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Jon Voight
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Height
6' 1"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Spouse
Marcheline Bertrand (1973 - 1978) (divorced); 2 children
Lauri Peters (1962 - 1967) (divorced)
Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
This blond, blue-eyed, perpetually boyish-looking leading manwhose breakthrough role, in 1969's Midnight Cowboy was that of a male prostitute-helped define the "sensitive" man for American movie audiences of the 1970s and 1980s. Voight, the son of a Czechoslovakian-American golf pro, embraced the dramatic arts while still a teenager, and worked his way from highschool stages to Broadway while still in his 20s. His first film, a superhero satire titled Fearless Frank was made in 1965 but wasn't widely released until 1969, after his big splash (and Oscar nomination) as hick hustler Joe Buck in Cowboy Other early films include Hour of the Gun (1967) and Out of It (1969). Voight went on to appear in several "antiestablishment" films, including Mike Nichols' clumsy adaptation of Catch-22 and The Revolutionary (both 1970). He was also part of a superb ensemble cast in the harrowing thriller Deliverance (1972), which is still one of his best-remembered films.
Voight made a few pictures of varying quality-including The All-American Boy (1973), Conrack, The Odessa File (both 1974), and End of the Game (1976)-over the next few years, before finding another truly great part: that of a quadriplegic Vietnam War vet in Coming Home (1978), opposite Jane Fonda. His moving performance won him a Best Actor Academy Award, but again, it was difficult to find other parts of commensurate quality. He starred in a soppy remake of The Champ (1979), and in Hal Ashby's troubled production of Lookin' to Get Out (1982, which Voight cowrote and coproduced) before producing the sentimental Table for Five (1983), in which he played a widower suddenly forced to raise his children singlehandedly.
His over-the-top performance in the action/allegory Runaway Train (1985, from a story by Akira Kurosawa) was atypical, to say the least, but earned him a third Oscar nomination. He followed it with Desert Bloom (1986). Voight underwent a spiritual reawakening near the end of the 1980s, often exhorting puzzled interviewers of the need for man's transcendence of evil, while trying to get intellectually related film projects off the ground. Eternity a 1990 film he wrote and acted in, has not been widely seen, but sheds some light on his current worldview: it deals with a TV reporter, trying to uncover government corruption and falling for a model who's a tool of the very forces he's trying to expose. He has also been seen in the TV movies Chernobyl: The Final Warning (1991), The Last of His Tribe (1992), Rainbow Warrior (1993), the miniseries "Return to Lonesome Dove" (1993), taking over Tommy Lee Jones' part as Woodrow Call, and The Tin Soldier (1995), which he also directed. |  |
