James Woods

18 April, 1947

| 1.80 m

Actor

Producer

Director

Biography

James Woods

James Howard Woods was born on April 18, 1947 in Vernal, Utah, the son of Martha A. (Smith) and Gail Peyton Woods, a U.S. Army intelligence officer who died during Woods' childhood. James is of Irish, English, and German descent. He grew up in Warwick, Rhode Island, with his mother and stepfather Thomas E. Dixon. He graduated from Pilgrim High School in 1965, near the top of his class. James earned a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; dropping out during his senior year in 1969, he then headed off to New York with his fraternity brother Martin Donovan to pursue aspirations to appear on the stage. After appearing in a handful of New York City theater productions, Woods scored his first film role in All the Way Home (1971) and followed that up with meager supporting roles in Tacy byliśmy (1973) and The Choirboys (1977).However, it was Woods' cold-blooded performance as the cop killer in Cebulowe pole (1979), based on a Joseph Wambaugh novel, that seized the attention of movie-goers to his on-screen power. Woods quickly followed up with another role in another Joseph Wambaugh film adaptation, Czarny marmur (1980), as a sleazy and unstable cable-T.V.-station owner in David Cronenberg's mind-bending and prophetic Wideodrom (1983), as gangster Max Bercovicz in Sergio Leones mammoth epic Dawno temu w Ameryce (1984), and scored a best actor Academy Award nomination as abrasive journalist Richard Boyle in Oliver Stone's gritty and unsettling Salwador (1986).There seemed to be no stopping the rise of this star as he continued to amaze movie-goers with his remarkable versatility and his ability to create such intense, memorable characters. The decade of the 1990s started off strongly with high praise for his role as Roy Cohn in the television production of Obywatel Cohn (1992). Woods was equally...

Movies

A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan 35 years later, where he must once again confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.

The son of Zeus and Hera is stripped of his immortality as an infant and must become a true hero in order to reclaim it.

A group of male friends become obsessed with five mysterious sisters who are sheltered by their strict, religious parents in suburban Detroit in the mid 1970s.

A programmer at a Toronto TV station that specializes in adult entertainment searches for the producers of a dangerous and bizarre broadcast.

A woman entices a bomb expert she's involved with into destroying the mafia that killed her family.

Recovering from an ambush that killed his entire team, a vengeful vampire slayer must retrieve an ancient Catholic relic that, should it be acquired by vampires, will allow them to walk in sunlight.

A stray cat is the linking element of three tales of suspense and horror.

A burnt-out photojournalist becomes involved in a Central American revolution.

An action movie star researching a role is allowed to tag along with a hardboiled New York City policeman, who finds him superficial and irritating.

A gangster hires an ex-football player to find his estranged girlfriend. When he finds her, they fall in love and things get complicated.

A Mississippi district attorney and the widow of Medgar Evers struggle to finally bring a white racist to justice for the 1963 murder of the civil rights leader.

A 15-year-old girl incites chaos among her friends and a media frenzy when she accuses her drama teacher of sexual harassment.

In the hope of a big score, two junkie couples team up to commit various drug robberies which go disastrously wrong, leading to dissent, violence, and murder.

Gabriel's released from prison. His con man friend makes a foolish bet with Diggstown's owner on who'd win the boxing matches - their man against ten Diggstown men.

An ex-hit man wants a police detective/novelist to write his biography.

An obsessive, insubordinate homicide cop is convinced a serial killer is loose in the Hollywood area and disobeys orders in order to catch him.

LA cop Ian Campbell is killed in the onion fields outside of Bakersfield. But legal loopholes could keep his kidnappers Greg Powell and Jimmy Smith from receiving justice, and his partner Karl Hettinger is haunted by survivor's guilt.

A secret Service agent and a news reporter investigate the conspiracy behind the assassination of the President.

A cynical former civil liberties attorney now reduced to "specializing" in defending drug dealers becomes transformed by an eight-year-old murder case.