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Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy (1969)

Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy (1969)

Vintage photo. Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969).

American actor Jon Voight (1938) became a star playing the street hustler Joe Buck in the groundbreaking film Midnight Cowboy (1969). He had a successful career taking on challenging leading and character roles in a wide range of films and television shows. Voight is the father of actress Angelina Jolie and actor James Haven.

Jonathan Vincent Voight was born in 1938 in Yonkers, New York. His father was Elmer Voytka, later Voight, a professional golfer, and his mother was Barbara Voight-Kamp. His eldest brother Barry Voight, a volcanologist, was a geology professor at Penn State University. His younger brother is songwriter Wes Voight who, under the alias Chip Taylor, wrote The Troggs' 1966 smash hit 'Wild Thing'. Jon attended Archbishop Stepinac High School, an all-boy school in White Plains, NY. Voight began acting while in high school and earned in 1960 a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He moved to New York City and studied (1960–1964) under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. Voight made his Broadway debut in 1961 in the role of Rolf in The Sound of Music. He continued working in theatre through most of the 1960s and in addition began making guest appearances on such television shows as Naked City, The Defenders, Coronet Blue, and Gunsmoke. Voight's film debut did not come until 1967 when he played the title role in the low-budget crimefighter spoof Fearless Frank (Phillip Kaufman, 1967). Voight also took a small role in the Western, Hour of the Gun (John Sturges, 1967), and a role in Out of It (Paul Williams, 1968). Then he was cast in the Academy Award winner Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) opposite Dustin Hoffman. He garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his performance. Voight appeared in Mike Nichols’s war comedy Catch-22 (1970) and starred as an angry young man in The Revolutionary (Paul Williams, 1970). He delivered a memorable performance as a city businessman forced to fight for his life in Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), and he portrayed the writer Pat Conroy in the film memoir Conrack (Martin Ritt, 1974). Voight followed a lead role in the conventional thriller The Odessa File (Ronald Neame, 1974) with a moving portrayal of a paralysed Vietnam War veteran in the drama Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978) opposite Jane Fonda. It earned him Golden Globe and Oscar awards for best actor; the Cannes Festival also named him best actor for the role. He starred in the sports melodrama The Champ (Franco Zeffirelli, 1979) with Ricky Schroder.

John Voight's output became sparse during the 1980s and early 1990s, although he won the Golden Globe and earned another Oscar nomination for best actor for his turn as an escaped convict in the thriller Runaway Train (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1985), opposite Eric Roberts. Voight made a comeback in Hollywood during the mid-1990s. He played Captain Woodrow Call in the TV miniseries Return to Lonesome Dove (Mike Robe, 1993) and starred opposite Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Michael Mann's crime epic Heat (1995). He played Jim Phelps opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible (Brian De Palma, 1996), a murderous government bureaucrat in Enemy of the State (Tony Scott, 1998), and the father of the title character (played by his real-life daughter, Angelina Jolie) in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001). His unscrupulous attorney Leo F. Drummond in Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker (1997), earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Voight received a supporting actor Oscar nomination for his portrayal of legendary sports broadcaster Howard Cosell in the biopic Ali (Michael Mann, 2001). His later films included the fantasy Holes (Andrew Davis, 2003) and the adventure films National Treasure (Jon Turteltaub, 2004) and Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007). He appeared as the gruff father of an art dealer who befriends a homeless man in Same Kind of Different As Me (Michael Carney, 2017), which was based on the best-selling memoir of the same name. His recent film credits include Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (David Yates, 2016) and the family drama Orphan Horse (Sean McNamara, 2018). Voight also played the title character's father in the TV series Ray Donovan (2013– ), for which he received Emmy Award nominations in 2014 and 2016. Jon Voight was previously married to Marcheline Bertrand and Lauri Peters. Both marriages ended in divorce. With Marcheline Bertrand, he has a son, James Haven Voight (1973) and a daughter Angelina Jolie Voight, aka Angelina Jolie (1975). On 21 November 2019, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Donald Trump.

Sources: Patricia Bauer (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Wikipedia and IMDb.

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Taken on: November 16, 2024

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