Willem Dafoe - Biography

Name: Willem Dafoe

Born: 22 July 1955 (Age: 54)

Where: Appleton, Wisconsin, USA

Height: 5' 9"

Awards: 2 Oscar, 1 Golden Globe nominations

For nearly a century, one of the hot topics in cinema has been the greed and egomania of its stars. Today especially, now that most movies are dull-witted, condescending and characterised by lowest common denominators, we ask ourselves whether the stars are to blame. Do the massive sums charged by Cruise, Pitt, Roberts et al ensure that producers take no risks whatsoever, ever copying past successes? And do their egos, the constant imperative that they ALWAYS LOOK GOOD, ensure that they, rather than the film or the story, are at the centre of the film-making process?

One actor you could never accuse of this is Willem Dafoe. Having spent much of his working life in experimental theatre in New York, you could hardly call him a money-grabber. Indeed, whenever he has a hit - and he has often been hot in Hollywood - he always chooses to return to the stage, or to some challenging indie production on the other side of the planet. So, no bread head he. Then there's the ego. His own wife has called him "psychotic for attention", but Dafoe does not embrace the cult of personality. Much to the annoyance of interviewers, he refuses to talk about himself other than as an actor, explaining time and time again that to do so would make it more difficult for people to accept him in character and thus spoil his films for them. He's said he wants to be "a blank slate", and to most of us, he is.

He was born William Dafoe on the 22nd of July, 1955, in Appleton, a town dominated by its paper mill, in Wisconsin. Appleton's by Lake Winnebago, up the Fox river from Green Bay. His father, William, was a surgeon, while his Bostonian mother was a nurse, both working at the same medical facility. There were five sisters and two brothers, young William being second youngest. Aside from his mum, who retained her East Coast accent, the rest, he says, had a touch of the Fargos about them. Attending Einstein Jr High School in Appleton, he soon picked up the nickname Willem - it stuck.

As a kid, Dafoe has described himself as "dutiful, conscientious, square" with no experience of the world at all. But, being the seventh of eight, he was forced to battle for attention, becoming both a mimic and a practical joker. This, he says, was the genesis of acting for him: "the impulse basically comes from a desire to act up, get attention".

He did well at school, enrolling at the University of Wisconsin at 17, majoring in Drama. He'd worked for spare cash as a maintenance man at his parents' facility. It's not a cherished memory. "I spent my youth," he later explained "fishing through bloody dressings and stool specimens in the trash". College wasn't much fun either. Willem found himself at odds with the theatre department, believing there was too much attitude and not enough talent. He left early, joining Wisconsin's experimental Theatre X troupe and, for the next four years, touring the USA and Europe.

At 22, it was time to step up. He moved to New York and into poverty, living in bad neighbourhoods. And he joined another avant garde troupe, the Performance Group, quickly making a name for himself. On arriving he overhead a terrible row between the group's artistic director, Elizabeth LeCompte, and the founder, Richard Schechner, with LeCompte shouting "Get him out of my house!" "Tough broad," Willem remembers thinking, "It was only later that I found out she was sexy as well".

All was certainly not well at the Performance Group and, soon after Dafoe's arrival, LeCompte walked out, taking Dafoe with her. He was to be her leading man and, though 11 years her junior, her lover too (they did not marry, but remained a couple for 27 years, having one son, Jack, born in 1982). Together they formed the Wooster Group, a thoroughly uncommercial organisation, dedicated to testing both the actors and the audience. Dafoe would return to the troupe throughout his career, appearing in such productions as LSD, Just The High Points, The Road To Immortality, North Atlantic (set on an aircraft carrier during the Cold War and co-starring Steve Buscemi) and To You, The Birdie!, based on Racine's Phaedre. He played the enraged ship's stoker in Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape on Broadway, a production they took to Melbourne. 2002 would see them perform in Hammersmith, London. When he appeared nude in one production, so a reviewer said, "the women in the audience let out a gasp of delighted astonishment" - Dafoe is famously well-endowed.

Despite his partner being the artistic director, Willem did not walk into lead roles with the Wooster group. His film career taking him away often, he found that the leads went to more consistent attenders - Spalding Gray, Ron Vawter and then Kate Valk. Nevertheless, despite his often missing out on the prime parts, many observers believe Dafoe to be a far finer actor onstage than on screen.

The first four years of his movie career were up and down. He made his debut in Michael Cimino's studio-crushing Heaven's Gate, alongside other great mavericks like Jeff Bridges and Christopher Walken, but his part was lost in the fearsome editing process demanded by the producers. His first part proper was also his first lead, in The Loveless as the bad-ass leader of a biker gang who stop off in a small town on their way to the Daytona races and cause Fifties-style chaos. This was also the debut of director Kathryn Bigelow, later to make Near Dark and Point Break.

There were a couple of tiny parts in The Hunger and New York Nights, then came Walter Hill's rock and roll extravaganza, Streets Of Fire, where hero Michael Pare goes into action to save his ex-girlfriend, Diane Lane. She's a rock singer who's kidnapped by Willem, playing - that's right - the bad-ass leader of a biker gang. It was overblown stuff, violent but strangely unengaging. Yet it did succeed in raising Willem's profile.

After Roadhouse 66, where he teamed up with Judge Reinhold to battle yet another gang leader, in yet another small town, came a major breakthrough, and a run of roles very few actors can match. He began with 1985's To Live And Die In L.A, directed by William Friedkin, helmsman of both The Exorcist and The French Connection. Here he played Rick Masters, a counterfeiter and an extremely dangerous man, who flaunts his crimes before the police and is hunted relentlessly by one copper whose partner has been killed in the chase. Cool, together, stylish, rich and utterly ruthless, Dafoe's Masters would change the face of movie villains - no mean feat.

Next came another tremendous performance, as Sgt Elias in Oliver Stone's Platoon. Here he was a pot-smoking Vietnam veteran, using his extraordinary experience and intuition to help young soldiers out in the jungle. But, good-hearted and something of a renegade, he clashes with the murderous Tom Berenger who, inevitably, brings about his death, shot in the back and transfixed in an iconic crucifixion pose - as befitted Elias's attitudes. In one scene, after an argument with officers, he stalks off and one of them spits "Three years in the bush and he thinks he's Jesus f***ing Christ". Both Dafoe and Berenger would be Oscar-nominated, and both would lose out to Michael Caine, in Hannah And Her Sisters. Caine often complains about being under-appreciated - that year he was over-appreciated to a stupendous degree. Dafoe was now incredibly hot in Hollywood and unsure of where to go next. "My choices were very odd," he's said. "I was frozen with indecision".

Having just played an imitation of Christ, now he went for the real thing, in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation Of Christ. With a script by Paul Schrader (who'd written Taxi Driver and would direct Dafoe on several occasions), this hugely respectful film dealt with the notion of Jesus as man and god.

With the Devil at work, Jesus is tempted to take up a normal life with Barbara Hershey's Mary Magdalene, rather than face the awful fate that awaits him at Golgotha. And Willem, who - though he's one of cinema's most intense actors, is also one of its finest waverers, exhibiting tortured doubt like few others - was wonderful, despite being blinded for three days by eye-drops that were supposed to achieve a God-like look. Sadly, for many this was a subject not ripe for re-consideration - EVER!!! - and The Last Temptation faced an almighty controversy.

. Yet Willem did not shy away from controversial subjects, he was always up for a challenge ("To this day," he said later "I can't believe I was so brazen as to think I could pull off the Jesus role"). Next came Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning, where he played straight-up FBI Agent Ward, investigating the disappearance of some Civil Rights activists down South in 1964. No one will talk - till Dafoe's unconventional partner Gene Hackman starts getting REALLY unconventional.

After Saigon, where he and Gregory Hines played cops hunting for the murderer of a prostitute in Vietnam, came another serious challenge, when he took the role of Salamo Arouch in Triumph Of The Spirit. Here he played a Greek Jew who's sent to Auschwitz and, when he's discovered to be a champion boxer, is forced to fight for the entertainment of the Nazis. It's a terrible choice he must make. If he fight and wins, his opponent dies. If he fights and loses, he dies. If he refuses to fight at all, he dies, and so does his father. Naturally, it's very depressing stuff.

And then came another barn-storming performance, again for Oliver Stone, in Born On The Fourth Of July. Here Tom Cruise played real-life veteran Ron Kovic, crippled in Vietnam and feeling betrayed by his country. As he spirals down into bitter depression, he loses himself in drink, drugs and whores down in Mexico. His partner in crime, naturally, is Willem as another crazy, worm-swallowing paraplegic, strung out on tequila and anything else going. He's with Cruise when, smashed out of their minds and wholly unbearable, they're dumped out in the desert with no wheelchairs and no way home.

Incredibly, the memorable roles kept coming - and it's to Dafoe's eternal credit that he MADE them so memorable. He stood out as a malevolent guard in Cry-Baby, where John Waters introduced the world to Johnny Depp. Then came David Lynch and Wild At Heart, a lunatic road movie where Sailor and Lula (Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern) are on the run, being pursued by and meeting up with all manner of misfits and psychos. And the greatest of these, naturally, is Willem's Bobby Peru, a vicious criminal with a repulsively lascivious nature and the most revolting teeth, who gets Sailor to join him in a fatal bank raid while trying to seduce Lula. Horrible bloke, so horrible you couldn't but applaud when his head was blown off and bounced along the ground.

Next came a few smaller productions, where Willem continued to shine. In Flight Of The Intruder, he played cynical bombardier Tiger Cole who joins an embittered pilot on a dangerous and absolutely unauthorised mission. Then Paul Shrader popped up again, directing him in Light Sleeper. Here he was a reformed drug addict who's still dealing for Susan Sarandon - the movie concerning itself with loneliness and a convoluted morality. And then there was White Sands, where Dafoe played a small town sheriff who finds a dead man and a lot of money out in the desert, assumes the guy's identity and gets drawn into a war between Mickey Rourke's gun-runner and Samuel L. Jackson's dodgy FBI agent.

Now Willem faced his toughest professional challenge - his attempt to survive his next movie. This was Body Of Evidence, another Madonna vehicle doomed to failure. This time the pop siren was to play a young woman charged with murder when an old fella dies while having sex with her - having bequeathed her a whopping $8 million. Dafoe plays her lawyer, who himself falls for her kinky charms, allowing her to pour hot wax on his privates, but then suspects that she may actually be a killer. It was laughable stuff, interesting only in that one wondered how the likes of Dafoe, Anne Archer and Julianne Moore had ever got involved.

It was said that Dafoe was finished but, as he had no real ambition to be a superstar anyway, he would always find work. Besides, as one of the great character actors of his day, capable of turning in cameos that improved movies ten-fold, Hollywood would come knocking soon. He took off to work with Wim Wenders in Faraway, So Close!, the sequel to Wings Of Desire, where an angel has become human to save a life. Willem played a weird entity, stalking the angel, but his name gives the game away; Emit Flesti - spelt backwards, Time Itself.

There was a brief return to Hollywood with Clear And Present Danger. Here a bunch of covert action agents have been caught and jailed by Columbian bad guys. Harrison Ford must break in and rescue them, but he needs the help of Willem, a field agent who's convinced it was Ford's fault they were caught in the first place. And then came one of Dafoe's finest roles, as TS Eliot in Tom And Viv. Gaunt, tired, he suffers terribly as Miranda Richardson - as Vivian Haigh-Wood, his lover, his critic and his inspiration - gradually falls apart.

Richardson would also appear in Dafoe's next project, the "erotic", talkative costume drama, Night And The Moment. Then came Victory where, in the Dutch East Indies in 1913, he saves a girl about to be sold to a racist thug and escapes to a paradisaical island - but it's never that easy, is it? Then there was a small role in Basquiat, about a young street artist made famous by Andy Warhol.

Now, once again, the big projects came his way. In Anthony Minghella's epic The English Patient, he played a mystery man with no thumbs, who's trying to discover the identity of a horribly burned pilot. A thief who shoots up morphine and spies for the British, he holds together this thrilling, old-school romance which won Best Picture at the Oscars in 1996, as Platoon had done 10 years earlier.

After this, he had some fun as a criminal computer genius who takes control of the ship when Sandra Bullock is on a romantic cruise in Speed 2: Cruise Control. Then there was more Shrader when he played Nick Nolte's brother in the Oscar-winning Affliction, both of them ruined by their cruel and controlling father, James Coburn. And there was Lulu On The Bridge, where Harvey Keitel (Judas in The Last Temptation) played a depressed and chaotic jazz musician, falling for Mira Sorvino, with Willem as a mysterious anthropologist who's definitely after something.

More excellent oddities were to follow. In the futuristic New Rose Hotel, written by William "Neuromancer" Gibson and directed by Abel Ferrara, major cyber-companies are trying to poach each other's staff. One plans to use sex to persuade one particular genius to switch allegiances, so Willem trains Asia Argento (Dario's daughter) to be a super-seductress. Christopher Walken and Annabella Sciorra joined a superb cast.

1999 brought two more goodies. In David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, he was fabulous as the murderous Gas, a mechanic who performs illegal operations on people's spines so they can plug into a new generation of video game. Then came The Boondock Saints, where twins are trying to knock out Boston's crime lords and Willem plays an FBI agent who's supposed to catch them, but kind of agrees with what they're doing.

2000 was great, too. He played Detective Kimball, hunting down Christian Bale in American Psycho - a role originally intended for James Woods. In Animal Factory, directed by his buddy Steve Buscemi, he played a long-time con who takes young Edward Furlong under his wing when he's jailed for marijuana. And then came another masterful performance and a second Oscar nomination for Shadow Of The Shadow. This told the story of the filming of FW Murnau's classic Nosferatu, but with the twist that the film's star, Max Shreck, is actually a real vampire. In fact, by way of payment, Murnau has offered to let him drink the blood of the heroine, played by Catherine McCormack, once shooting has ended. Max, though, can't wait and the crew begin to die. For the part, Dafoe spent three hours a day having his make-up applied. There was a bull-cap, a head-piece, the teeth, the nose and acrylic paint and prosthetic adhesive all over his face. And those amazing fingernails. They could be a problem. "I was always looking for a caring assistant," recalled Dafoe later. "I had to plan my biological functions very carefully".

For some reason, Willem then became a man of God. Or rather he was a priest in his next three roles.

First was Bullfighter, an off-kilter El Mariachi-style fantasy adventure where Olivier Martinez and Michelle Forbes, purused by a vengeful crime boss, took off on a whacked-out road trip. Dafoe would provide one of many carzy cameos, popping up as a mystical warrior priest who helps the pair out. Despite only appearing for a few minutes, his face would dominate the video sleeve when the movie was released some five years later. Next would come Pavilion Of Women, heralded as the first collaboration between Hollywood and the Chinese film industry. Based on a Pearl S Buck novel and set in Manchuria on the eve of the Japanese invasion in 1938, this saw a wife tire of her husband's brutality and try to settle him down with a young concubine while she got involved with Willem, a US missionary doctor running the local orphanage. And then there was Edges Of The Lord, where Haley Joel Osment played a young Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland who poses as the child of a Catholic farmer. Serious, devout and featuring some excellent child-acting, this saw Dafoe as a zealous priest preparing the local children for christening and hoping he can convert Osment. Sadly, it was never released in the States.

. The priest-thing had to end, and it did so with a bang. In Spider-Man, Willem starred as the schizoid arch-villain The Green Goblin, the psychotic alter ego of businessman Norman Osbourn who appears like Mr Hyde when Osbourn is exposed to experimental nerve gas. Both Nicolas Cage and John Malkovich were approached to take the role, but in the end it was Willem surfing the sky in his jet-shoes, conversing with his own dark side and generally going off the deep end.

Also in 2002 would come Auto Focus, a reunion with Paul Schrader. This was a biopic of Bob Crane, the beloved actor who became a family favourite as Hogan in the hit series Hogan's Heroes, and it followed him from his early radio successes, through TV fame to a rapid descent into promiscuity and pornography, the poor man eventually being found clubbed to death in a hotel room. With Greg Kinnear superbly vacant as Crane, and Dafoe grimly needy as the electronic wizard and videographer who befriends him and drags him into a sleazy netherworld of strip-joints, swap parties and swinger scenes, the movie was wholly uncompromising and quite brilliant.

2003 would see Willem in another blockbuster when he lent his voice to the monumental Pixar-pic Finding Nemo which saw clown-fish Albert Brooks go seeking the lost son of the title. At one point, young Nemo would find himself in a tank in a dentist's office and it was here that he encountered Willem, as a scar-faced Moorish Idol fish who's planning a daring escape. The film would be a screaming financial success (almost as big as Spider-Man) and, come 2005, would be the biggest selling DVD ever, with 22 million copies sold.

Naturally, Dafoe would at the same time be delivering work with a far lower profile. His next release would be The Reckoning (actually made in 2001). Set in England in 1380, this would see him as the leader of an acting troupe which travels the country performing biblical extracts. Deciding to harbour Paul Bettany, a priest on the run, they arrive in a small village where a mute woman is being railroaded to execution for murder and witchcraft. Dafoe questions the locals but they're in total thrall to the local lord, so he writes a play about the crime, thus the film becomes a fascinating treatise on the power of art to reveal and communicate truth.

He now moved on to another villainous role in Robert Rodriguez' Once Upon A Time In Mexico (Rodriguez had earlier cameoed in Bullfighter), playing a drugs kingpin who's plotting against the president, a wicked plan that causes shady CIA-type Johnny Depp to recruit Antonio Banderas' El Mariachi to help stop it. Then would come Mr Ripley's Return, based on Patricia Highsmith's 1970 novel Ripley Under Ground. Here the criminal chameleon Ripley would take the identity of a recently deceased artist, producing faked new works and hoping to cash in on the painter's newfound fame. Dafoe would feature as a ruthless US businessman who buys one of these pieces, suspects something shifty is up and pursues Ripley to France. Despite featuring Dafoe, Tom Wilkinson, Claire Forlani and Alan Cumming, like so many of Dafoe's less expensive efforts the movie would suffer financial difficulties and never see a proper release.

Now more prolific than ever, Willem delivered the gritty thriller Control, directed by Tim Hunter, feted in the Eighties for River's Edge. Here Ray Liotta played a career criminal and sociopath condemned to death. Having received what he thinks is a lethal injection, he's surprised to wake up in the morgue and be told he can either be doctor Willem's guinea pig or be executed for real. Willem, you see, is keen to test a new drug that turns nutters like Liotta into normal, respectable folks. And all goes well, until Dafoe, who has serious problems of his own, is blinded by his obsession to Liotta's psychological difficulties. The result is terrible confusion and violence.

Ripley and Control were just two of 6 Dafoe releases in 2004. He moved on to The Clearing where he played a loser living with a constantly demanding wife and her dad. Seeking a way to score big and quickly, he kidnaps wealthy Robert Redford at gunpoint but, as he's not a professional crim, he begins to come undone as the smart Redford recognises his weakness and slowly tries to talk him out of it. Sadly, though exceptionally well-made, with many twists and surprises, the movie died at the box office, taking only $6 million. This was not a fate suffered by Spider-Man 2, where Willem made a brief appearance once more as The Green Goblin.

He ended 2004 with two minor roles in major productions. First was Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, where Bill Murray played a famed oceanographer who puts together a rag-bag team to seek revenge on a shark that killed his partner. Dafoe would appear as Klaus Daimler, the emotionally insecure and hilariously dopey first mate. Then there'd be a reunion with Martin Scorsese with The Aviator, where Willem would briefly show his face as a private dick Leonardo DiCaprio's Howard Hughes hires to spy on Katharine Hepburn and Spender Tracy.

2005 would be busy, too. First came Manderlay, Lars Von Trier's follow-up to Dogville and the second in his planned trilogy USA: Land Of Opportunities. This would see Bryce Dallas Howard replace Nicole Kidman as the Grace character (Willem would play her father) and experience first-hand the horrors of slavery in the 1930s Deep South. More high profile would be xXx: State Of The Union,a sequel to the massive Vin Diesel hit, where Dafoe led a military splinter group attempting to bring down the government in Washington and causing agent Samuel L Jackson to recruit another vagabond hero, this time Ice Cube. There'd also be Before It Had A Name, a drama where a young widow would travel to her dead husband's second home to sort out his affairs, only for tragedy to strike when she has an unexpected connection to the place's caretaker. It was a small movie but had a big impact on Dafoe's life as he co-wrote and co-starred with Giada Colagrande, an award-winning Italian director 20 years his junior. The relationship would cause him to leave his long-time lover, Elizabeth LeCompte.

In February, 2002, in his late forties, Willem Dafoe spent $30,000 on a piece of work by artist Tom Fruin. It was a tapestry made from discarded baggies of heroin, cocaine and marijuana, collected from a local project, some of which still contained drugs. Controversy and art - always together with Dafoe. Though yoga-practice has given him mighty discipline, he doesn't really want the responsibility of writing or directing, he wants to constantly be in the moment, to be "the thing itself", and is quite happy to be "an instrument" for his director, believing it frees him as an actor. Basically, he wants to be out there. "I don't think people want to see me as a regular guy," he's said. "Besides, I'm a regular guy in real life. I guess I just want to be reckless in my work".

And he is - thank God.

Dominic Wills