In 1984, young Benicio went to Los Angeles to visit his brother, then studying at UCLA. Here, while walking through the Westwood district on a breezy day, a dollar bill hit him square on the chest. It just had to be a sign of fame and fortune to come. Graduating from Mercersburg Academy the next year, he enrolled at the University of California in San Diego and returned to the West Coast to take up business studies, following more or less in the family tradition.

It was now that an interest in acting took hold. The drama group were putting on a Sam Shepard play and Benicio thought he'd try out, just for fun. He auditioned and scored a role, but then discovered that to take part he had to be either a senior or a Drama major. Already enthused by the notion of stage-work, he thus changed his major to Drama - without telling his family. When his father discovered the truth, he would not speak to his son for a full year.

Immediately ambitious and as usual wishing to hurl himself in at the deep end, Del Toro dropped out of college and took off for New York where he joined the prestigious Circle In The Square Theatre School. One of the directors would describe this new student as "outstanding" but Benicio was finding life in New York to be tough and after a few months returned to California. Staying with his brother once more, he hit an absolutely formative point when he won a scholarship to the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting, for a year covering his expenses by helping the school build a new theatre.

Here he would study for the next three years, learning to act, learning to move, reading Shakespeare, working alongside the likes of Mark Ruffalo (The Last Castle) and Bud Cort (Harold And Maude). Adler would prove a hard task-mistress, correctly informing Del Toro that he was limited, tearing him down whenever his ego interfered with the work. Lessons would often end with students in tears, and it wasn't any easier when being taught by Arthur Mendoza. Benicio was learning his craft the hard way, but also the best way. The discipline and attention to detail taught by Adler would occasionally make him hard to work with, but would also force his future colleagues to up their ante. Del Toro would put in the time and effort to make his characters appear real, and would demand as many takes as it took. Some would find this annoyingly pedantic and disruptive. Others, like Steven Soderbergh, would find Benicio's research and ideas to be hugely helpful.

While studying at the Academy, he'd be encouraged by picking up several TV and movie parts. 1987 would see him appear in an episode of Michael Mann's Miami Vice and another of Private Eye. There'd be pilots for two series, Hard Copy and O'Hara, where he'd appear alongside Catherine Keener and Brandon Lee. He'd also pop up as a street kid sat on a car in the video to Madonna's number one hit La Isla Bonita. Already he was becoming aware that TV work was not for him. With filming schedules tight, he never had enough time to expand his characters and perfect his performances. Still, the experience was necessary and the bills had to be paid.

Onstage, he won the lead role of Phillip in Orphans at the Globe Theatre in San Diego. This was to be a massively important step as in the audience one evening was every wannabe film star's dream - a heavyweight casting director. His life was about to change radically.

In the meantime, he moved on to perform in Action at the Festival of the Arts in New York's Lincoln Centre. He also made his cinematic debut in Paul Reubens' Big Top Pee-Wee, where small-town farmer Pee-Wee Herman sees Kris Kristofferson's bedraggled circus literally blown onto his land by a fierce wind. Of course, the thoroughly strange Herman takes a liking to the outlandish troupe, particularly acrobat Valeria Golina (about to hit big with Rain Man and become Del Toro's girlfriend). Benicio would appear, alongside a bearded lady, as Duke, the Dog-Faced Boy, an inauspicious opening for a soon to be international sex symbol but immediate proof that he would not be playing upon his looks.

As do most struggling actors, Del Toro also went looking for ad work. 1988 saw his agent send him to a shoot for a jeans commercial and the casting director later recalled that the young man had not been keen. Noticing that Benicio was "hiding", the director took him to lunch and discovered that this was a serious actor who'd really rather be somewhere else. Eventually he persuaded him to continue, insisting the ad was for Sweden only and thus "like sending a letter to the Moon". Once he was more confident as a professional actor, Del Toro's stance on ads would soften and he would be spotted kissing Heather Graham in a spot for Calvin Klein's Obsession. A dirty job, but someone had to do it.

Now the importance of that performance in Orphans became clear as Benicio was asked to audition for Licence To Kill, the next in the James Bond series. At any other time, this opportunity would probably not have come his way but, with Timothy Dalton as a brooding and aggressive Bond, the producers were trying to move on from the camp, gadget-heavy Roger Moore years. More realistic characters were needed. Thus Licence To Kill would see Dalton resign from MI6 to fulfil a vendetta against Robert Davi, a cocaine baron who fed Bond's best buddy Felix to the sharks (killer line: "He disagreed with something that ate him").

Auditioning for the movie was torture for the perfectionist Del Toro. Horribly disappointed with his performance, he begged the casting director for another try that same day, and was permitted. He's since told the story of how Bond franchise owner Cubby Broccoli attended his next effort. The uber-producer arrived, said hello, took his seat and instantly nodded off, his head lolling on his chest. Waking up after Benicio's audition he asked "How tall are you?" Receiving the reply "6'2"", he gave a curt "Good" and Del Toro had the part of the youngest Bond villain ever.

As said, this Bond was a world away from Moore's smug and supercilious characterisation. Dalton was bringing 007 up to date and his enemies were similarly realistic. Davi was a murderous dealer whose only ambition was to be very, very rich and Benicio was exceptionally brutal as his henchman, Dario, a twisted killer and rapist who basically loves to hurt people. It was a prime part that, despite Bond's failing popularity, brought him massive exposure.

Now came more TV, or rather a high-class mini-series produced by Michael Mann and directed by Brian Gibson, soon to helm the Oscar-nominated What's Love Got To Do With It. This was Drug Wars: The Camarena Story (it would be followed by Drug Wars: The Cocaine Cartel) which saw undercover DEA agents trying to crack down on the drug trade between Guatemala, Mexico and the US but finding both fellow cops and government officials in their way. Benicio in particular stood out as Caro Quintero, a vicious and swaggering little overlord, taunting the police with his flamboyant clothes, beautiful women and smart-arsed one-liners. The movie would suffer badly when Miguel Ferrer (son of Jose, one of the other Puerto Rican Oscar-winners) busted and jailed him.

Ten years later, both Del Toro and Ferrer would appear in a movie heavily influenced by Drug Wars - Traffic. Right now, though, Benicio had a reputation to build, and he continued with Sean Penn's The Indian Runner. At the Conservatory, he'd formed a liking for the explosive performances of both Penn and Gary Oldman and was chuffed when, at a party for Drug Wars, Penn approached him and said he'd be the new Al Pacino (he was presumably reminded of Pacino's performance in Scarface). Better still he gave Del Toro a small role in his upcoming directorial debut, a harsh and torrid tale of family loyalties and inescapable doom featuring Viggo Mortensen and Benicio's Pee-Wee circus buddy Valeria Golino.

Del Toro now made a serious attempt to widen his scope. He moved on to Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, one of two big-budget movies intended to cash in on the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the Americas by people who didn't already live there. Directed by John Glen, who'd earlier directed Benicio in Licence To Kill, it was an ambitious piece, featuring Marlon Brando as Torquemada, but many felt Tom Selleck and Rachel Ward were hopelessly miscast as the King and Queen of Spain.

Del Toro would stand out once more as a rebellious and thoroughly unpleasant sailor, a brute and a rapist who's eventually killed by his own father. The movie would also hand a big-screen debut to Catherine Zeta-Jones, later to make a breakthrough of sorts alongside Benicio in Traffic.

. Del Toro's next part would take him back onto the mean streets, this time the streets of Philadelphia, in Money For Nothing, the true-to-life story of Joey Coyle. As the unemployed dock-worker Coyle, John Cusack finds $1.2 million in two sacks on the street and spends five frenetic days trying to spend, hide, launder and throw it away. Benicio would deliver another stirring performance as Dino Palladino, the local bookie and numbers runner who agrees to help Cusack legitimise his stash by introducing him to launderer Maury Chaykin. Unfortunately the movie stiffed badly, costing $11 million and closing after one week, having taken just $1 million at the box office.

The same year, 1993, saw Del Toro in two further efforts. First he popped up in a brief role in Bigas Luna's Golden Balls, a Spanish sex comedy that saw breast-obsessed architect Javier Bardem dreaming of building a Benidorm skyscraper, cheating on and subjugating wife Maria de Medeiros and his mistress, getting away with it all. When his plans, his company and his marriage all collapse, he takes off for Miami with his new girlfriend, but his confidence and sexual potency are shot. Enter Del Toro, macho and cheeky, like Bardem himself in his youth. He's Bardem's friend and gardener, but still accepts cash from Bardem's girlfriend for his sexual services. When Bardem complains, his girlfriend insists they form a sexual threesome, Del Toro grinning happily over Bardem's shoulder as he attempts to satisfy his woman (an extraordinary scene featuring perhaps the two greatest Latin actors of this generation), eventually crushing Bardem's spirit altogether. It was a great Del Toro cameo, he's shameless and particularly funny when spraying his lover's little dogs with a hosepipe. Following this came another high-profile part in Peter Weir's Fearless. Here Jeff Bridges played a plane crash survivor who now believes himself to be indestructible, touched by some form of divinity. At a survivors' meeting he encounters young wife Rosie Perez, tormented by her failure to save her baby when the plane went down, and tries to help her - Benicio playing her confused but opportunistic husband. Benicio would later claim that it was with this part that he finally found his voice. Before this "all I did was scream and punch".

1994 would see two more appearances. First came China Moon (actually filmed in 1992 but then shelved). This saw Ed Harris as a super-bright cop prone to criticising his less-observant partner, Benicio. Then Harris gets involved with Madeleine Stowe, the apparently abused wife of bank president Charles Dance. When Dance is murdered, and Harris and Del Toro are assigned to the case, Harris tries to cover up for his suspect-lover. But Del Toro, sick of playing second fiddle to his arrogant partner, is determined to get to the bottom of matters - a real problem when the evidence starts pointing towards Harris himself.

It was a reasonable thriller, well-acted but sadly lacking in suspense. Benicio's next film would be of a very different type. This was Swimming With Sharks, where Frank Whaley played a new personal assistant to Kevin Spacey, a monstrous vice-president of production at a big studio who loves to loudly belittle his employees. Del Toro would appear as Rex, the sophisticated outgoing assistant, who refers to Whaley as "farm boy" and schools him in the kind of sacrifices he'll have to make to satisfy the demands of the egotistical and impossibly cruel Spacey.

Sticking with Spacey, Del Toro now made a major breakthrough with the twisted and twisting thriller The Usual Suspects. Shot in flashback, with the story gradually revealed by Spacey's less-than-trustworthy petty crook Verbal Kint, this concerned five men pulled in by the cops for questioning when a truckload of guns is hijacked. While inside, the five plan a multi-million dollar job that will take them across country and into contact with the fabled villain Keyser Sose.

Though Benicio was onscreen for a very short time as Fred Fenster, partner of Stephen Baldwin's psychotic entry man McManus, he made a huge impression. Contemplating the often mumbling style of Dustin Hoffman (as in Midnight Cowboy, Dick Tracy etc), he'd decided to mumble to the max, and in a bizarre accent to boot, making himself near-indecipherable. When Baldwin first heard his efforts, he thought it was a joke, and afterwards Del Toro himself was unsure as to whether he'd gone too far. Kevin Pollak, though, another member of the gang, had a different opinion. He'd been offered a choice of two roles in the movie and had deliberately avoided that of Fred Fenster because, on paper, there'd been nothing there, it was hardly a role at all. When Pollak consequently realised that Del Toro was stealing every scene he was in, he watched more closely and was impressed to find that Benicio, armed by his usual rigorous research and rehearsal, was never taking it easy and letting things happen around him. He was making specific choices for every moment he was onscreen - a very rare quality. Writer Christopher McQuarrie noted that Del Toro was clearly not in it for the fame and money. He'd refuse a lead role if he thought a minor character was more interesting.

With The Usual Suspects winning him an Independent Spirit award, Benicio's hard work was paying off, and saw him offered a plethora of roles. And, like most newly successful actors, he found them hard to turn down. Thus 1996 saw him appear in no fewer than four movies. In retrospect, he'd admit it was too many - too many characters, not enough time for development, for expansion. Nevertheless, he still delivered each time. First came Basquiat, directed by his favourite painter Julian Schnabel. This was the true-life tale of a homeless early-Eighties graffiti artist taken under the wing of Andy Warhol and turned into a star, before hard drugs took their inevitable toll. Benicio would join an amazing crew of fellow mavericks in Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Gary Oldman, Willem Dafoe and Vincent Gallo. His character would be one of the few that were fictional, his Benny Dalmau being a composite of Basquiat's old friends from before he was famous. Once again he won an Independent Spirit award.

. Interestingly, the movie was originally to be made by Los Angeles producers and the original director wanted Benicio to play the lead, unaware that Basquiat was black (or rather half Puerto Rican and half Haitian). When Schnabel took over he invented a part for Del Toro, by this time a friend of his. Benicio named himself after the Puerto Rican basketball star Raymond Dalmau, even wearing one of Dalmau's shirts during filming. Del Toro is actually very proud of his nationality and earlier in his career had refused to change his name, despite warnings that it would limit his opportunities.

Benicio moved on to another high-budget thriller, The Fan. This saw Robert De Niro as an increasingly disturbed fan of the Giants baseball team, who begins to fixate on newly signed superstar Wesley Snipes. When Snipes goes into a slump, De Niro decides it's because he's not being allowed to wear his favourite Number 11 shirt, a shirt possessed by swaggering Latino slugger Benicio. So, as a gift to his hero, De Niro goes after Del Toro with a knife.

Like China Moon, The Fan was a well-made film that lacked tension - though it was interesting to witness a brilliant new actor in a stand-off with one of the finest of the old guard. Better was Benicio's next flick, The Funeral. Directed by Abel Ferrara, this saw him reunited with Walken and Gallo in the tale of a mobster family in the 30s sent into turmoil by the murder of their baby brother (Gallo). Benicio was excellent once more as cocky gangster rival Gaspare, in flashback when he refuses to take shit from an arrogant Gallo, and particularly in his scenes with Walken, who collars him for the murder. After vicious interrogation, Walken realises that Del Toro is innocent but, having been so vicious, he knows he has to kill him anyway, so vengeance cannot be taken. Benicio knows this too, and the hope, desperation and resignation that flicker across his scarred face are hugely moving.

He would learn much from Walken and would later recall one important piece of advice; "When you're in a scene and you don't know what to do, don't do anything". This would be helpful for an actor whose ultra-preparation did not easily lend itself to improvisation.

. Del Toro's last effort in 1996 was Joyride. Here three kids, one being Tobey Maguire, steal a car from one of the guests staying at Maguire's dad's motel. Turns out she an assassin and there's a corpse in the boot. Cue a cat and mouse game involving kids, killer and cops, Benicio playing the aggressive but fairly clueless Detective Lopez. He did his best, but it was a bad situation.

Now Del Toro cut his work-load down to a more manageable size, just five performances in four years, and one of those a cameo. 1997 saw him hand-picked by Alicia Silverstone (with whom he would share a brief relationship) for Excess Baggage. This saw Silverstone as a spoilt rich kid so desperate for her daddy's attention she fakes her own disappearance by locking herself in the boot of her car. Then the car is stolen by petty crooks Benicio and Harry Connick Jr who discover to their chagrin that they're now kidnappers, a situation made worse when they manage to lose some $200,000 of mob money. Once more Del Toro stole the movie, his lumbering Vincent Roche becoming more desperate and hilariously ingenious as, egged on by Silverstone, he digs himself deeper and deeper into trouble.

The next year would see Del Toro taking wild risks again, but this time coming unstuck. Based on the writings of Hunter S. Thompson, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas was troubled from the start, director Alex Cox eventually being replaced by Terry Gilliam. The movie would see Johnny Depp's Thompson and Benicio's Dr Gonzo (the same characters played by Bill Murray and Peter Boyle back in 1980's Where The Buffalo Roam) crossing the desert with a bootful of assorted drugs and booze and landing in Las Vegas for a big motorcycle race, all the while stoned out of their brains.

With both leads going way over the top and Gilliam attempting to portray the crazy clarity of the drug experience, it was too much for most viewers and bombed badly. Del Toro in particular was mortified by the reaction. He'd put on 40 pounds for the role and, overweight and drooling, he'd thrown himself into the skin of Oscar Zeta Acosta, Thompson's lunatic attorney, once described by the writer as "Too weird to live and too rare to die". In doing so he'd risked all manner of ridicule, not least from Thompson who, on first seeing Del Toro in character, had wailed "F***, no! Look at this idiot! He can't play Oscar, he's too f***ing boring!" (he soon changed his tune). In one scene he'd even burned himself on the arm with a cigarette - 8 times! - though this scene had been dropped to secure a more favourable rating.

One good thing did come from the Fear And Loathing experience, though. Promoting the movie at Cannes. Del Toro met Chiara Mastroianni, daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, and the couple would become lovers.

Benicio would not appear again on screen for two years. When he did, it was with a bang. In Snatch, Guy Ritchie's follow-up to Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, he played Franky Four Fingers, a slick crook who leads an Antwerp diamond robbery and set into motion a zany plot involving English crime lords, dodgy promoters, Russian and American gangsters and Brad Pitt as a gypsy bare-knuckle boxer. Pitt would admit that his comically unintelligible accent had been inspired by Del Toro's in The Usual Suspects.

Next came The Way Of The Gun, directed by Usual Suspects author Christopher McQuarrie. Here Benicio and Ryan Phillippe were half-arsed criminals who decide that kidnapping might bring some easy money and seize pregnant surrogate mother Juliette Lewis. Unfortunately, she's carrying the baby for some mob types and so the useless crims find themselves pursued by a couple of heavies, as well as James Caan's hardcore enforcer. It was an odd choice for Del Toro, particularly as he turned down Before Night Falls to take it (that film gave his Golden Balls co-star Javier Bardem an Oscar nomination). Perhaps the fall-out from Fear And Loathing made him wary of more flamboyant roles.

This was followed by a genuine triumph - Traffic. As said, this was inspired by Michael Mann's Drug Wars, and saw director Steven Soderbergh explore the drug trade, with all its hypocrisies and pay-offs, from the dealers, through the cops and up to the politicians. Del Toro played Javier Rodriguez, a decent Mexican cop who's trying to do his job and stay alive while caught between two warring cartels and corrupt officialdom. It was a superb performance, boosted by the connections Del Toro had made (and kept) with DEA agents and SWAT guys while researching Drug Wars, and the new research he'd done with the Tijuana police, and he was deservedly awarded an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Following Robert De Niro, Sophia Loren and Roberto Benigni, he was only the fourth actor to win an Oscar speaking predominantly in a foreign language. Now he would receive a raft of offers to play rugged action heroes for big money - he'd turn them all down.

2001 saw him back with Sean Penn for The Pledge. This would involve Jack Nicholson as a cop who delays his retirement to catch the killer of a little girl, gradually descending into vengeful obsession. Benicio would play Toby Jay Wadenah, a retarded Indian seen running from the scene of the crime. Cracking under aggressive interrogation he does not understand, he manages to shoot himself. Case closed? Not for Nicholson.

Another two years would pass before Benicio hit our screens once more, though he would be directed by Michael Mann in a notorious advert for Mercedes that pretended to be a trailer for an action thriller, with Benicio stealing files, bombing houses and being chased by helicopters. The delay would be partly due to the confusion surrounding the movie American Gangster and a catastrophic pre-production that would see Del Toro signed up, then dropped as director Antoine Fuqua was replaced by Ridley Scott, Del Toro eventually being paid $5 million despite not appearing. His next release would be The Hunted, directed by William Friedkin, where Tommy Lee Jones played an army employee teaching elite forces how to survive in desolate wastelands, how to kill a man with a lollystick and half a pound of frozen peas, etc, etc. You get the idea. Benicio was a star pupil but, badly disturbed by his experiences in a genocidal Kosovo, he has killed two hunters in Oregon and disappeared into the woods, believing the secret services are after him, his paranoia justified as he knows too much about covert operations and does not officially exist. Only Jones is equipped to bring him out, and so a brilliant chase begins, in cars and on foot, through city streets and underground, down rivers and across forests, all of it culminating in vicious hand-to-hand combat. Del Toro, playing a decent, mild man turned into a killing machine by coldly pragmatic authorities, was superb. Clearly disturbed, desperate to regain the normality of his past but twisted by war flashbacks and tales of biblical sacrifice, he raises the movie to impressive emotional heights.

. Following this would come 21 Grams, another big hit. Here he would for the first time act alongside Sean Penn, playing an ex-con who uses the discipline of strict Christianity to stay off drink and drugs. He's deeply sincere, horribly guilty when he slips, then drawn towards a disastrous descent when he's involved in a road accident that also has painful repercussions for Penn's indecisive academic and Naomi Watts' happily recovering junkie. Once again Del Toro would find himself Oscar-nominated, though he would be beaten by Tim Robbins' accomplished turn in Mystic River.

Del Toro's immediate future had been thrown into confusion by an accident on the set of The Hunted. Breaking his wrist in a fight scene with Jones, with only five more scenes to film, Benicio had seen production halted for several months. His schedule thus thrown off, he had to pull out of The Assumption Of The Virgin where he'd been set to play Italian Renaissance painter Fra Filippo Lippi, painting and seducing nun Juliette Binoche. Beyond this there'd be an attempt to film The Rum Diary, Hunter Thompson's follow-up to Fear And Loathing, again with Johnny Depp, with the action this time set in Benicio's homeland of Puerto Rico.

Del Toro, having directed Valeria Golino and Matthew McConaughey in the short Submission back in 1995, was actually mooted to direct this one himself.

. Instead, his next picture would be Robert Rodriguez's extraordinary Sin City, based around three books by Frank Miller. Aggressively noirish, black and white with splashes of gaudy colour, it would use effects and wild makeup to create an impressively, disturbingly dark urban world of corruption, paedophilia, prostitution, love and violent revenge. Del Toro's part, small but memorable, would see him as a bent cop taking liberties with Rosario Dawson's band of whores and persecuting his ex-girlfriend, cocktail waitress Brittany Murphy. This brings him into conflict with anti-hero Clive Owen, and Del Toro not only has his head shoved down a piss-filled toilet but also has his throat slashed. Ordinarily this would be the end, but in Sin City's torrid dreamscape it's not over for Del Toro as Owen shoves his body into the passenger seat of an old banger and, on the way to dumping the evidence in the local tar-pits, suffers an acute bout of paranoia, Del Toro seeming to come back to life - but this time with a gun barrel poking out through his forehead. Cackling, smoking and growling, with his rolling head revealing the horrible extent of his neck-wound, a wild-eyed but cheerful Del Toro tells Owen exactly how it's all going to go wrong. A hideous but masterful cameo.

Keeping with the outrage, Del Toro would then pop up for a brief second in the comedy short Trailer For A Remake Of Gore Vidal's Caligula, a hilarious orgy of anal tonguing, dildo-sucking, writhing flesh and grotesque overeating. Many big stars would make a showing, including Helen Mirren, star of the original fiasco, with Del Toro appearing as Macro, a Praetorian Guard with a fluffy white dog.

Del Toro's next release would not come till 2007 when he appeared in the absorbing melodrama Things We Lost In The Fire. Here Halle Berry and David Duchovny would be a happily married couple, well-off and blessed with two kids, suffering tragedy when Duchovny, visiting his oldest friend, Del Toro, a former lawyer now a flop-house junkie, is killed in a street disturbance. On the spur of the moment Berry invites Del Toro to stay in a room in her garage as so the movie deals with the growing platonic relationship between the grieving wife and friend, his dealings with her suspicious children and neighbours, and also his efforts to stick to his 12-step recovery programme. Again Del Toro would make a difficult subject real and intriguing.

Much of Del Toro's time over the last few years had been spent on his next release, a biopic of Che Guevara directed by Steven Soderbergh, helmsman of course of Del Toro's Oscar-winning Traffic. The project had been a long time in the making, with Soderbergh at one point apparently handing the reins to Terrence Malick, but 2008 would see it released to great fanfare.

Soderbergh would decide to split the four-hour film into two parts, The Argentine and The Guerrilla, the first film following Del Toro's Che and Demian Bechir's Castro as they plot and carry out their revolution against Batista's corrupt Cuban regime. It was a history, a thriller and a war film all in one. The Guerrilla would begin several years later, in the mid-Sixties, with Che continuing his revolution in Bolivia, setting up camp in the jungle and making one mistake after another as the peasants turn against him and his small band is reduced ever further by the elite troops surrounding them. It was a huge challenge for the leads and Del Toro would step up to the plate, his Che being warm, cruel, dynamic and witty, a man of action and deep thought, but also a headstrong fool. Rightly, he'd be named Best Actor at Cannes.

. 2009 would see a very different release in The Wolf Man, a re-adaptation of the 1941 Lon Chaney classic. Here Del Toro would star as Lawrence Talbot, a troubled nobleman who's abandoned his heritage but returns to the family estate when his brother mysteriously disappears and a series of bloody murders take place in the nearby village. Along with his father, Anthony Hopkins, he must piece together the puzzle, end the slaughter and protect his brother's fiancee, Emily Blunt, with pretty much inevitable results.

Now fully deserving of the tag "the new Brando" (Brando also being a protég&eactute; of Stella Adler and a renowned mumbler), Benicio Del Toro looks set to continue his run of commanding performances for some time yet. This is a man who kept the same small apartment in Los Angeles for ten years, despite his burgeoning success. He's clearly not in it for the fame or wealth - and for that we should all be grateful.

Dominic Wills