JON VOIGHT BIOGRAPHY


Born: 29 December 1933
Where: New York, New York, USA
Awards: Won 1 Oscar, 3 Golden Globes nominated for 1 BAFTA, 1 Emmy
Height: 6' 1"
Filmography: The Complete List


With his boyish features and baby-blue eyes, Jon Voight could easily have taken the James Dean route to eternal stardom. Two major roles, in Midnight Cowboy and Deliverance - and then bang, gone, but remembered forever as both a pin-up and a consummate, risk-taking artiste, personifying his generation. He could also have done a De Niro - sought out roles that suited him and replayed himself over and over, his very intensity keeping audiences interested. Instead, he took the hardest route of all. He decided, after his first phenomenal success, that he should only take work of depth and meaning. Sounds crazy, doesn't it, considering Hollywood's perennial dearth of both. Yet, for better or worse, Voight battled to maintain this high moral standard for nearly a quarter of a century and, even now that he's mellowed, he remains one of the most fascinating and powerful actors we have. Furthermore, he's one of the very few convincing role models Hollywood might offer to the youth of today. As far as charisma and anti-establishment attitude go, he knocks his supposedly rebellious daughter, Angelina Jolie into a cocked hat.

He was born Jonathan Voight in Yonkers, New York, on the 29th of December, 1938, a matter of months before the outbreak of World War 2. His father, Elmer, was a Czech-American and a golf pro. Though a back injury in his youth ensured he would not enter competitions beyond the age of 20, he nevertheless became an excellent golf teacher. His wife, Barbara, became a homemaker, and was later described by Jon as "a benign general". She was very active, very responsible, and a terrible cook, for which she was mercilessly teased by her three boys, each of whom would become world-renowned in their chosen field. Barry would become a feted expert on volcanoes, working out of Penn State University, while James Wesley - under the name Chip Taylor - would become a legendary songwriter, penning such classics as Wild Thing and Angel Of The Morning.
And then there was Jon. Jon was a born performer, wanting to act from the age of three. Attending the local Archbishop Stepinac High School (exclusively for Catholic boys), he involved himself in school productions in any way he could, both acting and - due to a genuine ability in drawing, painting etc - even designing sets for plays.

Jon was a happy, adaptable and, above all, decent student. Taking to heart his religion's call for us to be good to one another, he found it hard to accept that his Protestant friends were to inevitably burn for Eternity. "I was always trying to be a liaison between the attitudes I was being taught by the Church and my buddies," he later recalled . "I would say 'Well, you don't have to take it THAT seriously'." This was a problem Jon would face up until his twenties, as after high school he attended the Catholic University of America, in Washington DC. The system of morality he formed during his Catholic education - altered, and maybe purified by the loving spirit of the Sixties counter-culture - would inform his choice of roles until he reached his mid-Fifties.

Graduating from University in 1960, after a spell in the Army Reserves at Fort Dix, he went to New York to be an actor. Joining the Neighbourhood Playhouse, he studied under Sanford Meisner for the next four years (he'd later work with the Center Theatre Group). And, boy, did he need to study. In the same year he arrived in New York, he made his off-Broadway debut in a play called O Oysters, garnering one review that said he could "neither walk nor talk". Ouch.

For a year, Voight struggled to find work, worried that his height (he's 6' 4") would count against him. Then his life was changed quite drastically by a chance encounter. One day, unable to afford a cab, he was standing forlornly in the rain when a fellow on a scooter pulled up, asking him if he wanted a lift. It turned out the man was a theatrical agent for musical acts and, within two days, he'd scored Voight an audition for the original Broadway production of The Sound Of Music. On the day of the audition, Jon was suffering an almighty cold, but his ability was spotted by the show's creator, Richard Rogers, who chose him to play Rolf, the young boy who turns Nazi. His girlfriend, Liesl Von Trapp, was played by Laurie Peters, an actress then on a good filmic run, appearing opposite James Stewart in Mr Hobbs Takes A Vacation and Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday. She and Voight would marry in 1962. He now says he was not ready for such commitment, which explains why they were divorced five years later.
Jon continued to battle for parts. He won a few minor TV roles, in such series as Gunsmoke, but mostly his life was the theatre. Here he made many friends and connections, one being the young Dustin Hoffman who Voight met when appearing in a production of Arthur Miller's View From The Bridge (Hoffman was the assistant to director Ulu Grosbard). In 1966, Jon spent a season at the California National Shakespeare Festival, then performed in That Summer, That Fall for which, in 1967, he won a Theatre World award.



Voight was gutted, almost literally. He says that, due to losing the role, for days he suffered a terrible stomach ache and couldn't sleep. Then, out of the blue, came the good news. Sarrazin, under contract to Universal, could not gain a temporary release. Once again, Joe Buck was up for grabs and, after the role was turned down by many other actors, it at last fell to Voight.

John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy was a huge hit, also becoming the first X-rated movie to win Best Picture at the Oscars. Both Voight and Hoffman were nominated as Best Actor. This was good for Hoffman, who'd been nominated two years earlier for The Graduate, but amazing for Voight. The attention was mindblowing, though John Wayne beat them both to the Oscar, as well as the Golden Globe. Jon recalls going into a store to buy presents for his nieces, then slowly becoming aware that 100 people were looking over his shoulder, eager to see what he was purchasing.

So tall and so pretty, he was hard to cast. And, believing actors should do only responsible and meaningful work, it was hard to persuade him to take the roles he was offered. In the next five years, he made just six movies. Staying true to his word, these included Catch-22, Joseph Heller's mocking treatise on the absurdities of war, The Odessa File, where he played a German journalist chasing ex-members of the SS, and Conrack, based on the true story of Pat Conroy, a teacher of illiterate black children in South Carolina (this was directed by Martin Ritt, soon to cause a bigger political stir with the Oscar-winning Norma Rae). Well-intentioned, all of them, but none had the effect of his biggest hit of the period, 1972's Deliverance. Here, he was Ed Gentry, one of a group of "civilised" city dwellers who take a fun-trip down a Down South river, only to be tested to the limit by both environment and locals and, in one peculiarly unpleasant case, made to squeal like a pig (boy).

Aside from a role in End Of The Game, directed by his Odessa File co-star Maximillian Schell, Voight did not act throughout the mid-Seventies. This was partly because he'd married again, to the part-Iroquois Marcheline Bertrand, with whom he had two children - James Haven and Angelina (later Ms Jolie). But there were also no parts he felt to be "responsible". After Deliverance, he did try for the role of McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but lost to Jack Nicholson (he was offered Love Story by way of recompense, but thought it too corny). Instead, as he would all his life, he dedicated much of his time to charity work. A journalist visitor to his home would later note the posters on his wall - Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King. Voight's role models are hard to live up to, but he has tried, variously working to help drug victims in rehab, the homeless, the farmers, immigrants, the elderly, Vietnam veterans, Native Americans, the children of Chernobyl and, especially, kids in general. Often his charity work has tied in with his film work, and vice versa.

Finally, a part did come, in Coming Home. Due to his absence, Voight was no longer an A-list actor. Consequently, this role, as Luke Martin, a quadriplegic veteran who falls in love with and conducts an affair with married nurse Jane Fonda, was first offered to Bruce Dern. Then to everyone else. But everyone turned it down (too unglamorous) and Voight, who cares not for glamour, stepped in. He had actually been Fonda's first choice.

Next to the brutality and pyrotechnics of the other current Vietnam flicks, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, Hal Ashby's Coming Home was slow, tortured yet essentially loving. And Jon was superb, snapping up both the Oscar and Golden Globe. But immediately he slipped into crisis, all the fame and fuss making him wonder whether he was really deserving. After all, he knew there were far more important things than films - the good Catholic in him would not let him forget it. Beyond this, his marriage with Bertrand was over. So he seriously considered jacking it all in. Indeed, he recalls walking on Malibu beach one day, thinking just that, when he bumped into Al Pacino. Pacino told him outright that he was "SUCH a great actor". So he decided to continue.
Well, sort of. After Franco Zeffirelli's The Champ, a remake of the 1931 classic, where Voight played a washed-up and drunken boxer forced back into the ring to keep custody of his young son, he didn't appear again for three years (he was spending a lot of time with actress Stacey Pickren). When he did, it was with his own project, co-writing and starring in Lookin' To Get Out (featuring the young Jolie). Directed by Ashby and co-starring Ann-Margret, this involved two gamblers deep in debt, trying to redeem themselves in Las Vegas. It wasn't well received. Voight moved on to Table For Five, featuring a young Kevin Costner, where a dead woman's husband and ex-husband battle over custody of the kids, on a cruise-ship. It was a tearjerker to rival The Champ and many consider both movies to be overly schmaltzy. But, in the context of Voight's career choices, it's important to note that both films are EXTREMELY responsible in their presentation of the parents' role in a child's upbringing.

Then, suddenly, Voight threw the world a curve ball. In his movies, he'd always been the sensitive blue-eyed boy, struggling against beastliness and emotional hardship. Now, for the first time, he was bad. And HOW bad. Based on a story by Kurosawa, Runaway Train concerned a tough jailbird and his sidekick riding a brake-less freight train across Northern Canada to near-certain destruction. As Oscar "Manny" Manheim, Voight made a magnificent crazy. Totally demonic, he even out-menaced his young partner Eric Roberts. Once again, Voight was Oscar-nominated, and once again took the Golden Globe.

And, of course, once again he used his burgeoning celebrity to promote good causes. In 1986's Desert Bloom, he played an alcoholic vet, struggling to control and connect with his family, all of them living in the shadow of a nearby nuclear testing ground. There was a break during the late Eighties, while Voight spent time with his mother, diagnosed with cancer. It would kill her in the end, but not till 1995, when she'd reached the fine age of 85 (his father had died in a car accident, aged 64, back in 1973). Her illness hit Jon hard, though, and he went through a period of tough soul-searching, turning down all roles offered.

Finally, come 1989, there was Eternity, where Voight played a TV reporter leading a crusade against the evils of corporate America, only to fall for a beautiful model in the pay of a sinister media tycoon. What's worse, he thinks they may have been lovers in an earlier incarnation. It was interesting, challenging, and written by Voight. Then came the Nineties, and another anti-nuke message in Final Warning, the true story of the Chernobyl disaster. He promoted the cause of the Native Americans in The Last Of His Tribe, where he's an anthropologist who discovers the last survivor of California's Yahi tribe (he was Golden Globe nominated for this, as he had been for The Champ). And then there was yet more anti-nuke talk in Rainbow Warrior, about the environmentalists' boat sunk in New Zealand by those damned Frenchies.

Now things changed. There would be just a few more "responsible" films. He directed the Hans Christian Andersen adaptation Tin Soldier. In John Singleton's fact-based Rosewood, alongside Ving Rhames and Don Cheadle, he played a white man trying to help stop a massacre of blacks in a well-off Florida community in 1923. A Dog Of Flanders, based on a 1872 kids' story, saw a child trying to keep his family together. And Uprising concerned the rebellion of the Polish Jews in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943.

But, after he'd played Robert De Niro's shady underworld contact Nate in Michael Mann's Heat, Voight began to take roles in big action flicks, often as a very bad man indeed - as if he wanted to balance his life, have fun as well as be good. He was terrifically wicked in Mission: Impossible, The Rainmaker (another Golden Globe nomination) and Enemy Of The State, while he was weird as hell in Anaconda and U-Turn. And finally, he became what he is - an elder statesman of Hollywood, playing the President in Pearl Harbour, his daughter Angelina's dad, Lord Croft, in Tomb Raider, and the heavyweight sports reporter Howard Cosell, opposite Will Smith in Ali, where his verbal sparring matches with Smith really made the movie. In his usual, utterly un-star-like fashion, he wore makeup that made him wholly unrecognisable, and was rightly nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Oscar.

After this came Unleashed, involving a talking hound, schooled in the martial arts and hunting crims down in Chinatown. Then came Superbabies, and then Holes, where Voight played Mr Sir to Sigourney Weaver's Warden.

Now in his Sixties, but still highly active, we can expect Voight to continue balancing his roles between the bad boys and the good guys. We'll read about his triumphs and awards in the papers. What we WON'T hear about is the work he'll be doing for others on the side. But rest assured he'll be doing it just the same. He's one of the very few who always has. We should be more like him.