David Strathairn

Born in San Francisco on January 26, 1949, David Russell Strathairn is the son of a doctor. He studied at Williams College, a prestigious school where he became friends with a privileged student, John Sayles ., currently the filmmaker who uses his interpretive services the most. Right after graduation, he took a trip to Florida, to spend the summer with his grandfather, who passed away suddenly, while he was arriving. Suddenly, the young Strathairn found himself alone, without friends or resources, and ended up being welcomed by members of the Ringling Brothers circus. Few people know that Strathairn clowned for six months with the circus, on a multi-state tour. The boy seemed to take a ‘taste’ of traveling around the North American territory, because from that moment on he began to hitchhike from city to city, looking for theaters in which to work as an actor.

At that time he met John Sayles again. He was beginning to make his way as a screenwriter, in low-budget productions such as Piranha and The Lady in Red . He would scour the same theaters that Strathairn performed in, looking for actors for his directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7 , a rarity that also marked Strathairn’s big-screen debut. Soon after, he called him back for Brother from Another Planet and Enormous Changes at the Las Minutes . Right after that, Strathairn was recruited for the forgotten comedy Mad in Love , where his small intervention as a patient of Dudley MooreIt opened the doors for him to interpret a long list of secondary characters, sometimes in products of three to the room, such as A gentleman in New York ; and other times in series like Miami Vice or Spencer , a private detective. The interpreter gives enormous importance to television and cinema. “They are our libraries in the modern world. Movies are our history books”, he has declared.

Strathairn, happily married to Logan Goodman, with whom he has two children, made his career especially from the 1990s, a stage in which he began to work with the great stars of Hollywood, as he was a member of Robert Redford ‘s IT team , in Los Snoopers , Tom Cruise ‘s brother on The Cover , Meryl Streep ‘s peaceful husband on Wild River , and Jennifer Jason Leigh ‘s violent father on Total Eclipse (Dolores Claiborne). For regular movie viewers, he became “that very good actor, who is always very good, whose name I don’t remember”, especially after playing the sleazy pimp ofLA Confidential , which turned its prostitutes into stunt doubles for movie stars. In any case, it was Sayles who gave him more scope, which was why he was a ‘buddy’, in his films Matewan , Eight Men , The City of Hope , Passion Fish and especially in Limbo , where he played the protagonist, Joe Gastineau, a single fisherman in love with a singer, who embarks with her and her daughter on a trip to Alaska. Another of his career highs is Harrison’s Flowers , where he was a war photographer left in shock while reporting on the war in the former Yugoslavia. The real protagonist of the film was Andie MacDowell, who played his wife, who traveled half the world to find him. From time to time, Strathairn returns to television, as he has appeared in series as famous as The Sopranos .

It could be said that a new stage of his career begins now, after his Oscar nomination for becoming the man in the suit, the television journalist Edward Murrow, in Good night, and good luck . As he was more sung than ever that the Oscar was going to go to Philip Seymour Hoffman , for Capote , Strathairn must have attended the ceremony so calm, sure that his candidacy was already a triumph. In fact, since then he has been more in demand than ever. He has finished The Notorious Bettie Page , a biopic in which Gretchen Mol plays a famous model, has starred in The Sensation of Sight , where he is a depressed English teacher, and has just wrapped the dramaRacing Daylights and We Are Marshall , sports drama with Matthew McConaughey . He will also be seen next in the thriller Fracture , with Anthony Hopkins . Finally, he has also been one of the actors chosen by the Chinese Wong Kar Wai to star in My Blueberry Nights , which he will shoot in 2007. The cast also includes Ed Harris , Norah Jones , Jude Law , Tim Roth and Natalie Portman .