Willem Dafoe life and biography

Willem Dafoe is an American film, stage, and voice actor, and a founding member of the experimental theatre company The Wooster Group.
He worked briefly as a model in a 1990 Prada campaign.

Dafoe's film career began in 1981, when he was cast in Heaven's Gate, but his role was removed from the film during editing. In the mid 80s he was cast by William Friedkin to star in To Live And Die In LA, in which Dafoe portrays counterfeiter Rick Masters.

A year later he starred as the leader of a motorcycle gang in The Loveless (and later played a similar role in Streets of Fire), but his first breakthrough film role was as the compassionate Sergeant Elias in Platoon (1986).

In 1988, Dafoe starred in another film set during the Vietnam War, this time as CID Agent Buck McGriff in Off Limits. He has since become a popular character actor. He is often cast as unstable or villainous characters, such as the Green Goblin in Spider-Man and Barillo in Once Upon a Time in Mexico.
When he played Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), he remarked "To this day, I can't believe I was so brazen to think I could pull off the Jesus role", though Dafoe received acclaim despite the controversy surrounding the film.

He starred in the erotic drama Body of Evidence with Madonna. In 1991, Willem Dafoe portrayed a Manhattan drug dealer in the film Light Sleeper. Dafoe played an eccentric FBI agent in The Boondock Saints and a private investigator in American Psycho (2000).
He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1986 for Platoon and 2000 for Shadow of the Vampire.

He played a rare heroic film role when he provided the voice of Gill in the animated film Finding Nemo. Dafoe also played as a leading man and hero in "Triumph of the Spirit", playing a Greek Jew, Salamo Arouch, who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau through his prowess as a boxer, based upon a true story.
In 2004, Dafoe lent his likeness and voice for the James Bond video game Everything or Nothing as the villain Nikolai Diavolo.
In 2006, he played NYPD detective Stan Aubray on the hunt for a serial killer, the lead in New York-set thriller Anamorph, opposite Scott Speedman and Peter Stormare.

He stars alongside Rowan Atkinson in the sequel to 1997's Bean, Mr. Bean's Holiday which was released worldwide March 30, 2007.

In 2011, Dafoe began narrating a series of television commercials for the Greek yogurt company Fage. Additionally, the actor is featured in Jim Beam's "Bold Decisions" television ad campaign, which began airing April 2011.

Dafoe starred alongside Marina Abramović in 'The Life and Death of Marina Abramović' a theatrical masterpiece which premiered at the Manchester International Festival in 2011.

Dafoe met director Elizabeth LeCompte at the Performance Group. They were part of the restructuring of The Performance Group and became professional collaborators and founding members of The Wooster Group, and began a relationship. Their son, Jack, was born in 1982. The pair eventually split in 2004.

Dafoe married Italian director and actress Giada Colagrande on March 25, 2005. The couple spends most of the year in Colagrande's native Italy.

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