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Jon Voight Biography

in full Jonathan Voight

(1933–)

Related Works

1967 Hour of the Gun
1967 Fearless Frank
1968 Out of It

1969 Midnight Cowboy
1970 Catch 22
1970 The Revolutionary
1972 Deliverance
1973 The All-American Boy
1974 Conrack
1974 The Odessa File
1978 Coming Home
1979 The Champ
1982 Lookin' to Get Out
1983 Table for Five
1984 Sanford Meisner: The American Theatr's Best Kept Secret
1985 Runaway Train
1986 Desert Bloom
1989 Eternity
1992 The Rainbow Warrior
1995 Heat
1996 Mission: Impossible
1997 Rosewood
1997 Anaconda
1997 U Turn
1997 Most Wanted
1997 The Rainmaker
1997 Boys Will Be Boys
1998 The General
1998 Enemy of the State
1999 Varsity Blues
1999 A Dog of Flanders
2001 Pearl Harbor
2001 Tomb Raider
2001 Uprising
2003 Holes
2004 The Manchurian Candidate
2004 National Treasure
2004 The Karate Dog
2004 SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2
2006 September Dawn
2006 Glory Road
2006 The Legend of Simon Conjurer
2007 Transformers
2007 Bratz
2007 National Treasure: Book of Secrets
2009 Pride and Glory

» More

Related People

Actor. Born Jonathan Vincent Voight on December 29, 1933 in Yonkers, New York. The son of a Czechoslovakian-American golf pro, Jon Voight discovered his love for acting as a teenager. Following a stint on Broadway, he appeared in his first film, Fearless Frank, in 1965. However, it was his 1969 role as country boy-turned-hustler Joe Buck in the groundbreaking film Midnight Cowboy that earned him an Oscar nomination and launched his career into the big time.

For the next two decades, Voight's film career was a mix of incredible highs and forgettable misses. His many memorable projects from this period include 1972's Deliverance and 1978's Coming Home for which he won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of a quadriplegic Vietnam War veteran opposite Jane Fonda. In 1985, he ended a five-year dry spell with an Academy Award nod for his performance in Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's thriller Runaway Train. A "spiritual reawakening" then led Voight to work on a number of intellectually related and doomed film projects.

After playing Robert De Niro's underworld contact in Michael Mann's 1995 drama Heat, Voight once again began to star in big budget offerings, including 1996's Mission: Impossible, 1997's The Rainmaker and 1998's Enemy of the State. In 2001, he delivered well-received performances as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Pearl Harbor and as the patriarch in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, a film that starred his estranged daughter, actress Angelina Jolie. That year he also brilliantly channeled sportscaster Howard Cosell in the biopic Ali, capturing his fourth Oscar nomination.

In recent years, Voight has enjoyed a resurgence as one of Hollywood's most sought-after character actors. He received an Emmy nomination in 2002 for his performance in the acclaimed NBC miniseries Uprising. He also found great success with the 2004 sleeper hit Holes and Jonathan Demme's 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate. Voight next co-stars with Edward Norton and Colin Farrell in Pride and Glory, a story of familial corruption among New York City police officers, due out in 2009.

Jon Voight was married to Lauri Peters from 1962 to 1967 and to Marcheline Bertrand from 1971 to 1978. He has two children, actor James Haven and actress Angelina Jolie, with Bertrand.