Jon Voight biography

Synopsis

Profile

Actor. Born Jonathan Vincent Voight on December 29, 1938 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