Ethan Hawke
Ethan Green Hawke is an American actor, author, and filmmaker. Over a four-decade career on both stage and screen, Hawke has become known for his versatility across a wide range of roles and acclaimed collaborations with director Richard Linklater. Prolific in both independent films and blockbusters, he has received numerous accolades including a Daytime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for five Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, and a Tony Award.
Hawke made his film debut at age fourteen in Explorers and gained recognition for starring in Dead Poets Society. He established himself as a leading man with the films Reality Bites, Gattaca, and Great Expectations. Hawke received Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations for his roles in the crime thriller Training Day and the coming-of-age drama Boyhood, the latter also garnering him BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations. He was Oscar-nominated twice for screenwriting two films from the Before trilogy, in which he also starred. He earned Best Actor nominations at the Oscars, BAFTAs, and Golden Globes for portraying lyricist Lorenz Hart in the biopic Blue Moon.
Hawke garnered commercial success with Sinister, The Purge, The Magnificent Seven, and the Black Phone films, and was praised for Maudie and First Reformed. He directed the films Chelsea Walls, The Hottest State, Blaze, and Wildcat, as well as the documentaries Seymour: An Introduction, The Last Movie Stars, and Highway 99: A Double Album. He portrayed abolitionist John Brown in the miniseries The Good Lord Bird, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination, and appeared as Arthur Harrow in the Marvel miniseries Moon Knight.
Hawke has appeared in many theater productions. He made his Broadway debut in 1992 in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 2007 for his performance in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia. In 2010, he was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play for directing Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind. Divorced from actress Uma Thurman, he has been married to Ryan Shawhughes since 2008; he has two children from each marriage, including actors Maya and Levon Hawke.
Early life
Ethan Green Hawke was born in Austin, Texas, on November 6, 1970. His father, James Hawke, was an insurance actuary, while his mother, Leslie, was a charity worker and teacher. Hawke's parents were high school sweethearts from Fort Worth, Texas, and married when his mother was seventeen. Hawke was born a year later, while both of his parents were attending the University of Texas in Austin. His parents separated and later divorced in 1974, when he was four years old.After his parents separated, Hawke was raised by his mother. Hawke recalled first donning different personas as a child trying to please his parents, by pretending to be an "artistic, literary, conscientious political thinker" for his mother and a well-mannered, religious football lover when visiting his father. Hawke and his mother moved several times before settling in Brooklyn, where he attended the Packer Collegiate Institute. Hawke often shifted his personality to fit in with different groups of peers that he encountered in their moves. When Hawke was ten or twelve, his mother remarried and the family relocated to West Windsor Township, New Jersey. There, he attended West Windsor Plainsboro High School before transferring to the Hun School of Princeton, a boarding school from which he graduated in 1988. Around this time, Hawke volunteered with his mother's organization, the Alex Fund, a charity that supported educational opportunities for underprivileged children in Romania.
In high school, Hawke aspired to become a writer while also developing a strong interest in acting. During his time at the Hun School, he also studied acting at the McCarter Theatre, located on the Princeton University campus. He made his stage debut at age thirteen in the theater's production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. He later performed in his high school's productions of Meet Me in St. Louis and You Can't Take It with You. After graduating, Hawke continued to study acting at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh but left after being cast in Dead Poets Society. He later enrolled in New York University's English program for two years before leaving to pursue acting full-time.
Career
1985–1993: Early years and breakthrough
With his mother's permission, Hawke attended his first casting call at age fourteen and was cast in Joe Dante's Explorers, playing a misfit schoolboy alongside River Phoenix. Although the film received positive reviews, it performed poorly at the box office, leading Hawke to step away from acting for a time after its release. He later described the experience as difficult to handle at such a young age, remarking, "I would never recommend that a kid act". In 1989, Hawke had his breakthrough role as a shy student in Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society. The film was critically and commercially successful and won the BAFTA Award for Best Film. Reflecting on the impact of its success, Hawke later said, "I didn't want to be an actor and I went back to college. But then the film's success was so monumental that I was getting offers to be in such interesting movies and be in such interesting places and it seemed silly to pursue anything else." After filming Dead Poets Society, he auditioned for his next project, the comedy-drama Dad, and settled in New York City due to its prominent theater industry and variety of opportunites.In 1991, Hawke co-founded Malaparte, a Manhattan-based theater company that operated until 2000. His first leading role came with Randal Kleiser's film White Fang, an adaptation of Jack London's novel of the same name, in which he portrayed a young Klondike gold prospector who befriends a wolfdog. A writer for The Oregonian appreciated how he kept the film from "being ridiculous or overly sentimental", while Roger Ebert praised how he was "properly callow at the beginning and properly matured at the end"; Hawke himself later called it the "single best experience of my acting life". In A Midnight Clear, his character leads a group of American soldiers during World War II, tasked with capturing a small squad of German troops stationed in the Ardennes forest in France. Hawke made his Broadway debut in 1992, portraying the playwright Konstantin Treplev in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at the Lyceum Theater in Manhattan. He then played Nando Parrado, one of the survivors of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash in the Andes, in the survival drama Alive, adapted from Piers Paul Read's 1974 non-fiction book.
1994–2000: Established leading man
Hawke's next role was in the Generation X drama Reality Bites, in which he portrayed a disaffected slacker who mocks the ambitions of his love interest, played by Winona Ryder. Ebert liked his "convincing and noteworthy" performance, writing that "Hawke captures all the right notes as the boorish Troy". Caryn James observed that his "subtle and strong performance makes it clear that Troy feels things too deeply to risk failure and admit he's feeling anything at all". The film did moderately well at the box office, grossing $41million on a budget of $11million. Hawke starred in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, the first installment of the Before film trilogy. He portrayed a young American man who meets a young French woman—portrayed by Julie Delpy—and they both disembark in Vienna. The reception for the film and Hawke's performance was positive, with the former receiving a 100percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.Hawke directed the music video for Lisa Loeb's US Billboard Hot 100 number-one single "Stay "; Loeb was then a member of Hawke's theater company. Spin magazine named the video its Video of the Year in 1994. Hawke appeared in a 1995 production of Sam Shepard's Buried Child, directed by Gary Sinize at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. He published his first novel, titled The Hottest State, in 1996, which tells the story of a love affair between a young actor and a singer. He described writing the book as both the "scariest one of the best things I ever did." Entertainment Weekly said that Hawke "opens himself to rough literary scrutiny in The Hottest State. If Hawke is serious he'd do well to work awhile in less exposed venues." The New York Times thought Hawke did "a fine job of showing what it's like to be young and full of confusion", concluding that The Hottest State was ultimately "a sweet love story".
Hawke called his script in Andrew Niccol's science fiction film Gattaca "one of the more interesting" ones he had read in "a number of years". In it, he played the role of a man who infiltrates a society of genetically perfect humans by assuming another man's identity. Ebert called him a good choice for the lead role, stating that he "combin the restless dreams of a 'Godchild' with the plausible exterior of a lab baby". Alongside Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert De Niro, he starred in Great Expectations, a contemporary film adaptation of Charles Dickens's 1861 novel of the same name, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Hawke criticized the film's time of release, stating that "nobody gave a shit about anything but Titanic for about nine months after particularly another romance". He collaborated with Linklater once again on The Newton Boys, based on the true story of the Newton Gang. The film saw generally negative reception; Rotten Tomatoes' consensus said that the "sharp" cast made up for "the frustrations of a story puzzlingly short on dramatic tension".
In 1999, he starred as Kilroy in the Tennessee Williams play Camino Real at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. That year, Hawke starred in Snow Falling on Cedars, adapted from David Guterson's novel of the same name. Set in the 1950s, he played a young reporter who covers the murder trial of a fisherman. The film received a tepid response, with Entertainment Weekly commenting that "Hawke scrunches himself into such a dark knot that we have no idea who Ishmael is or why he acts as he does". Hawke's next film role was in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet, in which he played the titular character. The adaptation set William Shakespeare's play in contemporary New York City, a choice Hawke said made the story feel more "accessible and vital".