Jeff Bridges - Biography

Name: Jeff Bridges

Born: 4 December 1949 (Age: 59)

Where: Los Angeles, California, USA

Height: 6' 1"

Awards: 4 Oscar, 3 Golden Globe nominations

Nobody, but NOBODY who's worked with Jeff Bridges has a bad word to say about him. "I've never, ever heard of him pulling a star turn or showing any ego", said Peter Bogdanovich, director of The Last Picture Show. "It's like watching a diamond cutter," said John Goodman, his co-star in The Big Lebowski, "When you look at the diamond, you don't think of the work, you just notice there's no flaws". The New Yorker summed him up very simply as "the best actor alive".

The best actor alive? When most of us think of Bridges, we think of the easy-going dude in The Last Picture Show or Thunderbolt And Lightfoot. The impression is so strong the Coen Brothers even based the part of the Dude in The Big Lebowski on it - Bridges even wore his own clothes, for God's sake. The draw-string pants and plastic shoes - ultimate emblems of dudeness - were straight from his wardrobe. But it's too easy to view Bridges like this, as the Owen Wilson of his day. Think of his arrogant and increasingly dangerous rich man in Jagged Edge: his weird, childlike alien, gradually impersonating Karen Allen's husband in Starman: the cynical dissolute, betraying his talents in The Fabulous Baker Boys: the smart-arsed DJ plunged into depression in The Fisher King: the world-weary junkie he made of Bill Hickok in Wild Bill: his freaked-out angel, at odds with mortality in Fearless. We see these diamonds, and we do not consider the cutter. And that's this cutter's way - though he's been a headliner for 30 years, he is absolutely in the business of ACTING.

Jeffrey Leon Bridges was born in Los Angeles on the 4th of December, 1949. Famously, he was of acting stock. His father, Lloyd, was a star of big and small screen, having appeared in the likes of High Noon and hosting his own TV show (he'd later make a comic comeback in Airplane! - "Guess I picked the wrong day to give up smoking"). Jeff's mother, Dorothy Simpson, was an actress, too. Even his godparents were in on the game, Larry Parks having starred in The Jolson Story and Betty Garrett in On The Town. But though Jeff made his cinematic debut at just four months, being cuddled by Jane Greer in The Company She Keeps (she'd appear with him again, over 30 years later, in Against All Odds), he was not brought up a Hollywood brat, his parents taking the family to live near the beach at Mar Vista.

Jeff's life began amidst much worry. He had a brother, eight years older, named Beau. But his closest sibling, a boy named Garrett, born in 1947, had died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (cot death). Consequently, Dorothy spent many a night by tiny Jeff's side, her hand on his arm or leg, sleeping only when her fear subsided. There'd be a sister, too, Lucinda, five years Jeff's junior.

Growing up was sweet. Amidst the beautiful sweep of the West Coast, and surrounded and encouraged by creative people, Jeff became open-minded and creative himself. He has painted all his life, exhibiting in many major cities. He's also a photographer, using the Widelux camera popularised by French smudge Lartigue to shoot the cast and crew while filming. After the shoot, he puts together a book of the filming, prints up a thousand or so copies, presents one to everyone, and sells the rest through the Gallery of Contemporary Photography in Santa Monica, where he often exhibits - all proceeds going to the End Hunger Network, which he helped found in 1983.

And there was music. Jeff is an accomplished guitarist and songwriter. In his teens, he sang his own song, Lost In Space, on Quincy Jones's soundtrack to John And Mary, a sex comedy starring Dustin Hoffman, Mia Farrow and Tyne Daly, selling Jones a further two songs into the bargain. And in 2000 he released an album, Be Here Soon, with nine songs written by Jeff and three by Nashville musician John Goodwin, a friend since Fourth Grade. Such is Bridges' talent that the album was produced by The Doobie Brothers' Michael McDonald, who also guested along with David Crosby. Jeff would also sing the theme to his own picture, The Contender, dueting with Kim "Bette Davis Eyes" Carnes on a cover of Johnny Cash's Ring Of Fire.

But alongside the bounty of his early life, there was the pain, the frustration and the outrage - the pointing was nearly unbearable. Though a confident kid, Jeff was nowhere near sophisticated enough to cope with Beau's supremely cruel and really quite brilliant bullying. He didn't hit Jeff, or taunt him - he pointed. For hours. On the street, on the beach, in the garden. When parents were present, he did it under the kitchen table. Jeff knew it but couldn't prove it, gradually becoming more and more freaked out.

This being the late Fifties, with the Beatniks on the road and the seeds of hippie culture sown, His Dudeness grew quickly into an early Flower Child. So much so that to instil some discipline into him, he began his high school education at a military academy, completing it at University High School. To avoid the Vietnam draft, he spent time with the Coast Guard Reserves. By now, having appeared at age eight alongside his dad in Sea Hunt and often in the Lloyd Bridges Show, he knew that acting was for him. He and Beau, already an actor, had been taught to stage-fight by Lloyd, and would visit supermarkets, start a fake brawl as an audience inevitably gathered, then move on as the police arrived.

Keen to get it right, and ever the professional, Jeff took off for New York, studying at the prestigious Herbert Berghof Studio.

. The parts came fast. His debut proper was in the TV movie Silent Night, Lonely Night, where he played Lloyd in flashback as a college kid. Then came a bigger part in The Yin And Yang Of Mr Go, a Fu Manchu-style spoof directed by Burgess Meredith (wackwack), where an inscrutable James Mason plotted world destruction. Then came two very contemporary films directed by Paul Bogart. The first, In Search Of America, saw Jeff as the Flower Child he was, taking off across the States with his stuffy dad and nutty grandma (Tyne Daly was also involved). Then came Halls Of Anger where he played one of sixty white pupils integrated into a school of 3000 black kids. Rob Reiner also featured, his character bearing the rather unfortunate moniker Leaky Couloris.

Bridges' breakthrough came head-spinningly quickly with Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show. Here Jeff starred as Duane Moore, football hero and boyfriend of Homecoming Queen Jacy Farrow, played by Cybill Shepherd (with whom Jeff enjoyed a real-life affair). They live, along with best buddy Timothy Bottoms, in small-town Texas, trying to find a life while everyone with any ambition is moving out. Eventually, the situation is so bad the picture house is closing down. The movie was a huge critical and popular success, with Jeff receiving his first Oscar-nomination for his performance as the macho, squabbling Duane. Bogdanovich and the cast would revisit the scene 19 years later, with Texasville.

Next Jeff played the young prot'g' of failing boxer Stacy Keach in John Huston's Fat City, dating another co-star, Candy Clark. The part was first chased by Beau, but Huston had told him he'd be perfect if only he was ten years younger. Enter Jeff, eight years younger. He flew to Madrid to meet Huston, picked up a woman in his hotel, got slaughtered on red wine and downed some (dodgy) seafood. Meeting Huston in the Prado museum, he spent the whole time trying not to vomit all over the great director - and got the part anyway.

Having noted the terrible time his father had had with typecasting after his exploits in Sea Hunt (some people actually thought he WAS a skin diver), Jeff varied his roles wildly from the start. Next he played a young bushwacker, dodging the Civil War draft and learning the hard truth about life outside the law in Bad Company (directed by Robert Benton, later to score with Kramer Vs Kramer and Jeff's Nadine). Then he played a young man falling in love across a great divide in Lily-Madonna XXX, trying to bring peace to two feuding families led by Rod Steiger and Robert Ryan. Then came The Last American Hero where he played car racer and moonshine-runner Junior Johnson, a real-life character covered by Tom Wolfe (there was also another leading lady to date - Valerie Perrine).

And then came a mighty departure with The Iceman Cometh, again with Robert Ryan, with Jeff playing a youngster tormented by dream-wrecker Lee Marvin in Eugene O'Neill's infamous Last Chance Saloon. This last movie, Jeff has said, playing opposite such heavyweights as Ryan, Marvin and Frederic March, was where he first took acting absolutely seriously - previously, he'd been all about drugs, sex and meditation.

. Now came another of his classic dude roles, as easy-going drifter Lightfoot, alongside Clint Eastwood in Michael Cimino's Thunderbolt And Lightfoot. Joining Clint's old gang as they attempt to re-rob a government vault, he dresses up in drag to "seduce" a security guard then gets kicked nearly to death by lunatic cohort George Kennedy. Again, he was superb, picking up his second Oscar nomination. But now he entered a strange and far-from-sucessful run of movies, culminating in a second meeting with Cimino in the studio-ruining Heaven's Gate.

The first of the run, Rancho Deluxe, was an oddity of a western, with Jeff and Sam Waterston playing happy rustlers in modern Montana. It wasn't great, but was important, because here he met his wife. Susan Geston was working her way through college as a waitress at a ranch-resort named Chico Hot Springs. Jeff noticed her instantly - indeed someone took a Polaroid of his first astounded reaction - partly because she was so beautiful, and partly because both her eyes had been blackened in a car accident and he found the ugly/pretty juxtaposition incredibly appealing. "Raised as I was in the fantasy world of movies," he said later "I assumed she'd been beaten by her boyfriend and I vowed to be her knight in shining armour". She liked his valour and they were married in 1975, producing three daughters - Isabelle, Jessica and Hayley.

After Rancho Deluxe, he played a dime novelist turned Western hero in Hearts Of The West, then a smoothie mole sent by a property development syndicate to sneakily buy out Arnold Schwarzenegger's gym. Of course, he likes Arnie and falls for his friend Sally Field, indulging in a supremely sexy bit of reflexology on the stairs.

Then came a big, big boo-boo. Indeed, boo-boos come no bigger. The remake of King Kong was a disaster that fell short of the original by miles. Jeff remembers the fun of making it, like watching the director screaming at five non-English-speaking Italian engineers, each working one finger of a giant monkey hand that's supposed to undress debutante Jessica Lange but instead nearly crushes her to death. Yet for audiences the movie was simply not spectacular, not scary enough.

The weirdness continued with Somebody Killed Her Husband, a miserable crime-comedy intended to launch the big screen career of Charlie's Angel Farrah Fawcett. Then came two low budget movies by director William Richert. First was the conspiracy thriller Winter Kills, where Jeff played the brother of a murdered president.

19 years after the assassination, he meets a dying man who claims to have fired the fatal shot. Cue Sinister Men With Something To Hide. Then came a real out-there comedy in The American Success Company where a guy who thinks he's a failure in all departments pretends to be kidnapped, gets his body into shape, hires a prostitute to show him how to make love to the ladies and, well, generally gets himself together.

. Then came the big one - Heaven's Gate. Immigrant farmers versus wicked landowners in late 19th Century Montana. Many millions spent, very few returned, United Artists were sunk. But Jeff did OK. At the end of shooting, the man whose land they'd used wanted to burn down the whorehouse they'd built, in front of which Jeff and Christopher Walken had been shot onscreen. Cimino asked if anyone wanted it, Jeff said yes, and transported it log by log 200 miles south to his family ranch (set in the valley where he first met Susan). The Bridges live there still, though Jeff has to warn people not to lean on the walls for fear of letting off the squibs still stuck in them.

After five difficult years came five of greatness. Cutter's Way started it, with Jeff played the totally disaffected friend of crippled vet John Heard, both of them (eventually) seeking redemption by hunting a murderer. Then came the excellent Tron, the first of the computer game movies, where Jeff played a cheated programmer somehow drawn into the system itself and threatened by David Warner's malevolent Master Controller. Even now it's a feast for the eyes. Next came Kiss Me Goodbye, again with Sally Field, where he was her new fiance, not realising she's being haunted by her dead husband James Caan. Then there was the high romance of Against All Odds (a remake of Out Of The Past), where he was a washed-up football star hired to track down the girlfriend of gangster friend James Woods, only to fall for her himself.

And it got better. John Carpenter's Starman saw Jeff as an alien who crash-lands and must cross the country to rendezvous with a rescuing craft. Taking on the look of Karen Allen's dead husband, he wins her trust then her love - unsurprising when you consider he can do things like bring back to life a deer that's tied to the bonnet of a hunter's motor. To play someone getting used to their own body, Jeff hired a dancer to work together on movement. At one point, working on his birth scene, he was filming himself as he lay naked in the foetal position in the corner of his office, when his wife walked in. The Coen Brothers would later note how he used video playbacks to improve his performance and were particularly impressed as he'd made so many films before video was ever available.

Starman won Bridges his third Oscar nomination. He moved on to the superior thriller Jagged Edge as a rich man whose wife is butchered. Accused, he hires lawyer Glenn Close to fight his case. She falls for him, then slowly comes to suspect he may not be as innocent as he seems. There was a brief break from excellence with 8 Million Ways To Die where he played a alcoholic ex-cop who's drawn into a grim world of murder and prostitution by mysterious Rosanna Arquette. But then he was back on course with Sidney Lumet's The Morning After, again as an alcoholic ex-cop but this time helping Jane Fonda as she tries to discover whether she killed that bloke next to her in bed, or not.

Next he was Kim Basinger's boozy loser of a husband in the comedy Nadine, then Preston Tucker in Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker: The Man And His Dream. Here he was overflowing with ebullience and hope as the real-life guy who, after WW2, invented "the car of tomorrow" and took on the Big 3 motor firms. His wife was played by Joan Allen, later to be Oscar-nominated for another performance opposite Jeff, in The Contender.

After See You In The Morning, once more with Farrah Fawcett and with his real mum Dorothy playing his mother, the run continued with The Fabulous Baker Boys where he and brother Beau were a nightclub piano-duo. After 31 years, their career is sliding, so they hire a singer, Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer at her most spectacularly sexy). Jeff was tremendous as the musical genius failing utterly to achieve his potential, AND he got to get Beau back for all the pointing. Staging a fight sequence, they forgot to choose a word that meant STOP. So, as Jeff later told US Magazine, "when Beau said 'Stop, you're hurting me!' I thought 'Oh, you're acting your ass off, sucker' and kept up his attack on his brother's fingers. "I actually sent him to the hospital. I felt bad about that."

Then, after Texasville, came another stunning performance in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King. Here Jeff's a controversial talk-show DJ who's traumatised when he's more than little off-hand with a listener who proceeds to commit suicide. Depressed and drinking heavily, he's saved when he joins down-and-out Robin Williams on his quest for the Grail, and personal redemption. It was a hugely warm movie that saw Jeff nominated for a Golden Globe.

Next came one of Jeff's favourites, American Heart, where he played a jailbird desperately trying to go straight for the sake of son Edward Furlong. Jeff produced the movie, donating all video proceeds to the End Hunger campaign, and won an Independent Spirit award for his pains (he'd later also produce Hidden In America, concerning homelessness and starring Beau). After this, he was an unbelievably creepy kidnapper, persecuting Keifer Sutherland in a remake of the horribly disturbing The Vanishing. Then came another magical role as Max Klein in Peter Weir's Fearless.

Here, having survived a plane crash where he led the survivors to safety, he believes himself to be an invincible pawn of fate, removed entirely from his uncomprehending wife Isabella Rosellini. By helping Rosie Perez overcome the guilt she feels at the death of her baby, he finds himself again. In order to convince in the role, Jeff read exposes of the aviation industry.

. Now came his first real action film, Blown Away, where he played a Boston bomb disposal expert who must face terrorist Tommy Lee Jones, an old colleague who stirs up Jeff's unsavoury past (here he got to act with dad Lloyd for the last time. Then there was Walter Hill's tremendous Wild Bill, where he sparred with Ellen Barkin's Calamity Jane and sucked down opium as his violent life met its violent end. In Ridley Scott's White Squall, another true story, he played the captain of a boat-load of school-kids facing death on stormy seas. And then there was The Mirror Has Two Faces, directed by and starring Barbra Streisand, where the pair played college professors who marry. He thinks sex is the great destroyer and doesn't want it, believing she feels the same. She certainly does not and must transform herself into a voluptuous siren to win him.

And then he was The Dude AKA Duder AKA His Dudeness AKA El Duderino, "a guy whose casualness runs deep", in The Big Lebowski. Hanging around the bowling alley with fascist friend Goodman and dopey Steve Buscemi (and a gloriously insulting John Turturro), he's mistaken for a rich man who shares his name and drawn into a chaotic world of kidnapping, ransom, murderous nihilists, voracious dominatrixes and thoroughly un-called-for urinations. Though playing the ultimate stoner, Bridges smoked nothing during the shoot, later telling Empire "I did it all from memory, and I had a lot to draw on". He drew well - The Big Lebowski is one of the funniest films ever made.

After this came conspiracy thriller Arlington Road, where paranoid Jeff suspects new neighbours Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack of being terrorists, and then two artier pics, Albert Brooks' The Muse, and Sam Shepard's Simpatico, both with Sharon Stone. Next came his fourth Oscar nomination, for The Contender, where he played President Jackson Evans, having to decide what to do when running-mate Joan Allen has what appear to be sexy skeletons fall out of the cupboard. Amazingly, El Duderino exhibited more than sufficient presidential gravitas.

Following this came Scenes Of The Crime where a kid takes driving jobs to make some extra cash for his wedding and winds up as the get-away driver for an assassin attempting to knock off Bridges' gangster. Of course, it all goes wrong, the killer's killed and the kid ends up with Bridges in his van, wondering if he should let the persuasive and thoroughly menacing crime-boss go. After this there'd be K-PAX where Kevin Spacey would be locked up in a New York psychiatric institute due to his firm belief that he's an alien. Bridges would appear as his weary analyst, enlivened by their sessions and coming to ask himself if the charming, inspirational Spacey isn't better left as he is.

Bridges' next project would be a strange one - Bob Dylan's vanity piece Masked And Anonymous, which gathered together an amazing cast, including Penelope Cruz, Ed Harris and Val Kilmer, as well as Bridges' former co-stars John Goodman and Jessica Lange. Here Dylan would play a legendary musician sprung from jail to play a benefit concert and spouting his usual cod-mystic silliness. Bridges would appear as a snoopy, self-regarding journalist, hounding Dylan with stupid questions and eventually being battered with Blind Lemon Jefferson's guitar (Dylan thus taking a cheap and childish shot at the media as a whole). Far more mainstream would be Seabiscuit, the tale of the underdog racing horse raising the spirits of Depression-era America with its unlikely victories in the 1930s. Bridges would play the canny owner, a self-made millionaire known for spotting talent, who brings in jockey Toby Maguire and trainer Chris Cooper and orchestrates a smart public campaign to engineer a match between his trusty steed and the champion War Admiral.

Very different would be 2004's The Door In The Floor, a fraught drama based on part of John Irving's A Widow For One Year. Here Bridges would play a writer who's failed as a novelist but succeeded as a kids' author. A hard drinker and philanderer, he's also manipulative and cruel, an absolute beast to his mistress Mimi Rogers and his wife Kim Basinger, knowing which buttons to push in order to hurt them. Utterly ruthless, he even hires a young student closely resembling one of the sons he and Basinger lost in an accident, and tries to push her into a twisted affair.

Bridges' two films of 2005 would both be financial flops, but intriguing nonetheless.. First would come The Moguls, not released till December 2007, where he'd play a man who, estranged from his wife and family, realises that he's made nothing of his life. Consequently, along with some eccentric friends from his local bar - oddball Joe Pantoliano, a promiscuous and lonely Glenne Headly and a not-so-secretly gay Ted Danson - he decides to put together a feature-length porn film. It was wholly absurd and great fun, unlike the dark and creepy Tideland, supposedly director Terry Gilliam's creative comeback after studio interference with The Brothers Grimm.

This would see young Jodelle Ferland being raised - perhaps raised is the wrong word - by former rock guitarist Bridges and a bedridden Jennifer Tilly, both of them junkies. When Tilly ODs, Bridges takes his daughter out to the family home on the prairie, then proceeds to OD himself, leaving the kid alone with his rapidly decaying corpse. Now we'd take a trip into Ferland's fertile imagination, share her fantastical visions of talking animals and inanimate objects come to life, and meet weirdo taxidermist Janet McTeer and her simple brother. Most critics loathed the movie with a passion, but a few raved over it, a reaction directly opposite to the one Gilliam and Bridges had enjoyed with The Fisher King.

. Bridges' next couple of years would prove fairly barren. In Stick It he'd play a demanding gymnastics coach, bringing wayward kids back to the straight-and-narrow with his harsh discipline and tough love and challenged by wild girl Missy Peregrym. Then there'd be the animated Surf's Up, the third big-budget penguin movie of recent times. This would be set up like a documentary, complete with interviews and archive footage, with young penguin prodigy Shia LaBeouf challenging the unpleasant champion Tank in the big annual surf-off. The competition would be named after Bridges' character, Big Z, a legendary surfer who apparently was killed in action, but Z turns out to be living as a hermit in the jungle and is thus able to give stoner guru-style advice to LaBeouf.

In 2008, Bridges would experience a rare ubiquity. His first release of the year would see him in A Dog Year, based on the writings of Jon Katz, where he'd play a depressed writer who hopes to cheer himself up by acquiring another hound. Though initially disturbed by the chaos caused by the crazy canine, he eventually comes to enjoy life once more. No such lessons would be learned by his next character, the irredeemably horrible Obadiah Stane in Iron Man, Bridges' first all-action blockbuster since King Kong, some 32 years before. Here Robert Downey Jr would star as Tony Stark, the billionaire playboy and arms dealer who builds an extraordinary armoured suit and decides to use his power and genius to benefit the world, to right the wrongs he has caused with his machines of death. He has figured, however, without the bald and bearded Bridges, his mentor and business partner, a cunning and treacherous swine who determines to build his own suit and, as the colossal Iron Monger, crush Iron Man bend the world to his wishes. The producers were wise to employ such sharp talents as Bridges, Downey and director Jon Favreau as they raised Iron Man above the standard sci-fi fare, turning it into a massive hit.

Bridges next release would see him working alongside Downey's father, as well as his own brother Beau, when he narrated Pablo, an animated documentary about the groundbreaking Cuban artist Pablo Ferro.

He'd then move on to The Open Road where, hearing of his mother Mary Steenburgen's sudden heart problems, minor baseball player Justin Timberlake attempts to bring his estranged father Bridges back to her bedside. Taking off for Ohio, he finds Bridges, a former legend with the Dallas Cowboys but, awkward and mischievous, the old man proves hard to tie down, Timberlake eventually forcing him into a rented car for a road trip that sees them both re-examining the past. Bridges' last release of the year would be How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, based on the memoirs of Brit journo Toby Young. Here Young would be played by Simon Pegg as his work on an iconoclastic literary magazine sees him headhunted by Bridges for Sharp's magazine in New York, Bridges playing a version of Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter. With his long wavy hair and smart-casual gear, Bridges would be a hoot as the culturally vampiric and deeply conservative editor, at first amused by Pegg's antics, then less impressed as the young hack falls under the spell of starlet Megan Fox and makes an embarrassing hash of his career.

In 1988, Jeff Bridges became the youngest actor ever to be granted a tribute by London's National Film Theatre, who ran 18 of his films over three weeks. 2000 brought a Raul Julia Award for his Humanitarian Work with the End Hunger Network (originally set up to deal with hunger worldwide, but since 1991 - damningly for the US Government - dealing only with the USA). He's so much more than the disaffected young men he played in his youth, so much more than the Dude Of Dudes, it surely can't be long before he receives proper international recognition of his glorious talents.

Dominic Wills