Billy Bob Thornton

Born on August 4, 1955 in Hot Springs, Arkansas, into a Methodist family, William Robert Thornton had a very hard youth marked by poverty, as he lived in a house without electricity or hot water, and to make matters worse, he mistreated his father. But all these disastrous episodes have served as inspiration for his characters. “Talent is not an ingredient in my success,” he said in an interview. “I just borrow emotions from my own past to bring my characters to life.” The worst moment in his life came when his brother died suddenly, in 1988. He suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that leads him to associate people with numbers. “I constantly do math in my head, which is exhausting,” he has confessed.

His dream of making it as a baseball player was dashed by injury, so he focused on his musical career, as a drummer for the band Tres Hombres. As success resisted him in this field, he decided to leave everything to emigrate to Los Angeles, in the company of  Tom Epperson , his childhood friend, with the aim of succeeding as actors, apart from starting a law career, which he never finished. . Since nobody hired them, he did all kinds of jobs, for example he worked as a waiter.

During a movie industry event where he was serving canapés, he met legendary filmmaker Billy Wilder, who had an intense conversation with him. After knowing broad details of his life, the director of  The Apartment  ended up advising him to dedicate himself to selling scripts. He immediately got down to business with Epperson, but the studio executives wouldn’t welcome him. As a result, they both went hungry, to the point that Billy Bob Thornton ended up in the hospital with heart problems caused by malnutrition.

He finally managed to make his acting debut with the forgotten horror film  The Hunter’s Blood , from 1986. He then managed to place one of his scripts co-written with Epperson,  A Wrong Step . In the film, he himself played a drug dealer who runs off with a policeman’s girlfriend, who was to be played by Bill Paxton . From then on he started to do better, being called in from time to time for small roles, so he was a hiker in  Indecent Proposal , and a card player in  Tombstone: The Legend of Wyatt Earp .

The consecration came to Billy Bob Thornton when he made his directorial debut with  The Other Side of Life , also written by him, in which he plays a disabled man who comes out of the asylum where he has been hospitalized for twenty-five years. Thanks to his successful balance between drama and humor, he achieved against all odds the Oscar for best screenplay, taking it away from the favorite of that year, that of  The English Patient . He also made it to the finalist for lead actor.

Already recognizable by the general public, his best roles came to him. He played a quirky mechanic in  Turn to Hell , a political strategist in  Primary Colors , the CEO of NASA in  Armageddon , the President of the United States in Love Actually , a working alcoholic dressed as Santa Claus in  Bad Santa , David Crockett in  The Alamo, The Legend , and the jailer on death row in  Monster’s Ball , among other. He stands out especially in the field of thrillers, since his two best works would be the guy who with his brother (again Paxton) finds a crashed plane with a bag containing four million dollars in  A Simple Plan , by Sam Raimi, for which he won a third nomination for the Academy Award, and the barber who blackmails his wife’s lover in  The Man Who Wasn’t There , from the Coen brothers, who reprized him for  Intolerable Cruelty .

Love hasn’t gone too well for Billy Bob Thornton, who has been paired with six women, and none of them have lasted more than four years. Divorced from Melissa Lee Gatlin, with whom he had his firstborn, he has been with fellow actresses Toni Lawrence ( Donors ), and  Cynda Williams ( The more, the merrier! ),  with Pietra Thornton, mother of two other offspring, and the most famous of all, Angelina Jolie, nineteen years his junior, with whom he had a relationship as brief as it was intense and sick, since each one wore a medallion smeared with the other’s blood. “We still got along pretty well, but we had different lifestyles; she loved to get out of it and I am rather agoraphobic, ”he recalls. They broke up after three years of dating, and adopting a boy named Maddock, when Thornton grew tired of endless meetings with politicians, activists, wealthy people eager to donate money to charitable causes, and heads of adoption agencies. In recent years he has been linked to Connie Angland, a movie makeup artist who has given birth to his last daughter. For a time he was also dating actress Laura Dern .

Despite his promising debut feature, Billy Bob Thornton’s career as a director was ruined by the resounding failure of his second work,  All the Beautiful Horses , an ambitious blockbuster with Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz , which does not even come close to reaching the quality of the Cormac McCarthy novel on which it is based. In recent years, the star has once again shone in the Coen universe, this time on television, with the  Fargo series , inspired by the eponymous feature film. In the first season he played an enigmatic hitman who ends up helping a mediocre insurance salesman.