|
 |
|
 |
| |
|
| |
Here you are: >>
Home  Celebrities Biographies B Brad Pitt |
|
Feb 20, 2008 at 12:30 AM |
 William Bradley "Brad" Pitt (born December 18, 1963) is an American actor, film producer, and social activist. He became famous during the mid 1990s after starring in several major Hollywood films. Pitt was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award, both of which were for his role in the 1995 film Twelve Monkeys.
Pitt is consistently cited by popular media as one of the most attractive men alive and is regarded as a Hollywood A-lister. His former marriage to actress Jennifer Aniston and current relationship with actress Angelina Jolie have been widely covered in the world media. He is the father of four children with Jolie, one biological, all of whom have also received media coverage. Since his connection with Jolie, he has become increasingly involved in social issues, both domestically and internationally.
Early life
Pitt was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, the son of Jane Etta (née Hillhouse), a high school counselor, and William Alvin Pitt, a truck company owner. Along with his brother Doug and sister Julie Neal, he grew up in Springfield, Missouri, where the family moved soon after his birth. Pitt was raised a Baptist. He attended Kickapoo High School, where he was involved in sports, debating, student government, and acting. He attended the Missouri School of Journalism at the University of Missouri–Columbia.
Career
Early career
In 1987, Pitt arrived in Beverly Hills, California. He studied under acting coach Roy London for six years. He first appeared in the sitcom Head of the Class alongside the show's star, Robin Givens. He also guest-starred in two episodes of Growing Pains. Pitt appeared as Chris in the long-running soap Another World. While auditioning for the show Our House, he was asked to read for another part, and found himself playing Shalane McCall's boyfriend Charles on the Friday night time soap Dallas. He also had a number of roles in prime-time series, such as Thirtysomething, 21 Jump Street, and Freddy's Nightmares. Pitt appeared uncredited in both Less Than Zero and Charlie Sheen's No Man's Land, before appearing in Cutting Class, about a maniac stalking cheerleaders.
Moderate success
In 1988, Pitt had his first starring role, in The Dark Side of the Sun, where he played a young American taken by his family to the Adriatic to find a remedy for a skin condition. The movie was shot in Yugoslavia in the summer of '88 with Pitt being paid $1,523 per week for seven weeks. However, with editing nearly complete, war broke out and much of the footage was lost; the film was released years later. Pitt won a part in the TV movie Too Young to Die?, about an abused teenager given the death penalty for murder. Pitt played the part of a drug addict, Silly Canton, who took advantage of a runaway played by Juliette Lewis.
In 1991, Pitt starred, along with Vera Martins, as Joe Maloney in Across the Tracks, in which he portrayed a high school runner with a difficult criminal brother played by Ricky Schroder. Pitt attracted broader public attention from a supporting role in Thelma & Louise, where he played a small-time criminal drifter who befriends Thelma (Geena Davis). His love scene with Davis, which showed Pitt topless and wearing a cowboy hat has been referred to as "iconic", often cited as the moment that defined Pitt as a "sex symbol".
After Thelma & Louise, Pitt starred alongside Catherine Keener and Nick Cave in the low budget, Tom DiCillo-directed 1991 film Johnny Suede, as an awkward dreamer who aspired to be a big-haired rock star. Pitt had agreed to play the part before Thelma & Louise was released. After appearing in Cool World, Pitt starred in Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It in 1992, for which Pitt learned fly fishing by casting off of Hollywood buildings. In 1993 came Kalifornia, a road movie in which he played a scruffy serial killer alongside Juliette Lewis and X-Files actor David Duchovny.
1994-2000: Mainstream success and acclaim
In 1994, Pitt played vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac in the movie adaptation of Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire. The role of the eighteenth-century vampire required Pitt to endure several hours of make-up being applied every day to achieve the characteristic white skin; Pitt wore a pair of luminous green eyes, vampire fangs, and a shoulder-length hairpiece to complete the appearance. Pitt's co-stars included the eleven-year-old Kirsten Dunst, Tom Cruise, Christian Slater, and Antonio Banderas. He then starred in Legends of the Fall and Se7en. In Se7en, Pitt starred alongside Morgan Freeman as the police detective David Mills who hunts a serial killer played by Kevin Spacey. Pitt was then nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Jeffrey Goines in the 1995 film Twelve Monkeys.
In 1997, Pitt starred alongside Harrison Ford as the IRA terrorist Rory Devany in The Devil's Own, the first of several films where Pitt used an Irish accent in his performance. That same year he played the main role of Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer in the Jean Jacques Annaud film Seven Years in Tibet. Pitt trained for months for the role, which demanded a great deal of trekking and mountain climbing, by rock climbing in California and the Alps with his co-star, English actor David Thewlis. Due to the themes of Tibetan nationalism in the film, the Chinese government banned Pitt and Thewlis from entering China for life.
In 1998, Pitt starred as the main character in the film Meet Joe Black, where he played a personification of Death inhabiting the body of a young man in order to learn what it is like to be human. The film gave Pitt another chance to work alongside Welsh actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, with whom he had previously worked on Legends of the Fall. In 1999, Pitt starred in Fight Club, an adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel. Directed by Se7en's David Fincher, Pitt portrayed the highly complex and colorful character of Tyler Durden.
In 2000, Pitt played the role of Mickey, an Irish Gypsy boxer in the gangster movie Snatch, alongside Vinnie Jones and Benicio del Toro. The film was a wild caper involving a diamond heist, the Russian and American mafia and the shady underground world, that saw Pitt brought in as a ringer by two failing promoters. The movie saw him moving on from the conventional Irish accent he attempted in The Devil's Own; Pitt created a just-barely-intelligible accent suggesting the Irish Gypsies, referred to as Pikeys in the movie. Pitt continued to train for the role, and honed his boxing skills at Ricky English's gym in Watford.
 2000s: Ascension to the A-list
In 2000, Pitt filmed the Cold War thriller Spy Game in which he starred alongside veteran actor and look-alike Robert Redford, who played the role of his mentor. In 2001, Pitt worked with long-term friend Julia Roberts in the comical road movie The Mexican. At the end of the year, Pitt finished filming Ocean's Eleven with George Clooney and Matt Damon, a remake of the 1960s version which starred Frank Sinatra.
Since then, he has starred in numerous films, including Ocean's Twelve and the epic Troy, based on the Iliad, in which he portrayed the legendary hero Achilles. Ironically, during the production of Troy, Pitt injured his Achilles tendon, delaying production for several weeks. In 2005, Pitt starred in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, in which he and Angelina Jolie played husband and wife assassins.
In March 2006, it was announced that Paramount had purchased the rights to The Sparrow for Pitt's production company, Plan B, and that Pitt would be playing the lead role of Sandoz. In June 2006 it was announced that Paramount and Plan B will be working on a new zombie film called World War Z, based on the book of the same name by Max Brooks.
Pitt made his return to Hollywood in late 2006 with Alejandro González Iñárritu's critically acclaimed Babel, starring alongside Cate Blanchett. The movie garnered a total of seven Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, one of which was a Golden Globe nomination for Pitt as Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture. The movie has since become Pitt's highest grossing drama. That same year, he also produced the eventual Best Picture winner, The Departed.
Other projects
Pitt has appeared in television commercials designed for the Asian market, advertising such diverse products as Edwin Jeans, the Toyota Altis, and Japanese canned coffee. He also appeared in a Heineken commercial which aired during the 2005 Super Bowl; it was directed by David Fincher, who directed Pitt in the feature films Se7en and Fight Club.
Together with Jennifer Aniston and Paramount Pictures head Brad Grey, Pitt founded the production company Plan B. Aniston is no longer a partner in the company, although she is still attached to many projects that were set up before her divorce from Pitt. The company produced the blockbuster Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, starring Johnny Depp.
Pitt made a guest appearance in an eighth-season episode of Friends, as a man who has a grudge against Aniston's character Rachel Green, lent his voice on an episode of King of the Hill, where he played Boomhauer's brother, Patch Boomhauer, and on an episode of MTV's Jackass, in which he took part in a staged abduction of himself. In a later Jackass episode, he and several cast-members ran wild through the streets of Los Angeles in gorilla suits.
Pitt has been an active supporter of research into diseases such as AIDS. He is the narrator of the acclaimed Public Television series Rx for Survival: A Global Health Challenge, which discusses current important global health issues. Pitt is behind Not On Our Watch, an organization that focuses global attention and resources to stop and prevent mass atrocities such as in Darfur, along with George Clooney, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Jerry Weintraub.
Pitt is also a knowledgeable fan of architecture, particularly that of Frank Lloyd Wright, and has helped the National Trust for Historic Preservation raise money.
Personal life
Marriage to Jennifer Aniston
Pitt met Friends actress Jennifer Aniston in 1998 and married her during an enclosed wedding ceremony in Malibu on July 29, 2000. The couple ensured that the ceremony would be a private affair by hiring hundreds of guards to block any attempts of invasion by the paparazzi; just one wedding picture was released to the media. Not long after the wedding, Pitt sued Damiani International, the company which had made the wedding ring he gave Aniston, for selling replica "Brad and Jennifer" rings. According to Pitt, the ring was his design and was to be exclusive. Under the settlement reached in January 2002, Pitt would design jewelry for Damiani that Aniston would model in ads, and the company would stop selling the copies.
Though their marriage was, for years, considered the rare Hollywood success, rumors of marital problems began circulating, and the Pitts announced their separation on January 7, 2005. As Pitt's marriage to Aniston drew to a close, he and actress Angelina Jolie were involved in a well-publicized Hollywood scandal in which Jolie was often painted as the "other woman", largely due to their chemistry during the filming of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. While Jolie and Pitt both denied any claims of adultery, speculations continued to mount throughout 2004 and early 2005. In an interview with Ann Curry in June 2005, Jolie explained, "To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn't be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife."
In early 2005, the concept of a "troubled marriage" - and arguably his own - inspired Pitt to cooperate with photographer Steven Klein for a photoshoot entitled "Domestic Bliss" for W magazine. The spread showed Pitt and Jolie as a 1963 married couple with children. Pitt expressed the desire to tell a darker, truer tale, one that explored the "unidentifiable malaise" that often haunts a seemingly happy couple. "You don't know what's wrong", he remarked, "because the marriage is everything you signed up for." For her part, Aniston later cited the shoot as evidence that Pitt has "a sensitivity chip that's missing."
Aniston filed for divorce on March 25; the divorce was finalized on October 2, 2005.
Relationship with Angelina Jolie
One month after Aniston filed for divorce, in April 2005, a set of paparazzi photos emerged that seemed to confirm the rumors of a relationship between Pitt and actress Angelina Jolie. The photos, which were reportedly sold for $500,000, showed Pitt, Jolie and her son Maddox at a beach in Kenya. During the summer, the pair were seen together with increasing frequency, and the entertainment media dubbed the couple "Brangelina". Two months later, the highly-anticipated July 2005 issue of W magazine hit newsstands, featuring Pitt and Jolie posed as a couple.
In July 2005, Pitt accompanied Jolie to Ethiopia, where Jolie adopted her second child, a six-month-old girl named Zahara; later Jolie indicated that she and Pitt made the decision to adopt the child together. In December 2005, it was confirmed that Pitt was seeking to legally adopt Jolie's two children as his; per the legal requirements, classified advertisements in the Los Angeles paper Daily Commerce announced the name change request. On January 19, 2006, a judge in California approved this request, and the children's legal surnames were formally changed to "Jolie-Pitt".
During a charity trip to Haiti with Wyclef Jean, rumors began to circulate that Jolie was pregnant. On January 11, 2006, Jolie confirmed to People magazine that she was pregnant with Pitt's child. On May 27, 2006, Jolie gave birth to a daughter, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, at the Cottage Medi-Clinic Hospital in Swakopmund, Namibia. Public interest in the child was immense, as evidenced by an August 2006 survey, in which 41 percent of participating 18-to-24-year-old American adults correctly identified that the couple had named their baby Shiloh.
Pitt and Jolie are not married. In 2006, Pitt said, "Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able."
The Jolie-Pitt children
Maddox Chivan Jolie-Pitt
Born on August 5, 2001 as Rath Vibol in Cambodia; adopted at seven months old on March 10, 2002. Prior to the adoption, he lived in an orphanage in Cambodia's second-largest city, Battambang. Jolie's adoption of Maddox, which took place during her former marriage to actor Billy Bob Thornton, is often credited with sparking the celebrity adoption trend of the 2000s. Maddox has gained considerable celebrity in his own right; he appears regularly in the tabloid media and was named the "cutest celebrity kid" in 2006.
Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt
Born on November 29, 2003 as Pham Quang Sang in Vietnam; adopted at three years old on March 16, 2007. On March 2, 2007, Vu Duc Long, the head of Vietnam's international adoption department, confirmed that Jolie had filed papers to adopt a child from Vietnam. Two weeks later, on March 16, Jolie traveled to Vietnam with Maddox to pick up her new son. Pax had lived in the Tam Binh orphanage since he was found abandoned outside a Ho Chi Minh City hospital shortly after his birth. Since the orphanage does not allow unmarried couples to adopt, Jolie adopted Pax as a single parent, with Pitt later adopting his son domestically.
Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt
Born on January 8, 2005 as Tena Adam or Yemsrach in Ethiopia; adopted at 6 months old on July 6, 2005. Jolie adopted her from a Wide Horizons for Children orphanage in Addis Ababa. Shortly after they returned to the United States, Zahara was hospitalized for salmonella-intestinal infection, as well as dehydration and malnutrition. Jolie stated that "she was six months and not nine pounds. Her skin, you could squeeze it, it stuck together". Although it was initially reported in the media that Zahara had been orphaned by AIDS, in 2007 media outlets stated that Zahara's biological mother, Mentewabe Dawit, was still alive and had abandoned her shortly after giving birth. Dawit denied reports claiming she wanted the child back, instead saying she thought Zahara was a "very fortunate human being to be adopted by a world famous lady."
Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt
Born on May 27, 2006 at Cottage Medi-Clinic Hospital in Swakopmund, Namibia; Pitt and Jolie's only biological child. Shiloh was born by a scheduled cesarean section due to breech presentation; Jolie was assisted during the birth by the couple's Los Angeles obstetrician and local staff. Pitt confirmed that their newborn daughter would have a Namibian passport. The couple decided to offer the first pictures of Shiloh through the distributor Getty Images themselves, rather than allowing paparazzi to take these extremely valuable snapshots. People magazine paid more than $4.1 million for the North American rights, while British magazine Hello! obtained the international rights for roughly $3.5 million; the total rights sale earned up to $10 million worldwide - the most expensive celebrity image of all time. All profits were donated to an undisclosed charity by Pitt and Jolie. On July 26, 2006, Madame Tussauds of New York unveiled a wax figure of two-month-old Shiloh; she was the first infant to be recreated in wax by Madame Tussauds.
Life in New Orleans
The family divides its time between Los Angeles, California and New Orleans, Louisiana. In an interview with the Times-Picayune, while filming The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Pitt said:
“ I can't describe why we're allowed to live a more normal life (in New Orleans). Living in the French Quarter is a thrill for us. We have some semblance of real family life. People have been very, very gracious with us. If we're on the front deck, people go by and say, 'Hi.' Then they go on their way, very friendly.”
In December 2006, Pitt gathered a group of housing professionals together in the Hurricane Katrina-stricken New Orleans to begin planning a project that Pitt calls Make It Right, with the goal of financing and constructing 150 new houses in New Orleans' Ninth Ward. The houses are being designed with an emphasis on sustainability and affordability, with the hope that the project can and will be replicated throughout the city. Thirteen architectural firms are involved in the project, many of which are donating their services. Pitt and philanthropist Steve Bing have each committed to matching $5 million in donations.
Popular esteem
In 1995, Pitt was chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 25 sexiest stars in film history. Pitt has also twice been named the Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine.
Pitt was also prominently featured in the December 2006 Art Issue of Vanity Fair. He appears on the cover in nothing but a pair of white boxers. The cover promotes an article on the Robert Wilson video portraits, a production of LAB HD that includes numerous celebrities and noted personalities. This cover has drawn criticism from Pitt because although he had signed a release for the image, he did not expect it to end up on the cover of Vanity Fair more than a year later. The video portrait, which represents Pitt's first effort in avant-garde cinema, was exhibited at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.
In 2007, Pitt was listed among artists and entertainers as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World. He was credited, along with his best friend Tiago Miranda Paulo, with using "his star power to get people to look at places and stories that cameras don't usually catch." |
|
Last Updated ( Feb 20, 2008 at 12:37 AM )
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
