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Spanish actor: Javier Bardem |
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| En Castellano | |
Javier Ángel Encinas Bardem (born March 1, 1969) He is notable as the first Spanish actor to be nominated and win an Oscar, the nomination being for Before Night Falls and the historic Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 2007 film No Country for Old Men. He is Spain's only Academy Award winning performer. |
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Bardem starred in his second 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 assisted-suicide activist Ramón Sampedro , who unsuccessfully brought his case to the Spanish courts, yet eventually succeeded in persuading several friends to assist him and committed 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 killer Anton Chigurh. For that role, he became the first Spanish actor to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also won 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. Bardem's rendition of Chigurh's trademark phrase, "Call it, friendo" was named Top HollyWORDIE of 2007 in the annual survey by the Global Language Monitor that tracks the words from Hollywood that most influenced the English Language. Anton Chigurh was placed in EW's 50 Most Vile Villains in Movie History in a recent issue at #26. He recently starred 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 Raúl Juliá 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. Unfortunately, on May 19, 2008 it was confirmed that Daniel Day-Lewis would play the part. Bardem does not know how to drive and consistently refers to himself as a "worker" and not an actor. Following the legalization of same-sex marriage in Spain in 2005, Bardem incited controversy when he stated that if he were gay, he would "get married tomorrow, just to fuck with the church" (mañana mismo, sólo para joder a la Iglesia). He is a well known supporter of the Cuban regime. Bardem's life's work was recently honored at the 2007 Gotham Awards, produced by IFP (Independent Feature Project). He is currently dating actress Penelope Cruz.
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