Paul Giamatti - Biography

Name: Paul Giamatti

Born: 6 June 1967 (Age: 42)

Where: New Haven, Connecticut, USA

Height: 5' 8"

Awards: Won 1 Golden Globe, 1 Oscar nomination

For a long time it seemed Paul Giamatti might end up as just another bit-part character actor. Sure, he'd stand out as the hero's smug rival, as a loser on the verge of cracking, or as a psychotic minor hoodlum yet, though you'd remember the face, the name would never quite stick. This would change with the rise of American independent cinema in response to the big studios' ongoing hunt for the lowest common denominator. Independent film-makers took risks in their subject matter and casting and would pick a talented, charismatic and appropriate lead over the usual Hollywood Adonis. Seizing the opportunities thus offered by American Splendor and Sideways, Giamatti would force his way into the limelight, and would soon be headlining big budget movies and epic TV serials. It had been a struggle, all the more so as he'd had to escape the shadow of a famous father, but the mid-2000s would see Paul Giamatti as a marquee name in his own right.

He was born Paul Edward Valentine Giamatti on the 6th of June, 1967, in New Haven, Connecticut, a living heritage site founded in 1638, just north of New York City on Long Island Sound. It is the home of Yale University, an establishment that would have a profound effect on Giamatti's life and career. Paul's father was Angelo Bartlett Giamatti, better known as A. Bartlett Giamatti or simply Bart, while his mother was Toni Smith. There'd be an older brother, Marcus, and a sister, Elena.

Paul's ancestry is interesting in its unusual mixture of Old World and New. While his mother hailed from good New England Irish stock and would graduate from Smith College, his paternal line was of an altogether different pedigree. His great-grandfather, Angelo Giammattei, was from Telese, a town in Italy's Benevento province, the ancient home of the Samnites, some 40 miles north-west of Vesuvius, known for its hot springs, volcanic water and - coincidentally, given Paul's breakthrough role - wine. Angelo would marry one Maria Lavorgna from nearby San Lorenzello, a famed centre for ceramics and, like so many of his compatriots, seek his fortune in America, passing through Ellis Island in 1900, when he was about 16. He'd then move to New Haven, living on Wallace Street. By 1920, then working as an adjuster in a clock factory, he'd own a house on Ferry Street with an $11,000 mortgage. He was doing well.

Paul's grandfather, Valentine, would be born in New Haven in 1911 and would continue the family's social ascent.

Winning a Sterling Memorial Scholarship to Yale (preference was given to graduates of New Haven High School), he'd earn his degree then stay on to become a graduate student in the field of Romantic language and literature. For the academic year of 1933-34, he'd sail back to Italy to study at the University of Florence, en route meeting one Mary Claybaugh Walton, known as Peggy, also on her way to Italy to study at Smith College. The couple would fall in love, but their union was not initially acceptable to her family. These were seriously WASPy folk from Wakefield. Peggy's father, Bartlett Walton (her mother was Helen Buffum Davidson) was a graduate of both Harvard and Phillips Academy, a college that would include amongst its alumni several Kennedys and both Bushes, as well as the Aga Khan, code inventor Samuel Morse, chewing gum magnate Philip Wrigley and Oscar-winning actor Jack Lemmon. The Waltons guarded their name fiercely and were not keen to have immigrant blood enter the line. Valentine, however, would convince them of his respectability, marrying Peggy in 1936, and would prove it by becoming Chairman of Italian Language and Literature at the prestigious Mount Holyoke College. Beyond this, he'd be a writer and Dante specialist, in 1958 publishing The Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise of Dante, while also listing and collecting illustrated editions of The Divine Comedy, in 1974 bequeathing his huge collection to Mount Holyoke College.

. Paul's father, Angelo, would be born in Boston in 1938 and would receive a similar schooling to his father's. He'd spend his junior year in Rome, and attend Phillips Academy and Yale, entering deep into the fraternity world and graduating in 1960, sticking at Yale for graduate studies. Like his father, he was fascinated by Dante, but also by Edmund Spenser and the relationship between Italian and English Renaissance poets. But Bart was not simply an academic. A larger-than-life character, he was intellectually intimidating but also great fun. At Yale, he dreamed of a career in theatre and hung out with theatrical types like Dick Cavett (later to become a huge TV star). Along with Cavett, he'd once travel down to New York City and successfully persuade Peter Ustinov to give a talk at Yale. He'd also appear alongside Cavett at Yale in a 1958 musical production of Cyrano de Bergerac (you can still buy the soundtrack), where Roxanne would be played by Toni Smith, two years later to be Bart's wife.

Bart was not a good actor and he knew it. Instead, he chose to make his entire life a performance and entered into the very theatrical world of academia, with its robes, rituals and daily performances. Having been awarded his doctorate in 1964, he'd briefly teach at Princeton before moving back to Yale for what would be a spectacularly successful career.

From the start, young Paul would be raised on campus, from the age of 3 living in the Master's House of the residential Ezra Stiles College where Bart served as Master between 1970 and 1972 (one later Ezra Stiles student would be Ed Norton). In 1977, Bart would become Yale's youngest ever president. Toni, meanwhile, who'd graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 1960, would raise the kids and teach English at the renowned Hopkins School, also in New Haven.

. So Paul grew up amidst the most illustrious academic surrounds. A smart kid, it seemed very likely that he'd follow his forebears into top-end education. Yet acting was also a big part of his upbringing. Toni would give drama classes outside of school hours, while Bart would put on plays on campus, often featuring the Giamatti kids. Neither elitist nor repressively highbrow, and possessed of a scatological humour, Bart would never order the kids to turn off cartoons and would share with them his love of Star Trek and noir movies. He'd often do impressions, still living a theatrical life outside the theatre. Many of Paul's early memories involve visiting the cinema with his father to see Italian films, or the comedies of Monty Python and the Pink Panther franchise.

Another strong influence would come from brother Marcus, 6 years Paul's senior. When French Fried Films of Chicago began to scour schools outside of New York for new talent, they came upon Marcus, then skinny with blue eyes and blonde curly hair, and cast him in commercials for M&Ms and the like. After high school, Marcus would attend college in Bowdoin, Maine, and grad school in New Haven before being accepted by his mother's alma mater, Yale School of Drama, spending the summers of 1985-87 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Paul would later follow a very similar path.

For now, though, Paul's life was most excellent. The family would holiday at their retreat on Martha's Vineyard and, during term time, the Yale campus offered myriad opportunities to explore. It was packed with entertaining eccentrics - one friend of his father was an expert in voodoo - and few areas were barred to the son of the Big Cheese. Like all the Giamatti kids, Paul was academically gifted, and he fitted in well at Foote School at Loomis Place in the East Rock neighbourhood of New Haven, a top-notch school with strong affiliations to Yale. The place, seeing kids through from kindergarten to Year 9, was set in 14 acres with a library, theatre, gym and music rooms. Better still, it had a pupil to teacher ratio of 6:1. Most pupils would go on to complete their high school years at Hamden Hall, Hopkins or Choate Rosemary Hall and, in 1982, Paul would follow suit, enrolling at the last of those three.

Choate Rosemary Hall, in Wallingford, some 15 miles north of New Haven, was a superior establishment, an amalgam of Choate boys' school and Rosemary Hall girls' school which had merged in 1974. Alumni of Choate included John F Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Alan J Lerner, Alan Lomax, Edward Albee and Michael Douglas, while Rosemary Hall had been attended by Glenn Close, Ali MacGraw and Jamie Lee Curtis. Set in 400 acres, CRH boasted a fully-fledged theatre, choral groups, an orchestra and a jazz band, being geared towards boosting academic, theatrical and sporting prowess, as well as "open-eyed sophistication".

Throughout, Paul would be involved in theatre. In 4th Grade, for instance, he'd appear in a production of The Pied Pier Of Hamelin, playing the mayor who hires then stiffs the piper - the first of his many weasely roles. But he still wasn't set on a life on stage. He had lots of interests, one being baseball, another of his father's great loves. Like his dad, Paul was a lifelong Red Sox fan but, oddly, he was more interested in the umpires than he was in the players, and was always keen to don a chest-plate and mask, like the home-plate umpire. The costume, the language, the exaggerated gestures, all part of a performance.

After Choate, Paul would move on to college, keeping to family tradition by enrolling at Yale as an English major, writing his senior thesis on Herman Melville. He'd appear in collegiate plays, but really his ambition now was to be an animator. He'd write a Gothic western comic book and, along with a friend, create a five-minute cartoon called Flip the Chimp where two monkeys would enjoy all manner of carnal goings-on.

With his dad as president, Paul's time at Yale should have been a homely affair. But Bart had undergone several troubled years, his presidency being soured by a major white collar strike in 1984. In 1986, he'd resign and, following his dreams and other profession (he'd long been a renowned writer on sport), he became President of baseball's National League. In 1989, as Paul was finishing his college course, Bart would rise to be Commissioner of Baseball, and would prove both effective and popular, dedicating himself to improving conditions for fans, and also becoming involved in one of the sport's great scandals, the Pete Rose Affair, where the field manager of the Cincinnati Reds was accused of betting on games. Bart would protect the integrity of his sport by persuading Rose to leave baseball forever.

This might have been the start of great things, both for Bart and for baseball. But that same year, 1989, after just 154 days as Commissioner and 8 days after he banished Rose, Bart would die of a massive heart attack at the Giamattis' place on Martha's Vineyard. He was only 51. Toni was there, so too was Paul. Nothing could be done to save him. The 1989 World Series would be dedicated to his memory.

Naturally, this was devastating to young Paul. As professor, master and president at Yale, where Paul had lived all his life, Bart was a huge figure to the boy and to pretty much everyone he'd ever met. He'd brought money, kudos and celebrity friends to the family. He'd made life a challenge and a joy. His loss was a stunning blow. Paul's thoughts and ambitions were thrown into disarray and, now graduated from Yale, he took off for Seattle, a town known primarily for drugs and music. From birth Paul had lived amidst the wealth and comfort of New England academia. Seattle, both geographically and socially, was about as far away as he could get.

Once in the Pacific North-West, Giamatti took the opportunity to do his own thing. Thus far he'd stuck rigidly to the family path. He'd been good, studied hard. Now he sat around, smoked a lot of pot, read books - many of them from his father's library - did some local theatre and concentrated on drawing cartoons. It was a fantastic time to be involved in youth culture in Seattle with Grunge on the rise, led by Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Alice In Chains, Mother Love Bone and the fledgling Nirvana. Through his theatre connections, Giamatti would win bit-parts in several movies filming in the area. First he'd be a heckler in She'll Take Romance where Linda Evans would play a weather girl who takes over from an injured reporter and must track down the area's Most Romantic Man. Then there'd be Past Midnight where Rutger Hauer would be an alleged killer on parole and Natasha Richardson a social worker convinced of his innocence. Giamatti would play a witness to the murder, a dimwit living with his suspiciously scary brother. There'd also be Singles, Cameron Crowe's exploration of the Grunge scene and 20-Something life in America. Giamatti would appear very briefly as a guy snogging his girlfriend, the girlfriend being played by Paul's real-life squeeze Alicia Roper. Later, Roper would enrol at Yale School of Drama, become an award-winning stage actress and marry actor Robert Devaney.

The death of his father had convinced Giamatti he must do something serious with his life. His time is Seattle further convinced him that comics and graphic novels were not for him - years of sitting hunched over a drawing-board has proved to be too tough. He gave up pot and decided to return to New Haven, enrol at Yale School of Drama, and have a real go at acting.

Another influence, still, was his brother Marcus. Marcus had attended YSD and moved to New York, hoping to be a star of stage and screen. Life, though, had been tough. He'd scored minor roles in soap operas The Guiding Light and Another World and appeared briefly alongside Paul Newman in James Ivory's Mr And Mrs Bridge, but much of the time he'd had to support himself by working as a bass-playing session-musician. However, come 1990 he'd gone to Los Angeles, predominantly to make money, and things had started well.

He'd married actress Kathryn Meisle who appeared that year in Basket Case 2 (she'd later be a Tony-nominated stage actress). He'd played a rapist in the TV series Hunter, appeared in a Movie of the Week alongside Richard Chamberlain and in 1992 scored a decent part in the sitcom Flying Blind with Tea Leoni (two episodes of which featured future Paul co-star Thomas Haden Church). Marcus was hot. Told by everyone he was the Next Big Thing, he was a big inspiration for his younger brother. Yet his would also be a cautionary tale. When Flying Blind flopped, Marcus returned to New York theatre with his tail between his legs and was soon barely surviving on a diet of frozen peas. He'd later admit to being hugely jealous of his brother's instant success, his envy lasting till 1999 when he scored a meaty role in the family drama Judging Amy.

. As said, Paul was inspired by his father's memory and his brother's brief exploits in LA to return to New Haven and Yale School of Drama. Here he'd receive a superb all-round education, studying dance, voice, speech, all of it. Students would work on Chekhov, Shakespeare, Sam Shepard, sometimes concentrating on five plays at once. In 1994, he'd graduate with an MFA in Drama, joining a list of YSD alumni that included such greats as Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Frances McDormand and, er, Henry Winkler. Yale had also given him a life-partner in fellow student Elizabeth Cohen. Daughter of a psychoanalyst and a VP of the Segal Comapny, an employee-benefits consulting firm in New York, Elizabeth was a graduate of Brown, NYU and, one year after Paul, YSD. Moving with him to New York, she'd work as a screenwriter and freelance dramaturge. They'd marry in 1997, son Samuel being born in 2001.

Marcus Giamatti, who'd struggled for years in New York, then had success offered and snatched away in Los Angeles, had every right to be jealous of what happened to Paul next. Moving straight into decent employment, he'd immediately score hits both on Broadway and onscreen, working with some of the greatest writers, directors and performers of our time.

Onscreen, he'd begin in 1994 with a tiny part in NYPD Blue then straight away score a brief role in Woody Allen's latest return to form, Mighty Aphrodite. This would see Allen as an unhappy husband tracking down the birth mother of his adopted child, a genius, and discovering her to be hooker Mira Sorvino, Giamatti playing a researcher. It was a small part but a high-profile movie, Sorvino winning an Oscar for her efforts. Next would come another small TV role in New York News where Mary Tyler Moore would lead a team of journos on a New York newspaper featuring the late, great Madeline Kahn. Moore was unhappy with her character, but the show took such a hammering from its ratings rival Seinfeld it was cancelled before she could jump ship. More successful, for Giamatti at least, would be an appearance in Sabrina, a big budget remake of Audrey Hepburn's Sabrina Fair.

Here Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear would play the wealthy brothers battling for the hand of Julia Ormond. 1996 would bring more coverage. Giamatti would find himself sitting in the courtroom audience in Before And After as Edward Furlong, son of a tortured Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, went on trial for the murder of his girlfriend. Then would come a pilot for a show called The Show where Sam Seder would play a lone white writer appointed to an all-black programme, Giamatti playing Seder's associate. And there'd be another bit part in the rom-com Breathing Room, a disjointed affair where a couple could neither be happily together nor apart. Giamatti would later explain that he'd never seen the script for the movie and was simply asked to turn up at a diner one day. All he remembered of the experience was the absurd reindeer-plastered jumper he was asked to wear.

. If his screen roles between 1994 and 1996 added some big names to his CV, his stage career was even more successful. Between March and August of 1995, he'd appear in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre; Trevor Nunn reprising his 1993 hit at the National. Where Rufus Sewell, Bill Nighy and Felicity Kendal had been the original stars, now Billy Crudup, Robert Sean Leonard and Blair Brown were onboard. Flipping between 1809 and the present, the play would see a historian researching an episode in the life of Lord Byron that may have resulted in Byron leaving England forever, at the same time showing what really happened. Myriad subjects would be covered, from gardening to existentialism, physics to first love, but there'd also be comedy, much of it provided by a hapless Giamatti. Accusing Crudup of conducting an affair with his wife, he first challenged him to a duel, then left for the West Indies with his wife and a ship's captain who actually was sleeping with the unfaithful lady.

Following this success, Giamatti would remain at the Vivian Beaumont, from November to December appearing in another revamp of a renowned English production. This would be David Hare's Racing Demon, reprised by director Richard Eyre after a memorable stint at the National in 1990. The play would examine the nature of faith in the late 20th Century, using the C of E as a springboard for debate. One priest claimed the church should dedicate its power to helping the poor, another supported the use of showy ritual to attract non-believers. One bishop was outraged by the increasing stature of women in the church, another priest was threatened by tabloids over his homosexuality, while a working class lad was Born Again, dumping his girlfriend (played by Giamatti's sister-in-law Kathryn Meisle) in the process. Indeed, all these religious types would be in crisis, all except for Giamatti, who'd play an easy-going parish priest who likes to drink tequila and buy philosophical self-help books he never reads.

Having acted alongside his brother's wife, he next appeared with the man himself, in November of 1996 starring in Michael Cristofer's The Blues Are Running at City Centre Stage II. Intended to inaugurate the 25th season of the Manhattan Theatre Club, this was a philosophical comedy where Paul and Marcus each played three parts, the characters meeting two-by-two on a bench in Central Park at two in the morning. The pair would play the ghosts of Beckett-type tramps, two lifelong friends who don't really know each other, and a couple of New Jersey hitmen with big problems.

Early 1997 would bring yet more theatrical kudos when Giamatti took part in the Roundabout Theatre Company's all-star version of Chekhov's Three Sisters at the Criterion Centre. This would see Amy Irving, Jeanne Triplehorn and Lili Taylor as the titular siblings, backed by such heavyweights as David Strathairn, Calista Flockhart, Giamatti's Arcadia co-star Billy Crudup and also Eric Stoltz who, like Giamatti, had performed a cameo in Singles. As all the characters withered in the Russian gloom, it would be the ambitious, faithless Flockhart who took over, roundly abusing her husband Giamatti, the sisters' spineless brother Andrei Prozorov, a poor fool living forever in apologetic embarrassment.

Now living with Elizabeth in an 8th floor apartment overlooking the Bowery, a flat packed with a dozen giant bookcases (he remained a voracious reader), Giamatti was in demand and his fim career was about to take off. He was still getting minor roles, but they were minor roles in important features. In the next 18 months he'd appear in no fewer than 6 hits, 4 of them taking over $100 million.

1997 would begin unobtrusively with Arresting Gena where a young girl would be forced to grow up too fast after being drawn into a dark world of drugs, gang violence and sexual initiation, Giamatti popping up as a cop. Far more exciting would be a part as an FBI technician backing up Johnny Depp as he infiltrated Al Pacino's mob in Donnie Brasco, Giamatti getting the benefit of Depp's hilarious explanation of the different meanings of "Forget about it". Following this would come a much showier contribution to Private Parts, a biopic of shock jock Howard Stern. Here, when Stern finally makes the big leagues and outrages the network with his antics, Giamatti would be the programme director charged with either taming Stern or forcing him to resign. For his pains he would be insulted, frustrated and publicly nicknamed Pig Vomit.

Giamatti's fourth release of 1997 would be his first big mainstream hit. This was My Best Friend's Wedding where Julia Roberts would decide she's in love with buddy Dermot Mulroney once he's engaged to Cameron Diaz and sneakily attempt to shatter their relationship.

In perhaps the film's most touching scene, when Roberts has done the dirty and stands - tearful, confused and guilty - in a hotel corridor, Giamatti would appear as a passing bellboy, sharing a cigarette with her as well as his granny's wise words "This, too, shall pass". After this he'd reunite with Woody Allen for Deconstructing Harry where Allen would play a vampiric writer, hated by everyone for making use of their lives. The film would cut between Allen's life, his dreams and his stories, all of it exploring his methods as a writer and director and the criticisms aimed at him. Like Bergman's Wild Strawberries, it would be based around a man's trip back to his former school to be honoured, Giamatti appearing as an obsequious professor conveniently overlooking the fact that his school had actually expelled Allen's character years before. Along with Philip Bosco, Giamatti did shoot a lot more scenes for Allen, but most of it ended up cut. His final release of the year would be a pop-up role in A Further Gesture, based on an idea by Stephen Rea and filmed some time before, where Rea would play an IRA operative who flees to New York only to be dragged into a plot by Guatamalan exiles to assassinate a CIA agent.

1998 would be another prime year. It would begin with an episode of Homicide: Life On The Street where Giamatti would get to play his first out-and-out swine. When an 82-year-old man is found mauled to death by three pit-bulls, the cops hunt down the dogs' owner, Giamatti, the old guy's grandson. When they find and interrogate him, officers Andre Braugher and Jon Seda (who'd earlier guested with Giamatti in NYPD Blue) are shocked by his moral emptiness, the fact that he cannot or will not react, that he cares about nothing. Giamatti was beginning to reveal his range, though he'd hardly be tested by his next outing, the Disney TV comedy romp Tourist Trap. Here, in a riff on the Vacation franchise, couple Daniel Stern and Julie Hegarty would take their two bored kids on a 3-week trip to learn more about the life of Stern's Civil War hero ancestor. Stern hopes to draw his family together and is aided in his efforts by the ghost of his famous forebear, played by Giamatti, who turns out to be not so heroic after all.

Giamatti's next three releases of 1998 would all be $100 million hits (how Marcus, chowing down on frozen peas, must have spat). First would come Peter Weir's excellent The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey would play a naif who, unknown to him, is the centre of a reality show. Everyone around him, from his wife Laura Linney to the news-vendors on the street, is an actor with the whole caboodle being masterminded by Ed Harris's god-like director Christof. Giamatti would work in Christof's control-room, a sympathetic, humorous sort forced to scramble and improvise whenever Carrey stumbles close to the truth.

Following this, he'd reunite with Private Parts director Betty Thomas for Doctor Dolittle where Eddie Murphy would play the medic with an ear for animals. In one show-stopping scene, Giamatti would appear as a fellow doctor, still bitter about Murphy's out-performing him back in med school, who mocks Murphy's claims that he can communicate with beasts and is then called a Butthead by his own cat. And then there'd be the biggest of them all, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, where Tom Hanks would lead a rag-tag platoon across war-torn northern France in search of Matt Damon's titular squaddie. On their journey, the platoon would come across Giamatti, a US sergeant in a fire-fight with Germans, Giamatti adding some humour in the midst of the chaos and horror with his bad feet and a comic clumsiness that sees him knock over a wall and inadvertently reveal the hiding enemy. It was a part that Spielberg increased once Giamatti had earned big laughs by accidentally tripping over while running.

. 1998 would continue with another memorable minor role in The Negotiator where police negotiator Samuel L Jackson would be framed and, in desperation, take hostages himself in order to clear his name Peer Kevin Spacey would be called in to talk Jackson out of it and must do so before the SWAT teams do their dirty business. Again Giamatti would prove to be a scene-stealer. As a low-life credit card fraudster and slimy snitch caught up in the hostage crisis, he'd be nervous and chattering, one of the great cinematic weasels of recent times. That The Negotiator was not a financial success was no fault of his.

Giamatti's 6th film release of 1998 would be Safe Men, the Dumb And Dumber of the crime genre. Here two Jewish mafia bosses would be at loggerheads, one wanting to hire a pair of expert safe-crackers to turn the other over. Enter Giamatti as a henchman known as Veal Chop, sent to make contact in a bar, unfortunately mistaking dopey duo Sam Rockwell and Steve Zahn for the criminal pair and then having to sort out his own mess. Better would be the TV movie Winchell, directed by Paul Mazursky. This would tell the real-life story of controversial columnist Walter Winchell, following him across 60 years as he produces the first sassy gossip column, exposes public figures, rages against the rising Nazis and then blows his career by supporting McCarthy's witch-hunts. Stanley Tucci would win both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his efforts as the charismatic and arrogant Winchell, but the quiet hero of the film would be Giamatti, playing Winchell chief ghost writer Herman Kurfeld (the film being based of Kurfeld's biography of Winchell). Though kept out of the limelight and constantly subject to Winchell's egomaniacal assaults, he stays by his difficult friend's side throughout.

After two such prolific years, a step-back was inevitable, and Giamatti would see only two movies released in 1999.

First there'd be a tiny but telling part in Tim Robbins' classy Cradle Will Rock, an exploration of revolutionary art and politics in the 1930s based on the attempt by Orson Welles and John Houseman to stage the pro-union play of the title despite the antagonism of big business and the authorities. Helping the pair would be luvvie countess Vanessa Redgrave, a patron of the arts, and Giamatti would produce big laughs yet again as Redgrave's latest protege, a talentless Italian actor and musician who's hoping she'll make him a star of the opera. 1999's other film would be another high-quality production, Milos Forman's Man On The Moon. This would be another biopic, this time of maverick comedian Andy Kaufman. Here Jim Carrey (who'd earlier had his life arranged by Giamatti in The Truman Show) would play the anarchic funnyman, charming the nation in Taxi then provoking the TV establishment and audiences alike with his surreal pranks and foolhardy entry into the world of wrestling. And Giamatti would be beside him all the way as Bob Zmuda, Kaufman's best friend and writing partner. Radical, uncompromising, nurturing Carrey's wilder instincts and perpetuating his myth, he was a bright-eyed and chortling zealot, dead-set on pushing back the boundaries of comedy.

. If 1999 didn't prove give Giamatti a smash at the box office, he did at least earn more plaudits when he returned to New York and stagework with Eugene O'Neill's 1946 classic The Iceman Cometh at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Starring Giamatti's former Negotiator co-star Kevin Spacey, this had recently been a hit at London's Almeida and would see Spacey as a charismatic and ruthless salesman forcing a bar full of losers to confront the truth of their sorry lives, Giamatti playing the sad-eyed alcoholic journalist Jimmy Tomorrow, as his name suggests an arch-procrastinator. Also featuring would be Robert Sean Leonard who'd appeared alongside Giamatti in Arcadia back in 1995.

Back onscreen, Giamatti would now have a sufficiently solid reputation as a character actor to vary his movies wildly. He'd begin the new millennium with If These Walls Could Talk 2, a prestigious TV movie that would employ three separate stories, each set in the same house at different times, to explore the experiences of lesbian couples from 1961 to the present day. In the 1961 segment, Giamatti's Cradle Will Rock benefactor Vanessa Redgrave would suffer in silence when her long-term partner Marian Seldes dies and no one understands or accepts the bond they have shared. Giamatti would turn up as Seldes' nephew who, along with wife Elizabeth Perkins, plans to flog off his aunt's house without any thought of Redgrave at all. Very different would be Big Momma's House, Martin Lawrence's attempt to duplicate Eddie Murphy's success with The Nutty Professor.

Here Lawrence would play an FBI agent and master of disguise who, staking out the girlfriend of an escaped robber, dons a fat suit and a major attitude and pretends to be the girl's grandmother. Giamatti, meanwhile, would play Lawrence's partner, struggling to create new padding and fake limbs so Lawrence can continue his deceit. Naturally, it was crude stuff, but a big hit nonetheless, earning Giamatti yet another $100 million hit.

. Giamatti's third and last release of 2000 would be Duets, another film comprising three stories, this time interweaving tales following three couples on their way to a karaoke competition in Nebraska. Directed by Bruce Paltrow, it would feature Paltrow's daughter Gwyneth, as well as Maria Bello, Huey Lewis, Giamatti's recent auntie Marian Seldes and Andre Braugher who'd earlier interrogated Giamatti in Homicide: Life On The Street. Here Giamatti's storyline would be the toughest and most touching with Giamatti playing a minor executive who, utterly unappreciated at work and at home, goes into meltdown and, railing against the tedium and homogeneity of American life, dumps everything and takes off across country. Picking up ex-con hitch-hiker Braugher, the pair try out some bar-room karaoke, belting out Try A Little Tenderness, with Giamatti discovering a new freedom in singing. His is by far the most compelling character, a meek man suddenly liberated, initially hilarious but gradually sadder as he loses his grip.

Having lent his voice to an episode of King Of The Hill, playing a new teacher inspiring Bobby to take an interest in green issues, Giamatti would move on to Todd Solondz's two-part Storytelling. As Deconstructing Harry had done with Woody Allen, this would see Solondz examining his reasons for writing and the criticisms aimed at him, Giamatti playing a Solondz-like character, a documentary-maker who wants to cover US teenagers post-Columbine. Edited by a tough Franka Potente, he'd pick the family of old schoolmate Julie Hegarty (formerly his co-star in Tourist Trap) and begin to film her messy life as she tries to cope with domineering hubbie John Goodman and their sullen kids. Very quickly - just as Solondz was in real life - Giamatti would find himself open to accusations that he was making fun of his subjects. It was fascinating fare, unlike Giamatti's other release of 2001, Tim Burton's Planet Of The Apes where Mark Wahlberg would play the astronaut marooned on monkey-world. Escaping from his primate captors, he'd make a dash for the wilderness, accompanied by a warm and fuzzy Helena Bonham Carter, with Giamatti utterly wasted as a trader in humans reluctantly dragged along for the ride.

2002 would see Giamatti return to broad comedy with Big Fat Liar where young Frankie Muniz (star of the hit show Malcolm In The Middle) would have his homework fall into the hands of Giamatti's grasping Hollywood producer who uses it as the subject of a hit movie.

Muniz is outraged but no one believes his story so he takes off for Beverly Hills with his buddies and proceeds to make Giamatti's life a misery, at one point filling his pool with dye on the eve of a big meeting so he must attend looking like a member of Blue Man Group. Giamatti would, of course, be perfect in the role - alternately smarmy, rude and exploding with anger. And there'd be more kids' comedy with Thunderpants, a British production where adolescent inventor Rupert Grint would attempt to help out his friend, a boy with an amazing gift for flatulence. Eventually they'd be recruited by government agent Giamatti to help rescue the crew of a doomed spacecraft, Giamatti finding comedy in super-efficiency. The movie was not a hit, yet Giamatti would remember it with great fondness as a happy change from the depressed or manic types he felt he was now being saddled with.

. If Giamatti was feeling under-challenged, this was about to change. In October and November of 2002 he'd be back in New York and reuniting with Donnie Brasco star Al Pacino for The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui at the Michael Schimmel Centre for the Arts. Written by Brecht and set in old Chicago, this was a fable concerning fascist tyranny and the rise of Hitler with Pacino in the lead as a thuggish bully taking over the cauliflower business. Giamatti would appear in several roles, including sarcastic journalist Ted Ragg and, on his knees throughout, the midget Ignatius Dullfeet, Brecht's equivalent of the Austrian chancellor Dollfuss, murdered by Nazis in 1934. Also featuring in the genuinely star-studded cast would be Steve Buscemi, Chazz Palminteri and Giamatti's former stage co-star Billy Crudup, as well as recent accomplice John Goodman. And they'd all work hard, the play lasting nearly 5 hours with seven performances a week (on one day there'd be two shows with half an hour between them). With (a perhaps unwanted) membership included in the price, tickets cost a hitherto unheard-of $115.

Now, after 8 years making the most of bit parts, Giamatti would get his first stab at carrying a movie. This would be American Splendor, a strange but brilliantly inventive take on the life, character and work of comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, with the actors, Pekar himself and cartoon characters all helping to tell the tale. Back in the 1970s Pekar, a Cleveland desk clerk and comics fanatic, would meet cartoonist Robert Crumb and get him to illustrate stories, written by Pekar, about a normal Cleveland family, the point being that real life is just as thrilling as the adventures of superheroes. The result would be the American Splendor of the title and Pekar would become a celebrity of sorts, though he'd never leave his day job and blow his one chance at big money when, given a run on The David Letterman Show, he'd accuse both host and audience of phoniness.

Pekar was a complicated character, an irritable misanthrope, ambitious but accepting of his fate, horribly stilted in his speech but with an ear for poetry, and Giamatti played him with eerie precision, with all his tics and grunts, toothy grimaces and hunched, shambling gait. He'd be absolutely hilarious when, having lost his voice, he tries to persuade his wife not to leave him. With Giamatti's stunning performance backed by the adept efforts of Hope Davis as Pekar's equally bizarre third wife, the movie would be Oscar-nominated for its screenplay, with Davis getting nominated for a Golden Globe. It would also be named Best Movie of 2003 by America's National Society of Film Critics, beating the much-lauded Mystic River, Monster and Lost In Translation. Yet when it came to the major honours Giamatti, who'd really made the movie what it was, was overlooked. No matter - his time would soon come.

. After American Splendor, 2003 would be another busy year for Giamatti. First there'd be James Foley's Confidence where con-man Edward Burns would put together a gang to scam crime lord Dustin Hoffman. Corporate loans and offshore wire transfers would be involved, as would Rachel Weisz, Giamatti appearing as Burns' crankiest accomplice, taking many of the film's best lines. After this he'd return to TV for The Pentagon Papers, the true story of the political shenanigans leading up to Watergate. Here James Spader would play radical social scientist Daniel Ellsburg who comes to doubt the legality and morality of US involvement in Indochina and leaks the story to the New York Times. Smeared by Nixon's government, he ends up in court, fighting a case that brings into question the freedom of the press and the integrity of the government. Only two people risk their necks to support him - radio host Claire Forlani and his skittish, frightened colleague Giamatti. Far more hi-tech would be Paycheck, directed by John Woo and based on a story by Philip K Dick. Set in the future, this would see Ben Affleck as a computer boffin who's hired by corporations to break down their rivals' programmes and reassemble them to avoid copyright. He gets paid well as he has his memory wiped after each job to avoid complications. When he wakes after a three-year job, though, he discovers he has no memory, no money and just an envelope containing 19 mysterious items that are supposed to help him discover what happened. Giamatti would appear in a telling cameo as Affleck's agent and sidekick who performs the memory-wipes. The part might have been more substantial as the makers decided half-way through shooting that Giamatti's character was actually dying of cancer. Relevant scenes were shot, but then minds were changed and the cancer removed.

Oddly, for such a prolific worker, 2004 would see only one Giamatti release. Thankfully, it was THE release.

Where American Splendor reached only the smallest of audiences, Alexander Payne's Sideways would see Giamatti's talents recognised worldwide. Here he'd play a High School English teacher and failing novelist, recently divorced, who decides to take his best friend, the soon-to-be-married actor Thomas Haden Church on a trip through the winemaking regions of California. Unbeknown to Giamatti, Church is hoping for a final blow-out, complete with hot chicks, and so, himself getting it on with Sandra Oh (who'd earlier appeared with Giamatti in Big Fat Liar), he arranges a double-date with Giamatti and Virginia Madsen, a waitress Giamatti has fancied for ages. And so the stage was set for Giamatti's tour de force. At first upbeat, intent upon giving his mate a good time and a grounding in all things vinicultural, he quickly begins to unravel. Battered by failure, unable to let go of his ex-wife, he's moved by Madsen but paralysed by the past, only being driven forward by Church's increasingly outrageous antics. He's exasperated by but ever loyal to Church, damaged and sweetly tentative with Madsen, and painful to watch in the company of his former wife. And he's brilliantly funny throughout. Sideways was an indie triumph, Oscar-nominated for Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay (the last of which it won), with official nods also to Church and Madsen. Incomprehensibly, however, Giamatti was passed over, his performance earning him only a Golden Globe nomination.

. 2005 would be another slow year for releases, with just two voice-parts and one blockbuster. First he'd rejoin former co-stars Robin Williams, Greg Kinnear and Stanley Tucci in the animated Robots, where Ewan McGregor would leave Rivet Town for Robot City, hoping to find work with inventor Mel Brooks. On arrival, though, he's put off by Giamatti's gate guard, a cruel and amusing fellow who warns McGregor that he's wasting his time as Kinnear's monstrous corporate megalomaniac has taken over. Following this would come the short fairy tale The Fan And The Flower, directed by Bill Plympton, recently Oscar-nominated for his short Guard Dog. Plympton actually recruited Giamatti at an Oscar party, though he claimed he needed a few drinks before plucking up courage to ask.

Giamatti's big film of 2005 would be Ron Howard's Cinderella Man, the real-life tale of James J Braddock, an up-and-coming boxer who lost it all due to injury and the Great Depression, then heroically came back to claim the championship of the world. Russell Crowe would play Braddock, a dignified man forced to undergo terrible humiliations in order to support his family. Giamatti, meanwhile, would have the showier part of Joe Gould, Braddock's manager and trainer. At first he's a cigar-chomping big-wig, loving the ride to the top. Then he's a true friend, supporting Crowe in his time of direst need, putting on a flamboyant front while mortgaging his own future to make the dream a reality.

With Crowe so singleminded, it was left to Giamatti to express the emotions of the story, his anguished face beneath the bottom rope, his astonished joy, his beam of triumph all lending the movie a humanity that raised it beyond brutal drama. And this time it would be Giamatti singled out for Oscar and Golden Globe consideration.

. Giamatti would next move on to the indie flick The Hawk Is Dying, an unusual piece where he'd play a car upholsterer in Florida who tries to inspire his autistic nephew and obese sister, as well as mend his own wrecked life, through the process of training birds of prey. After many failures - the birds refuse to eat in captivity - he decides to invest more of himself in the project, resolving to starve himself until a bird takes food, his only confidante being trashy pot-head Michelle Williams. Having lent his voice to the English language version of Asterix And The Vikings, he'd take on The Illusionist, starring his fellow Yale alumnus Edward Norton. Set in Vienna in 1900, this would see Norton as a master magician, his tricks so convincing people believe he must be in command of supernatural forces. When Norton begins to romance Jessica Biel, the lover of Rufus Sewell's Prince Leopold, the bitter and jealous Sewell orders police chief Giamatti to investigate Norton's show and shut it down. Giamatti, though, comes to sympathise with his victim.

Following this would come Giamatti's most prestigious role yet, the lead in M Night Shyamalan's Lady In The Water. Here he'd play a stammering superintendant in an apartment block, emotionally ravaged by the murder of his wife and kids, who one day discovers in the swimming-pool a nymph from another world. In order to help her return home, he must enlist the aid of the block's oddball inhabitants and fight off a werewolf-like creature called The Scrunt. As an everyman shoved into a heroic role, Giamatti was again excellent, dealing with the movie's more fantastic elements while also providing a real depth of feeling. Sadly, his efforts would mostly be overlooked as the critics queued up to give Shyamalan a kicking.

2006 would end with two animations. First, Giamatti would rejoin Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep in The Ant Bully where a kid would flood an ant colony then, reduced in size by some potion, would have to help save the insects from Giamatti's evil exterminator. After this would come the title role in The Amazing Screw-On Head, based on Mike Mignola's comic book, where he'd be Abraham Lincoln's top agent in supernatural affairs, trying to save America from David Hyde Pierce's Emperor Zombie.

2007 would bring a return to live action, lots of live action, with Shoot 'Em Up, an attempt to out-John Woo John Woo. Here Clive Owen would play a drifter who protects a pregnant woman from marauding gunmen, delivers her baby, then is pursued himself.

Giamatti would play the outlandishly evil leader of the gunmen, intent upon nabbing the baby so his boss can harvest its bone marrow, but the story would be secondary to the spectacular stunts. Very different would be The Nanny Diaries, a reunion with Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, the team behind American Splendor. Here Scarlett Johansson would play a college grad hired by rich Manhattan couple Giamatti and Laura Linney, who'd earlier played alongside him in The Truman Show. With Linney shopping-crazy and Giamatti an unfaithful, money-mad workaholic, Johansson would soon view her job more as an anthropological study of rich New Yorkers, Giamatti giving her ever-more ammunition as he rejects his young son's embraces and comes on to her.

The year would end in festive fashion with Fred Claus, a comedy placing Giamatti's Saint Nicholas at the head of a dysfunctional family. Vince Vaughn would play the black sheep of said family, returning to the North Pole once he's been dumped by girlfriend Rachel Weisz (earlier with Giamatti in Confidence). Giamatti, who's running the whole Christmas show, gives Vaughn a job but must now deal with his irresponsible sibling's jealousy, as well as the jibes of wife Miranda Richardson and the efforts of efficiency expert Kevin Spacey (another former co-star) to shut down their entire Yuletide operation.

2008 would bring yet more success and kudos. After voicing Dr Satan in the comedy-horror cartoon The Haunted World Of El Superbeasto, he'd rise up several cultural levels to star in the big budget miniseries John Adams. Produced by his Saving Private Ryan cohort Tom Hanks, this would cover the first 50 years of the United States, seeing Giamatti as George Washington's VP, then as President himself, taking on the might of France. Once again Laura Linney would play Giamatti's wife, along with his beastly employer in The Illusionist, Rufus Sewell. Following this would come Pretty Bird, loosely based on Paul Brown's The Rocketbelt Caper, where three friends would become obsessed with creating a Buck Rogers-style belt, their struggles eventually resulting in theft, murder and multi-million-dollar lawsuits.

A late starter in terms of cinema, Paul Giamatti has come a long way. Though now a headliner in his own right, he'll surely continue to nip between big budget fare and the art-house, between comedy and drama, very probably returning to the theatre inbetween. He'll win a hots of awards before he's through.

Dominic Wills