Biography

William Bradley Pitt (born December 18, 1963), best known as Brad Pitt, is an American actor and film producer. He has been cited as one of the world’s most attractive men and his off-screen life is widely reported. Pitt has received two Academy Award nominations and won one Golden Globe Award out of four nominations.

Pitt began his acting career in television guest spots, including a recurring role on the CBS soap opera Dallas in 1987. He gained recognition as the cowboy hitchhiker

who seduces Geena Davis’ character in 1991’s Thelma & Louise but his first leading role in a major film was in Interview with the Vampire (1994).

Pitt was cast opposite Anthony Hopkins in the 1994 drama Legends of the Fall, which earned him his first Golden Globe nomination. The following year came two contrasting, widely acclaimed starring roles, in the crime thriller Seven (1995) and the science fiction Twelve Monkeys (1995), in which he won a Golden Globe for the Best Supporting Actor.

Pitt received worldwide attention in the 1999 film Fight Club, for his role as Tyler Durden. Following the success of Fight Club, he was cast as Rusty Ryan in the 2001 film Ocean’s Eleven, and its sequels Ocean’s Twelve (2004) as well as Ocean’s Thirteen (2007). His biggest commercial successes came from Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Spy Game (2001), Troy (2004), the action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).

Following a high profile relationship with actress Gwyneth Paltrow, and marriage to Jennifer Aniston, as of 2009, Pitt now lives with actress Angelina Jolie, in a relationship that has attracted worldwide media attention. Pitt and Jolie have three adopted children, Maddox, Zahara and Pax, and have also had three biological children, Shiloh, Knox, and Vivienne. Pitt owns a production company named Plan B. Since his relationship with Jolie, he has become increasingly involved in social issues, both in the United States and internationally.

Early life

Brad Pitt was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, the son of Jane Etta (née Hillhouse), a high school counselor, and William Alvin Pitt, a truck company owner. Along with his siblings Doug (born 1966) and Julie Neal (born 1969), he grew up in Springfield, Missouri, where the family moved soon after his birth. He was raised as a conservative Southern Baptist when growing up.

Pitt attended Kickapoo High School, where he excelled; he was a member of the golf, tennis and swimming teams, as well as the Key and Forensics clubs. He also participated in school debates and musicals. Following his graduation, Pitt attended the University of Missouri in 1982, where he belonged to the Sigma Chi fraternity, where he frequently acted in several fraternity shows. He majored in journalism, with a focus on advertising.

In 1985, two weeks prior to earning his degree, Pitt left the university and moved to Los Angeles, California to take acting lessons. When asked why he left the university, Pitt responded: “I had this sinking feeling as graduation approached. I saw my friends getting jobs. I wasn’t ready to settle down. I loved films. They were a portal into different worlds for me, and Missouri wasn’t where movies were made. Then it hit me: If they didn’t come to me, I’d go to them.”

Career

Early work

While struggling in Los Angeles, he took a number of odd jobs, ranging from chauffeuring, being a delivery man, and dressing up as an El Pollo Loco chicken, to pay for his acting classes, in which he began studying with late renowned acting coach Roy London.

In December 1987, Pitt began his acting career in television guest spots, including a recurring role on the CBS primetime soap opera Dallas playing Randy, the boyfriend of Shalane McCall’s character, Charlie Wade. Pitt described the character as “an idiot boyfriend who gets caught in the hay”. During an interview with People magazine, he revealed, while questioned about his scenes with McCall, “It was real sweaty-palms time for me. It was kind of wild, because I’d never even met her before.” His character spent five weeks in the show. In 1990 he co-starred in the short-lived television drama Glory Days.

In 1988, Pitt made his feature film debut in the drama The Dark Side of the Sun, where he played a young American taken by his family to the Adriatic to find a remedy

for a skin condition. The movie was shot in Yugoslavia in the summer of 1988. He was then cast in the television movie Too Young to Die?, about an abused teenager given the death penalty for murder. Pitt played the part of a drug addict, Billy Canton, who took advantage of a runaway young woman, played by Juliette Lewis. Entertainment Weekly wrote: “Pitt is a magnificent slimeball as her hoody boyfriend; looking and sounding like a malevolent John Cougar Mellencamp, he’s really scary.”

Pitt’s next film role was as Joe Maloney in Across the Tracks (1991), where he played a high school runner with a difficult criminal brother played by Ricky Schroder. He attracted broader public attention from a supporting role in the 1991 film Thelma & Louise, where he played J.D., a small-time criminal drifter who was friends with Thelma (Geena Davis). His love scene with Davis, which showed Pitt shirtless and wearing a cowboy hat, has been often cited as the moment that defined Pitt as a “sex symbol”.

After the success of Thelma & Louise, Pitt starred alongside Catherine Keener and Nick Cave in the low-budget, Tom DiCillo-directed 1991 movie Johnny Suede, an individual who aspires to be a rock star. After appearing in Cool World (1992), Pitt starred in Robert Redford’s biographical 1992 film A River Runs Through It, in which his performance was described as “career-making”. In discussion of the film, Pitt said: “I felt a bit of pressure”. He also added that it was one of his “weakest performances”, and concluded with, “It’s so weird that it ended up being the one that I got the most attention for.” When asked about working alongside Redford, Pitt said: “It’s like tennis: When you play with somebody better than you, your game gets better.”

The following year he re-united with his Too Young to Die? co-star Juliette Lewis in Kalifornia (1993), a road movie in which he played Early Grayce, a serial killer, and Lewis played Grayce’s former girlfriend. In his review of the film, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone declared Pitt’s performance “outstanding”. In the same year he won a ShoWest Award for Male Star of Tomorrow.

Critical success

Pitt’s career prospects began to improve after being cast as vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac in the 1994 movie adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire. He was part of an ensemble cast that included Tom Cruise, Kirsten Dunst, Christian Slater, and Antonio Banderas. Although Pitt won two MTV Movie Awards, his performance was particularly criticized; Variety wrote: “Brad Pitt’s Louis is handsome and personable, but there is no depth to his melancholy, no pungency to his sense of loss. He also doesn’t seem to connect in a meaningful way with any of the other actors”.

Following the release of Interview with the Vampire he starred in Legends of the Fall (1994) and Seven (1995). In Legends of the Fall, Pitt played Tristan Ludlow, son of Colonel William Ludlow (Anthony Hopkins), a movie set throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century. Legends of the Fall also stars Aidan Quinn and Henry Thomas as his brothers. Upon its release, the movie received with mixed reception: critic Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote: “Mr. Pitt’s diffident mix of acting and attitude works to such heartthrob perfection it’s a shame the film’s superficiality gets in his way.”

Chris Hicks of Deseret News was more favorable towards Pitt, saying that Legends of the Fall will “further cement his big-screen, romantic leading-man status.” Hicks concluded that he was “satisfying” as Tristan. Despite mixed reaction, Pitt garnered his first Golden Globe Award nomination in the category for Best Performance, but lost to Tom Hanks for Forrest Gump. In Seven, Pitt starred alongside Morgan Freeman as the police detective David Mills who hunts a serial killer played by Kevin Spacey. Variety wrote, “This is screen acting at its best. Pitt turns in a determined, energetic, creditable job as the eager young detective.”

Pitt next took the portrayal of Jeffrey Goines in a supporting role in Terry Gilliam’s 1995 science fiction Twelve Monkeys. The latter film received very positive reviews and was successful at the box office. His portrayal was particularly acknowledged when Janet Maslin of the New York Times wrote: “Giving a startlingly frenzied performance, he electrifies Jeffrey with a weird magnetism that becomes important later in the film.” Pitt won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor, and received his first Academy Award nomination.

Pitt was next cast in the 1996 film Sleepers, based on the Lorenzo Carcaterra novel of the same name; the film starred Kevin Bacon and Robert DeNiro. The following year he starred opposite Harrison Ford as the Irish Republican Army terrorist Rory Devany in The Devil’s Own (1997), for which Pitt was required to master an Irish accent.

That year he also played the main role of Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer in the Jean Jacques Annaud film Seven Years in Tibet. He trained for months for the role, which demanded a great deal of trekking and mountain climbing, by rock climbing in California and the Alps with his co-star, David Thewlis.

Pitt had the leading role in the film, Meet Joe Black (1998), where he played a personification of death inhabiting the body of a young man in order to learn what it is like to be human. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle, was somewhat less enthusiastic about his performance, adding: “It’s not just that Pitt’s performance is bad. It hurts. Watching Pitt struggle, with inert face and glazed eyes, to make an audience believe that he knows all the mysteries of death and eternity is painful.”

1999–2003

In the 1999 film Fight Club, his most successful film to date, he played Tyler Durden, a straight-shooting but charismatic mastermind who runs an underground fight club. The film, an adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name, was directed by the same director as directed the movie Seven, David Fincher. To prepare for the role, Pitt took boxing lessons, as well as lessons in taekwondo and grappling. For the cosmetics of his role, Pitt voluntarily visited a dentist to have pieces of his front teeth chipped off, which were restored after filming concluded.

During promotion of the film, he noted his interpretation of the film: “The fighting is not necessarily ‘take your aggressions out on someone else.’ The idea is just to get in there, have an experience, take a punch more importantly and see how you come out on the other end.” Fight Club premiered at the 1999 Venice International Film Festival. The film failed to meet expectations at the box office, and the film received polarized reactions from film critics. His performance, however, earned him good reviews from critics. David Rooney of Variety, noted that Pitt was “cool, charismatic and more dynamically physical” as Tyler Durden and David Edelstein of Slate magazine thought that Pitt played well into the embodiment of conceit.

After Fight Club, Pitt appeared in the Guy Ritchie-directed gangster movie Snatch (2001), alongside Jason Statham, Vinnie Jones, and Benicio del Toro. Pitt’s character, an Irish Gypsy boxer, spoke in a barely intelligible accent, for which Pitt drew criticism. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “[He] is ideally cast as an Irishman whose accent is so thick even Brits can’t understand him. The picture also trades on our past associations with Pitt. For years Pitt was shackled by roles that called for brooding introspection, but recently he has found his calling in black comic outrageousness and flashy extroversion.”

In this same year, Pitt starred alongside Julia Roberts in the romantic comedy The Mexican. His next role was in the Cold War thriller Spy Game (2001), in which he starred alongside Robert Redford, who played his mentor. Charles Taylor of Salon.com enjoyed the film, but felt that neither Pitt nor Redford “provide[d] much of an emotional connection for the audience”. The movie grossed over $143 million worldwide. Also in 2001, Pitt played Rusty Ryan in Ocean’s Eleven, a remake of the 1960s Rat Pack film of the same name. He starred alongside George Clooney, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, and Julia Roberts. The film was a success at the box office, earning $450 million worldwide.

He also made a guest appearance in the eighth season of the situation comedy Friends as Will Colbert, a man who has a grudge against Jennifer Aniston’s character, Rachel Green. In 2002, Pitt appeared on an episode of MTV’s Jackass, in which he and several cast members ran wild through the streets of Los Angeles in gorilla suits. In a later Jackass episode, Pitt also took part in a staged abduction of himself. In 2003, he took his first voice-acting roles; he lent his voice to the titular character of the DreamWorks animated movie Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, and voiced Boomhauer’s brother Patch in an episode of King of the Hill.

2004–present

In 2004 he starred in two films, Troy and Ocean’s Twelve. In Troy, based on the Iliad, he portrayed hero Achilles. Before the filming of Troy, Pitt spent six months sword training. During filming, he injured his Achilles tendon, delaying production for several weeks. The film was an international success, grossing $364 million. In North America however, it earned considerably less, grossing less than $133 million. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, wrote that Pitt “plays this part quite well”. The success of Ocean’s Eleven led Pitt to return to the role in the 2004 sequel, Ocean’s Twelve. Paul Clinton of CNN wrote: “Clooney and Pitt have the best male chemistry since Paul Newman and Robert Redford.” The film was a big financial success, earning $362 million worldwide.

In 2005, Pitt starred in the film Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Directed by Doug Liman, the film tells the story of a bored married couple who find out that they are both secret assassins. Pitt starred as John Smith alongside Angelina Jolie. The film was well received and was generally lauded for the chemistry between the two leads. The Star Tribune noted, “While the story feels haphazard, the movie gets by on gregarious charm, galloping energy and the stars’ thermonuclear screen chemistry.” The movie earned $478 million worldwide, one of the biggest hits of 2005.

Pitt starred alongside Cate Blanchett in his next feature film, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s critically acclaimed Babel (2006). His performance in the film was well received by critics, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer added that his performance was “credible” and gives the film “visibility”. Pitt called the film “one of the best decisions of my film career”. The film was screened at a special presentation at the 31st annual Toronto International Film Festival in 2006. Babel garnered a total of seven Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, one of which was a Golden Globe Award nomination for Pitt as Best Supporting Actor.

In 2007, Pitt reprised his role as Rusty Ryan in the third Ocean’s film Ocean’s Thirteen. The sequel, while not as lucrative as the first two, earned $311 million at the international box office. Pitt’s next film role was Jesse James in the 2007 Western drama The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, adapted from Ron Hansen’s 1983 novel of the same name. Directed by Andrew Dominik and produced by Pitt’s company Plan B, the film premiered at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. Lewis Beale of Film Journal International said Pitt is “scary and charismatic”. For his performance, he won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the 64th Venice International Film Festival; although Pitt attended the festival to promote the movie, he left early after being attacked by a crazed fan who pushed through his bodyguards, and he was not present to accept the award. The festival failed to ship Pitt the award, so he did not collect it until the 65th Venice Film Festival in 2008.

Pitt appeared in the 2008 dark comedy Burn After Reading, his first collaboration with the Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan). Burn After Reading received positive

reception; Andrew Pulver of The Guardian called the film “a tightly wound, slickly plotted spy comedy”. Pulver, who also rated the film four out of five stars, noted that Pitt’s performance was one of the “funniest”. He was cast as Benjamin Button, the lead in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), loosely adapted from the 1922 short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a man who is born an octogenarian and ages in reverse. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has grossed over $302 million worldwide. The film earned him a fourth Golden Globe, first Screen Actors Guild, and second Academy Award nomination.

Pitt’s projects after 2008 include Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, scheduled for release in August 2009, where he plays Lieutenant Aldo Raine, an American resistance fighter battling Nazis in German-occupied France. He will appear in the drama The Tree of Life directed by Terrence Malick and starring alongside Sean Penn. Pitt has signed on to appear in the Lost City of Z, where he will play a British explorer searching for a mysterious Amazonian civilization. The film is based on the book of the same name by David Grann.

Other projects

Pitt appeared in a Heineken commercial which aired during the 2005 Super Bowl; it was directed by David Fincher, who directed Pitt in the feature films Seven, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. He has also appeared in television commercials designed for the Asian market, advertising such products as Edwin Jeans.

Pitt, along with Jennifer Aniston and Paramount Pictures head CEO Brad Grey, founded the production company Plan B in 2002. Aniston and Grey are no longer partners in the company. Aniston, however, is still attached to many projects that were set up before her divorce from Pitt. The company produced the 2005 film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory starring Johnny Depp, as well as The Departed (2006), and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). Pitt has been reluctant in discussing the production company in interviews.

Pitt, along with George Clooney and Matt Damon, support the One campaign, which help fights AIDS and poverty in Third-World countries. He was the narrator of the public television series Rx for Survival: A Global Health Challenge, which discusses current important global health issues. In 2005, Pitt and Angelina Jolie visited Pakistan in November to see the impact of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. The following year, Pitt and Jolie flew to Haiti and visited a school supported by Yéle Haïti, a charity founded by Haitian-born hip hop musician Wyclef Jean. In May 2007, Pitt and Jolie subsequently donated $1 million to three relief organizations in Chad and Darfur, affected by the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region. He is behind Not On Our Watch, an organization that focuses global attention and resources to stop and prevent genocide such as in Darfur, along with Clooney, Damon, Don Cheadle, and Jerry Weintraub.

In 2006, Pitt created the Make It Right Foundation New Orleans and gathered a group of housing professionals together in the Hurricane Katrina-stricken city with the goal of financing and constructing 150 new houses in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. The houses are being designed with an emphasis on sustainability and affordability, with the hope that the project can and will be replicated throughout the city, with the assistance of Global Green USA, a national environmental organization. Thirteen architectural firms are involved in the project, many of which are donating their services. Pitt and philanthropist Steve Bing have each committed to matching $5 million in donations.

In the media

In 1995, Pitt was chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 25 sexiest stars in film history. He has also twice been named the Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine in 1995 and 2000. Pitt has appeared on the annual Celebrity 100 list by Forbes magazine in 2006 and 2007, at No. 20 and No. 5. In 2007 he was listed among the Time 100 a compilation of the 100 most influential people in the world, as selected annually by Time magazine. He was credited with using “his star power to get people to look at places and stories that cameras don’t usually catch”.

In 2004, Pitt visited the University of Missouri campus to encourage students to vote in the 2004 US presidential election, in which he supported John Kerry. Also in 2004, he publicly supported funding tax-free embryonic stem-cell research, saying, “We have to make sure that we open up these avenues so that our best and our brightest can go find these cures that they believe they will find.” He also supported Proposition 71, a California ballot initiative which would provide federal government funding for stem-cell research, including that using adult and embryonic stem cells.

Starting in 2005, his relationship with Angelina Jolie became one of the most reported celebrity stories worldwide. After confirming that Jolie was pregnant in early 2006, the unprecedented media hype surrounding them “reached the point of insanity” as Reuters described it in their story “The Brangelina fever”. To avoid the media attention, the couple went to Namibia for the birth of their daughter Shiloh, “the most anticipated baby since Jesus Christ”. Two years later, after confirming Jolie’s second pregnancy again it fueled a media frenzy. For the two weeks, before the birth, Jolie spent in a seaside hospital in Nice, reporters and photographers camped outside on the promenade to report on the birth.

Pitt was also prominently featured in the December 2006 Art Issue of Vanity Fair; he appears in a blue-colored photo holding a gun and wearing nothing but white boxer shorts and socks. The cover promotes an article on the Robert Wilson video portraits, a production of LAB HD that includes numerous celebrities and noted personalities. This cover had drawn criticism from Pitt because, although he had signed a release for the image, he did not expect it to end up on the cover of Vanity Fair. The video portrait, Pitt’s first effort in avant-garde cinema, was exhibited at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.

In September 2008, Pitt donated $100,000 to fight California’s November 2008 ballot proposition Proposition 8, an initiative that would overturn the state Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. In discussion of this, Pitt said: “Because no one has the right to deny another their life, even though they disagree with it, because everyone has the right to live the life they so desire if it doesn’t harm another and because discrimination has no place in America, my vote will be for equality and against Proposition 8.”

Personal life

In an October 2007 interview with Parade magazine, Pitt revealed that he is no longer a Christian or believes in an afterlife. Pitt stated: “There’s peace in understanding that I have only one life, here and now, and I’m responsible.” He is also a knowledgeable fan of architecture.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Pitt dated several of his co-stars, including Robin Givens (Head of the Class), Jill Schoelen (Cutting Class), and Juliette Lewis (Too Young to Die? and Kalifornia), who at sixteen was ten years his junior when they started dating. Pitt had a much-publicized romance and engagement to Seven co-star Gwyneth Paltrow who he dated from 1995 to 1997.

Pitt met Friends actress Jennifer Aniston in 1998 and married her in a private wedding ceremony in Malibu on July 29, 2000. For years their marriage was considered the rare Hollywood success. However, in January 2005, Pitt and Aniston announced that they decided to formally separate after seven years together. Two months later, Aniston filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.

As Pitt’s marriage to Aniston drew to a close, his involvement with actress Angelina Jolie during the filming of Mr. & Mrs. Smith became highly-publicized, which resulted in a scandal; Jolie was often painted as the “other woman”, largely due to her chemistry with Pitt while filming. While Pitt denied any claims of adultery, he admitted that he “fell in love” with Jolie on the set, and said that production was still going on for Mr. & Mrs. Smith after he and Aniston had separated.

In April 2005, a month after Aniston filed for divorce, a set of paparazzi photos emerged that seemed to confirm the rumors of a relationship between Pitt and Jolie. The photos showed Pitt, Jolie and her son Maddox at a beach in Kenya. During the summer, the two were seen together with increasing frequency, and the entertainment media dubbed the couple “Brangelina”. Pitt and Aniston’s final divorce documents were granted by the Los Angeles Superior Court on October 2, 2005, ending their marriage. On January 11, 2006, Jolie confirmed to People magazine that she was pregnant with Pitt’s child and thereby confirmed their relationship for the first time in public. In an October 2006 interview with Esquire magazine, Pitt said that he and Jolie will marry “when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able”.

Despite media reports that Pitt and Aniston have an acrimonious relationship, in a February 2009 interview with W magazine, Pitt said that he and Aniston “check in with each other”. Also adding, “She was a big part of my life, and me hers.”

Children

In July 2005, Pitt accompanied Angelina Jolie to Ethiopia, where Jolie adopted her second child, a six-month-old girl named Zahara; Jolie later stated that she and Pitt made the decision to adopt the child together. In December 2005, it was confirmed that Pitt was seeking to legally adopt Jolie’s two (adopted) children as his own; per the legal requirements, classified advertisements in the Los Angeles paper Daily Commerce announced the name change request. On January 19, 2006, a judge in California approved this request, and the children’s legal surnames were formally changed to “Jolie-Pitt”.

On May 27, 2006, Jolie gave birth to a daughter, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, in Swakopmund, Namibia, by a scheduled caesarean section. Pitt confirmed that their newly born daughter would have a Namibian passport. People magazine paid more than $4.1 million for the North American rights, while British magazine Hello! obtained the international rights for roughly $3.5 million; the total rights sale earned up to $10 million worldwide, which became the most expensive celebrity image of all time. All profits were donated to an undisclosed charity by Pitt and Jolie. Madame Tussauds in New York unveiled a wax figure of two-month-old Shiloh, making Shiloh the first infant to have a statue at Madame Tussauds.

On March 15, 2007, Jolie adopted a three-year-old boy from Vietnam, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt (originally Pax Thien Jolie). Since the orphanage does not allow unmarried couples to adopt, Jolie adopted Pax as a single parent, and Pitt later adopted him as his son in the United States.

Following media reports suggesting Jolie might be pregnant again, she attended the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards in a close-fitting dress, indirectly confirming those rumors. In May 2008, Jolie confirmed on the Today show that she and Pitt were expecting twins. On July 12, 2008, Jolie gave birth to the couple’s twins, a boy named Knox Léon and a girl named Vivienne Marcheline at the Lenval hospital in Nice, France. The rights for the first images of Knox and Vivienne were jointly sold to People and Hello! for $14 million—the most expensive celebrity baby pictures ever taken. The money went to the Jolie/Pitt Foundation.

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