JAVIER BARDEM Biography - Actors and Actresses

 
 

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JAVIER BARDEM

Name: Javier Ángel Encinas Bardem                                                       
Born: 1 March 1969 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain                                     
                                                                                         
Javier Ángel Encinas Bardem (born March 1, 1969) is an Academy Award-winning             
Spanish actor. He has made over two dozen films in his native country, but               
became an international star with his starring role in the critically acclaimed           
Before Night Falls. With this role, he became the first Spanish actor ever to             
receive an Academy Award nomination. Bardem won the Academy Award for Best               
Supporting Actor, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award and British               
Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for his performance as the             
antagonist Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.                                       
                                                                                         
He was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Gran Canaria, the son of Carlos               
Encinas and the actress Pilar Bardem. Bardem comes from a long line of                   
filmmakers and actors who have been working since the earliest days of Spanish           
cinema; he is the grandson of actors Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro,           
and the nephew of screenwriter and director Juan Antonio Bardem. Both his                 
older brother and his older sister, Carlos and Mónica Bardem, are actors. His           
film debut was at the age of six in the film El Pícaro (The Scoundrel) and he           
appeared in several television series before turning to painting and, eventually,         
athletics. Before acting professionally, Bardem was a member of the Spanish               
national rugby team.                                                                     
                                                                                         
Bardem starred in his first major motion picture, The Ages of Lulu, when he was           
20. In 1992, he made his first international hit with Jamón, Jamón, which also         
starred Penélope Cruz. After starring in roughly two dozen films in his native           
country, he would eventually land his international breakthrough performance             
role in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls in 2000, as Cuban poet Reinaldo             
Arenas. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role, the           
first time for a Spaniard. This also marked Bardem's first English language               
speaking role. In 2002 he starred in John Malkovich's directorial debut, The             
Dancer Upstairs.                                                                         
                                                                                         
Bardem won the Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his role in 2004's Mar         
Adentro, released in the United States as The Sea Inside, in which he portrayed           
the quadriplegic turned assited-suicide activist Ramón Sampedro , who                   
unsuccessfully brought his case to the Spanish courts, yet eventually succeeds           
in persuading several friends to assist him and commits suicide. That year he             
also made a brief appearance as a vicious crime lord who summons Tom Cruise's             
hitman to do the dirty work of dispatching witnesses, in Michael Mann's crime             
drama Collateral, which also starred Jamie Foxx. In 2007 Bardem acted in two             
film adaptations; the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, based upon the               
novel of the same name and the adaptation of the classic Colombian novel Love in         
the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. In No Country for Old Men, he           
plays chilling sociopath hitman Anton Chigurh. For that role, he won an Academy           
Award for Best Supporting Actor, a Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild (SAG)       
Award for Best Supporting Actor and also won the Critics' Choice Award for Best           
Supporting Actor as well as the 2008 British Academy of Film and Television Arts         
(BAFTA) Award for Best Supporting Actor.                                                 
                                                                                         
He will star in Woody Allen's film Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Bardem is currently         
in talks to play fictional filmmaker Guido Contini in the film adaptation of the         
Tony Award-winning musical Nine. The part of Guido Contini had previously been           
played by Raul Julia in the original 1982 production and more recently by                 
Antonio Banderas in the Tony Award-winning 2003 revival also starring Mary               
Stuart Masterson, Jane Krakowski, Chita Rivera, and Laura Benanti. The film is           
to be directed by Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award-winner Rob Marshall and         
is scheduled for release in 2008.