James Haven biography
Date of birth : 1973-05-11
Date of death : -
Birthplace : Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Nationality : American
Category : Arts and Entertainment
Last modified : 2011-09-05
Credited as : actor, film producer, Angelina Jolie's brother
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James Haven Voight was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. He is the brother of actress Angelina Jolie and the nephew of singer-songwriter Chip Taylor. On his father's side, Haven is of German and Slovak descent, and on his mother's side, he is of French Canadian and Dutch ancestry. He is also said to be part Iroquois through his mother, although Voight has claimed that Bertrand was "not seriously Iroquois."
After his parents' separation in 1976, Haven and his sister were raised by their mother, who abandoned her acting ambitions and moved with them to Palisades, New York. When he was 13, the family moved back to Los Angeles, where he attended Beverly Hills High School. Following graduation, he enrolled at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, then called the School of Cinema-Television. While at university, he received a George Lucas Award for a student film he directed starring his sister.
Despite his father and sister's success in Hollywood, James Haven has not been as high-profile or as prolific as them. He appeared as young man on Sansom Street in the acclaimed TV movie about top fashion model from the late 1970s, Gia (1998), which won sister Angelina a Golden Globe for portraying the title character. That same year, he appeared with Angelina again, as a bartender, in writer-director Tony Cinciripini's crime drama film, Hell's Kitchen, which also starring Rosanna Arquette, William Forsythe and Mekhi Phifer. He followed it up with writer-director Kurt Kuenne's next year family/drama film, Scrapbook, alongside Justin Urich and Eric Balfour.
Entering the new millennium, James appeared with sister Angelina in Michael Cristofer's film adaptation of the novel "Waltz into Darkness" by Cornell Woolrich, Original Sin (also starring Antonio Banderas), and then shared the screen with Angelina's then-husband Billy Bob Thornton in Marc Forster's romantic drama Monster's Ball, which featuring the Oscar-winning performance of Halle Berry. The subsequent year, he was seen in writer-director David W. Warfield's neo-noir thriller Ocean Park (2002) and writer-director Joe Menendez's drama Hunting of Man (2003).
2004 saw James starring in Kurt Kuenne's 12-minute comedy Rent-a-Person and in writer-director Mark Edwin Robinson's drama/thriller Breaking Dawn, in which he played a catatonic patient at a psychiatric hospital loaded with secrets. Meanwhile, TV viewers could catch him as a guest in an episode of popular, Emmy Award-winning CBS crime drama "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." The next year, he went on to executive-produce Trudell, a documentary about the life of author, poet, musician and former political activist John Trudell.
Recently, James was cast in writer-director William Brent Bell's 2006 teen horror/thriller film, Stay Alive, alongside Jon Foster, Samaire Armstrong, Frankie Muniz and Sophia Bush. More recently, in 2007, he reunited with award-winning filmmaker Kurt Kuenne in his 16-minute comedy, Validation.
Filmography:
Gia (1998)
Hell's Kitchen (1998)
Original Sin (2001)
Monster's Ball (2001)
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2004)
Stay Alive (2006)
The Game (2007)
