William Bradley Pitt. He is an American film actor and producer, with an outstanding career, he is listed as one of the highest grossing stars of his generation. He has received multiple awards and nominations including an Academy Award as a producer under his own company Plan B Entertainment.
Biographical synthesis
He was born on 18 of December of 1963 in Shawnee, Oklahoma , United States , son of a teacher and manager of a trucking company, grew up in Springfield , Missouri , where he graduated from Kickapoo High School.
He studied Journalism at Columbia University , Missouri , but dropped out and moved to California with the intention of becoming an actor. Before starting his career, he did all kinds of odd jobs, such as a limousine driver or a porter. He also played small roles in television series such as The problems grow , Dallas , Young policemen and Thirty-something .
Career path
His first film appearance was as a backup in Marek Kaniewska’s Hit the American Dream ( 1987 ), and his first leading role was one of the most curious adventures of his career: The dark side of the sun , shot in the old Yugoslavia during the Summer of 1988 , but a resurgence of the war caused that the filmed material was lost. After a six-year search, its producer, Angelo Arandjelovic , found the lost footage and released the film when Pitt was already an international star, thereby more than recouping his investment.
After a series of small minor roles, he got his big break with Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise ( 1991 ) , one of the most famous and controversial films of the 1990s. Pitt played a secondary but important role in it: that of JD, a petty thief who is picked up by the protagonists, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon , while hitchhiking and whose appearances barely add up to thirty minutes in total. However, although brief, her appearance in Thelma and Louise It changed his life completely and made him the fashionable actor of the early nineties: in just a few months he went from being a stranger to being considered one of the most attractive men in the world.
In his next film, The River of Life ( 1992 ), he was directed by another male sex symbol, Robert Redford , who got one of the best performances of his career from him. As his price rose and the quality of his roles increased, he continued to appear in small productions such as Johnny Suede (1992), directed by Tom DiCillo , in which he played a rocker with an unlikely hairstyle obsessed with the memory of Elvis Presley and with succeeding in the world of music . In A Blonde Between Two Worlds ( 1992 ), directed by animation specialist Ralph Bakshi, shared the bill with Kim Basinger and Gabriel Byrne .
To avoid being typecast, he also played darker roles, such as the psychopath in Early Grayce de Kalifornia ( 1993 ), by Dominic Sena . In Legends of Passion ( 1994 ), by Edward Zwick , he repeated to some extent the scheme of The River of Life . In it he plays Tristan Ludlow, an indomitable young man who enlists in the army to fight in World War I fleeing from a crushed love for his brother’s fiancee, Julia Ormond , and following the example of his father, a former colonel from retired cavalry in Montana played byAnthony Hopkins .
His next film was Interview With The Vampire ( 1994 ), by Irishman Neil Jordan , a careful adaptation of the mythical novel written by Anne Rice in 1977 . Pitt was the common thread of the narrative as he played Louis, the vampire Christian Slater interviews in New Orleans . The film features a baroque staging by Dante Ferretti and a star-studded cast starring Tom Cruise as the vampire Lestat, the key character in the series of novels by Anne Rice and Antonio Banderas.While Pitt’s fame grew considerably, his romances with some of the most famous actresses of the day provided him with good publicity. Among his conquests are his companions Geena Davis, Juliette Lewis , the television star Jennifer Aniston (whom he married) or the then unknown Gwyneth Paltrow , with whom he participated in one of his best films, Seven ( 1995 ), by David Fincher , in which accompanied by his partner, played by Morgan Freeman , he investigates a series of horrible crimes perpetrated against recognized practitioners of each of the seven deadly sins.
Awards and nominations
The first Academy Award nomination came to him with the strange and magnificent Twelve Monkeys ( 1995 ), from the former member of the group of comedians Monty Phyton Terry Gilliam. Based on the experimental film La Jetée, by French documentary filmmaker Chris Marker and written by David and Janet Peoples, it tells of Bruce Willis’ time travels to save humanity from the attack of the “group of the Twelve monkeys”, a terrorist group. ecologist. Brad Pitt played the schizophrenic son of a genetic engineering mogul whom Willis meets in a mental hospital. Pitt earned a well deserved Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
In 1996 he participated in Sleepers ( 1996 ), by Barry Levinson , where he had the opportunity to work alongside great actors such as Robert De Niro , Dustin Hoffman or the Italian Vittorio Gassman . Based on the autobiographical book by Lorenzo Carcaterra , Sleepers tells the true story of the abuse suffered in the reformatory by four friends and the subsequent revenge against the chief warden, a magnificent Kevin Bacon. Brad Pitt played Michael Sullivan, an assistant prosecutor who has to charge two of his friends with murder. The film, despite its spectacular cast, did not meet expectations and is not among Pitt’s best work, as well as La sombra del diablo ( 1997 ), the last film by director Alan J. Pakula . This is one of the jobs with which Pitt was least satisfied and from which he is about to retire when the script is changed during filming, but a possible lawsuit of almost 60 million dollars leads him to finish it reluctantly.
With firm stride, however, Pitt continues his cinematographic trajectory. In Seven Years in Tibet ( 1996 ), of the French Jean-Jacques Annaud , he played another role based on a real character: the mountaineer and adventurer Austrian (and Nazi sympathizer) Heinrrich Harrer, the first westerner who rose to the holy city of Lhasa in Tibet and lived with the Dalai Lama . The film openly used the name of Pitt as a publicity stunt and joins the fashion of Buddhism that invades Hollywood in the late nineties. The Chinese government declared the actor persona non grata and prohibited him from entering its territory.
Established as one of the highest grossing stars of his generation and as a sex symbol, he collected an astronomical seventeen million dollars for his next film, Do You Know Joe Black? ( 1997 ). Directed by Martin Brest and based on Mitchell Leisen’s Death on Vacation ( 1934 ), Pitt played the Joe Black of the title, personification of death who arrives at the mansion of a millionaire, Anthony Hopkins , to take him away and falls in love from her daughter. A career as established as hers naturally makes Brad Pitt’s filmography grow year after year. His latest films includeThe Fight Club ( 1999 ), Pigs and Diamonds ( 2000 ), The Mexican ( 2001 ), Spy Game ( 2001 ), Ocean ‘s Eleven ( 2001 ), Remembering Jack ( 2001 ), Full Frontal ( 2002 ), Confessions a dangerous mind ( 2002 ) and Troy ( 2004). In 2005 he starred in the action movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith with Angelina Jolie, something that played an important role in his personal life, as his marriage with Aniston was already ending and he began a relationship with Jolie that It has lasted until the present day and with whom she has 3 biological children, a baby Siloh and a pair of twins born in Paris, whom they named Vivienne and Knox, as well as three adopted children that the actress already had, Maddox, Zahara and Pax. And this Hollywood heartthrob has become in 2012, the first man to promote the legendary Chanel No.5 perfume. Only he could promote the campaign for a women’s perfume. For the sensual commercial, the actor received 7 million dollars.
Films made
- Thelma and Louise ( 1991 )
- The River of Life ( 1992 )
- A Cool World ( 1992 )
- Early Grayce Kalifornia ( 1993 )
- True Romance (1993)
- Legends of the Fall ( 1994 )
- Interview With The Vampire ( Interview with the Vampire ) (1994)
- Seven (film) Seven Deadly Sins (1995)
- The shadow of the Devil ( 1997 )
- Meet Joe Black (Meet Joe Black)]] ( 1998 )
- The Fight Club (Movie) (Fight Club) ( 1999 )
- Snatch. Pigs and Diamonds ( 2000 )
- The Mexican ( 2001 )
- Spy Game ( 2001 )
- Ocean ‘s Eleven (Hagan game, The Hoax )] ( 2001 ) and Rusty Ryan
- Remembering Jack ( 2001 )
- Full Frontal ( 2002 )
- Confessions of a Dangerous Mind ( Confessions of a Dangerous Mind ) ( 2002 )
- Sinbad: Legend of the seven seas ( Sinbad, the legend of the 7 seas ) voice 2003
- Troy (Movie)
- Ocean’s Twelve ( Ocean’s Twelve ) and Rusty Ryan (2004)
- Mr. and Mrs. Smith ( Mr. and Mrs. Smith ) (2005) as John Smith
- Babel 2006
- Ocean’s 13 (Ocean’s Thirteen) (The New Big Scam) ( 2007 )
- The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford ( The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford ) 2007
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ( The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ) ( 2008 )
- Burn After Reading (2008)
- Inglourious Basterds ( Inglourious Basterds (movie) ) ( 2009 )
- Kill Me Softly ( 2012 )
- The Crime Lawyer ( The Counselor (Movie) ) ( 2013 )
- Allies ( 2016 )
- Once upon a time in Hollywood ( 2019 )