William "Willem" Dafoe Jr. (born July 22, 1955) is a versatile, award-winning and Oscar-nominated American actor. He is a founding member of the experimental theatre company The Wooster Group.

Biography

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Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, the seventh of eight children, he acquired the nickname "Willem" in childhood. After graduating from Appleton East High School, he studied drama at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but left before graduation in order to join the newly formed avant-garde group Theatre X. After touring with Theatre X for four years in the United States and Europe, he moved to New York City and joined the Performance Group, where he met director Elizabeth LeCompte. LeCompte and Dafoe left the Performance Group together became professional collaborators, and began a relationship. Their son, Jack, was born in 1982. Dafoe married Italian actress Giada Colagrande on March 25, 2005.

Career

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Dafoe's film career began in 1981, when he was cast in Heaven's Gate, but his role was removed from the film during editing. A year later he starred as the leader of a motorcycle gang in The Loveless, but his first breakthrough film role was as the compassionate Sergeant Elias in Platoon (1986). He has since become a popular character actor; due to his harsh facial features, he is often typecast as unstable or villainous characters, most recently the Green Goblin in the Spider-Man movies. Before that, he was briefly considered for the role of The Joker by Tim Burton and Sam Hamm for the Batman film in 1989. Hamm recalls "We thought, 'Well, Willem Dafoe looks just like The Joker.'" The role ended up going to Jack Nicholson ^* He also played Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which moved Sergio Leone to exclaim, "This is the face of a murderer, not of Our Lord!" He once remarked "To this day, I can't believe I was so brazen to think I could pull off the Jesus role," though Dafoe received acclaim despite the controversy surrounding the film.

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