Jon Voight, American actor and producer
Jonathan Vincent Voight (; born December 29, 1938) is an American actor. He came to prominence in the late 1960s with his Academy Award-nominated performance as Joe Buck, a would-be gigolo, in Midnight Cowboy (1969). During the 1970s, he became a Hollywood star with his portrayals of a businessman mixed up with murder in Deliverance (1972); a paraplegic Vietnam veteran in Coming Home (1978), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor; and a penniless ex-boxing champion in the remake of The Champ (1979).
Voight's output became sparse during the 1980s and early 1990s, although he won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as the ruthless bank robber Oscar "Manny" Manheim in Runaway Train (1985). He made a comeback in Hollywood during the mid-1990s, starring alongside Sam Neill in the film The Rainbow Warrior (1993) about the French bombing of the eponymous ship in Auckland, and in Michael Mann's crime epic Heat (1995) opposite Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. He portrayed Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible (1996), a corrupt NSA agent in Enemy of the State (1998), and the unscrupulous attorney Leo F. Drummond in Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker (1997), which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Voight gave critically acclaimed biographical performances during the 2000s, appearing as sportscaster Howard Cosell in Ali (2001) for which his supporting performance was nominated for the Academy Award, the Golden Globe Award and a Critics Choice Award, and also as Nazi officer Jürgen Stroop in Uprising (2001), as Franklin D. Roosevelt in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (2001) and as Pope John Paul II in the eponymous miniseries (2005). Voight also appears in Showtime's television series Ray Donovan as Mickey Donovan, a role that brought him newfound critical and audience acclaim and his fourth Golden Globe win in 2014. He also appeared as an antagonist on the thriller series 24 in its seventh season.
Voight is the winner of one Academy Award, having been nominated for four. He has also won four Golden Globe Awards and has been nominated for eleven. On November 21, 2019, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. He is the father of actress Angelina Jolie and actor James Haven.
1938Dec, 29
Jon Voight
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Events on 1938
- 18Feb
Nanking Massacre
Second Sino-Japanese War: During the Nanking Massacre the Nanking Safety Zone International Committee is renamed "Nanking International Rescue Committee" and the safety zone in place for refugees falls apart. - 12Mar
Austria
Anschluss: German troops occupy and absorb Austria. - 23Sep
Munich Agreement
Mobilization of the Czechoslovak army in response to the Munich Agreement. - 30Sep
Munich Agreement
Britain, France, Germany and Italy sign the Munich Agreement, allowing Germany to occupy the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. - 30Oct
The War of the Worlds (radio drama)
Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States.