Martin Sheen

Ramón Gerard Antonio Estévez, known professionally as Martin Sheen, is an American actor. His work spans more than six decades of television and film, and his accolades include three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and four Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Sheen rose to prominence in his breakthrough roles in Terrence Malick's crime drama Badlands and Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam War drama Apocalypse Now. Sheen is also known for such notable films as The Subject Was Roses, Catch-22, The California Kid, Gandhi, Wall Street, Gettysburg, The American President, Catch Me If You Can, The Departed, Bobby, and Judas and the Black Messiah. He also portrayed Robert F. Kennedy in The Missiles of October, Eddie Slovik in The Execution of Private Slovik, John Dean in Blind Ambition, and John F. Kennedy in Kennedy and Uncle Ben in The Amazing Spider-Man.
Sheen received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his role in Murphy Brown, and later received widespread acclaim portraying President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet in The West Wing, for which he received six nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series tying the record for most nominations without a win in the category. He later played Robert Hanson in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie.
Born and raised in the United States by a Spanish father and an Irish mother, he adopted the stage name Martin Sheen to help him gain acting parts. He is the father of four children, all of whom are actors. Sheen has directed one film, Cadence, in which he appears alongside his sons Charlie and Ramón. He has narrated, produced, and directed documentary projects and has been active in liberal politics.

Early life and education

Sheen was born in Dayton, Ohio, on August 3, 1940, to Mary-Ann and Francisco Estévez Martínez. During birth, Sheen's left arm was crushed by forceps, giving him limited lateral movement of that arm and resulting in the arm being shorter than his right arm. Both of Sheen's parents were immigrants; his mother was Irish, from Borrisokane, County Tipperary, and his father, who was Spanish, was born in Salceda de Caselas, Galicia. After moving to Dayton in the 1930s, his father was a factory worker/machinery inspector at the National Cash Register Company. Sheen's maternal uncle, Michael Phelan, fought in the Irish Civil War as a volunteer in the Anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army, and was imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin. Sheen grew up on Brown Street in the South Park neighborhood, the seventh of ten children. Due to his father's work, the family lived on the island of Bermuda on St. John's Road, Pembroke Parish, where five of his brothers were born. Martin was the first child to be born in Dayton, Ohio, after the family returned from Bermuda. Sheen contracted polio as a child and had to remain bedridden for a year. His doctor's treatment using Sister Kenny's method helped him regain use of his legs.
When Sheen was ten years old, his mother died, and the children faced the possibility of living in an orphanage or foster homes. The family was able to remain together with the assistance of the Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Dayton. Raised as a Catholic, he graduated from Chaminade High School. At fourteen years old he organized a strike of golf caddies while working at a private golf club in Dayton, Ohio. He complained about the golfers, saying: "They often used obscene language in front of us... we were little boys and they were abusive... anti-Semitic.... And they, for the most part, were upstanding members of the community."
Sheen was drawn to acting at a young age, but his father disapproved of his interest in the field. Despite his father's opposition, Sheen borrowed money from a Catholic priest and moved to New York City in his early twenties, hoping to make it as an actor. He spent two years in the Living Theatre company. It was in New York that he met Catholic activist Dorothy Day. Working with her Catholic Worker Movement, he began his commitment to social justice, and would one day go on to play Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement, in Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story. Sheen deliberately failed the entrance examination for the University of Dayton so that he could pursue his acting career.
He adopted his stage name, Martin Sheen, from a combination of the CBS casting director, Robert Dale Martin, who gave him his first big break, and Catholic archbishop and broadcaster, Fulton J. Sheen. In a 2003 Inside the Actors Studio interview, Sheen explained,

Whenever I would call for an appointment, whether it was a job or an apartment, and I would give my name, there was always that hesitation and when I'd get there, it was always gone. So I thought, I got enough problems trying to get an acting job, so I invented Martin Sheen. It's still Estevez officially. I never changed it officially. I never will. It's on my driver's license and passport and everything. I started using Sheen, I thought I'd give it a try, and before I knew it, I started making a living with it and then it was too late. In fact, one of my great regrets is that I didn't keep my name as it was given to me. I knew it bothered my dad.

Career

1963–1979: Rise to prominence

Sheen was greatly influenced by the actor James Dean. Speaking of the impact Dean had on him, Sheen stated, "All of his movies had a profound effect on my life, in my work and all of my generation. He transcended cinema acting. It was no longer acting, it was human behavior." Sheen developed a theatre company with other actors in hopes that a production would earn him recognition. In 1963, he made an appearance in "Nightmare", an episode of the television science fiction series The Outer Limits. In 1964, he co-starred in the Broadway play The Subject Was Roses; he later reprised his role in the 1968 film of the same name, and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor. Sheen also starred in the television production Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play Camino Real directed by Jack Landau and presented by NET, a PBS predecessor. In 1968, he played the titular role in Hamlet, directed by Joseph Papp at The Public Theater, with dialogue mostly in English and some in Spanish as Hamlet's alter ego.
During the 1960s and early 1970s Sheen appeared as a guest star in many popular television series, including Insight, My Three Sons, Flipper, The F.B.I., Mission: Impossible, Hawaii Five-O, Dan August, The Rookies, Columbo, and The Streets of San Francisco. He also had a recurring role as Danny Morgan in Mod Squad. By the early 1970s, Sheen was increasingly focusing on television films and motion pictures. He portrayed Dobbs in the 1970 film adaptation of Catch-22. He then co-starred in the controversial Emmy Award-winning 1972 television film That Certain Summer, said to be the first television movie in America to portray homosexuality in a sympathetic light.
His next important feature film role was in 1973 when he starred with Sissy Spacek in the crime drama Badlands, playing an antisocial multiple murderer. Sheen has stated that his role in Badlands was one of his two favorites, the other being his role as a U.S. Army special operations officer in Apocalypse Now. Also in 1973, Sheen appeared opposite David Janssen in "Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On", the first pilot for the television series Harry O. In 1974, Sheen portrayed a hot rod driver in the television film The California Kid and that same year received an Emmy Award nomination for Best Actor in a television drama for his portrayal of Pvt. Eddie Slovik in the television film The Execution of Private Slovik. Based on an incident that occurred during World War II, the film told the story of the only U.S. soldier to be executed for desertion since the American Civil War.
Sheen's performance led to Francis Ford Coppola's casting him in a lead role as U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard in 1979's Apocalypse Now, gaining him wide recognition. Filming in the Philippine jungle in the typhoon season of 1976, Sheen later said that he was not in good physical condition and was drinking heavily. For the film's opening sequence in a Saigon hotel room, Sheen's portrayal of Willard as heavily intoxicated was aided by Sheen's celebrating his 36th birthday on-set that day, and being actually drunk. Twelve months into filming, Sheen suffered a minor heart attack and had to crawl out to a road for help. While he was recovering, his younger brother Joe Estevez stood in for him in a number of long shots and in some of the voice-overs. Sheen was able to resume filming a few weeks later.
In 1976, he participated in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane as Frank Hallet, the antagonist with bad intentions towards teenager protagonist Rynn Jacobs. Frank was the son of landlady Cora Hallet. In 1979, Sheen acted in The Final Countdown with Kirk Douglas, another actor with family connections to Bermuda.

1980–1998: Established actor

In the early 1980s he had roles in the science fiction war film The Final Countdown, the biographical epic Gandhi, the sports drama That Championship Season, and the drama film Wall Street starring Michael Douglas, and his son Charlie Sheen. He played Captain Hollister in Firestarter opposite Drew Barrymore and David Keith.
Sheen portrayed U.S. President John F. Kennedy in the miniseries Kennedy for which he received nominations for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film. He also portrayed Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in the television special The Missiles of October, White House Chief of Staff A.J. McInnerney in The American President, White House Counsel John Dean in the television mini-series Blind Ambition for which he was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama. In 1991 he narrated the Oliver Stone biographical film JFK.
Other roles include the sinister would-be president Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone, the President in the Lori Loughlin-Chris Noth television mini-series, Medusa's Child, the president in the short film Family Attraction. In 1993, Sheen's sympathetic portrayal of General Robert E. Lee in the Ronald Maxwell film Gettysburg met with acclaim.
Sheen has performed voice-over work as the narrator for the Eyewitness series in the US for the first and second seasons and as the "real" Seymour Skinner in the controversial Simpsons episode "The Principal and the Pauper".