Matthew Modine

Born on March 22, 1959, Matthew Avery Modine is the youngest of seven children of a Mormon confession stage manager. He discovered his acting vocation when at the age of 10 he saw a documentary about the filming of the musical Oliver! , whose young performers fascinated him to the point that he asked his mother if he could lead his steps to become an actor or dancer and singer. Since then, he has combined his elementary studies at Marian Catholic High School, and Vista High School, with classes at a dance school.

Finally, Matthew Modine moves to New York, where he works for a while washing cars, cooking or whatever to pay for his acting studies at Stella Adler. He debuted with the dramedy Baby It’s You , in which he had a very brief role, but which caught the attention of filmmaker Robert Altman . He hired him to play one of the young soldiers about to go to Vietnam who discover that they have a homosexual partner, in Debris , a role for which the young performer won the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival.

The award was quite key in the first stage of Modine’s career, since it began to be claimed by first swords. In the surprising Mrs. Soffel , Gilliam Armstrong turned him into the brother of a convict (Mel Gibson) who seduces the wife of a civil servant so they can both escape. Alan Parker, cast him as a boy obsessed with birds and flying, too – like his character in Debris – about to be sent to Vietnam, in Birdy , where he played his best friend Nicolas Cage . Matthew Modine ‘s most accomplished role also has to do with the conflict in Southeast Asia, as he was the prankster recruit, the linchpin of Full Metal Jacket ., the penultimate work of the master Stanley Kubrick , which follows his training and his stay at the front.

“Working with Kubrick marked me like never before,” Modine said in an interview. “We spent two years shooting the film and I have no words to describe the impact that collaboration with him had on me. He liked to ask an actor the right questions, to try to make us understand the character. It seems important to me that the actors are questioned, something that many times does not happen. It is a mistake of many directors who limit themselves to saying what must be done and nothing more, when they should be invited to interpret understanding the situation of the character”.

He also did a good job for Jonathan Demme , casting him as an undercover agent trying to help Michelle Pfeiffer , married to a mob boss, in Married Everybody . After the thriller Suddenly, a Stranger , by veteran John Schlesinger , in which his tenant ( Michael Keaton ) turns out to be a psychopath, he plays the person in charge of the United States team in the America’s Cup sailing, in The Force of the Wind , representative from the nature films of Carrol Ballard . They also have his interest From him On the edge of doubt , about the early days of AIDS, and his reunion with Altman, inCrossed Lives , where he played a doctor, married to a painter ( Julianne Moore ), who begins a friendship with a peculiar couple at a concert. In The Browning version , an adaptation of the work by Terence Rattingan by Mike Figgis , which Anthony Asquith had already made into a film in the 50s, Modine was one of the teachers at the school, who had an affair with the wife of the veteran protagonist ( Albert Finney ).

At this point, in the mid-90s of the last century, Matthew Modine’s career was going from strength to strength, until he embarked as the protagonist in The Island of the Severed Heads , where he was a slave with knowledge of Latin, bought to decipher the treasure map by Morgan Adams – Geena Davis –, the daughter of a pirate captain. The film by Renny Harlin , Davis’s husband at the time, included large doses of spectacularity, and was right in its twist on traditional pirate cinema (here the girl was the one who had the upper hand) but it was one of the great shipwrecks of the decade at the box office. Unfortunately, it completely wrecked Harlin’s, Davis’ and Modine’s careers. Hollywood seemed to chop off the heads of all three.

Since then, little else has been heard from Modine. He was inactive for some time, the peculiar Abel Ferrara chose him to give life to a movie star with paranoia in The Blackout: hidden in memory , which did not have much impact either. From time to time he appeared in supporting roles, as a doctor in Any Given Sunday , as an actor in a Notting Hill movie sequence, as a millionaire in The West Wing of the White House , as an abandoned husband in James Ivory ‘s Le Divorce .

In 1999, he debuted as a director with Golpe a treason , correct, but which went unnoticed on the billboards. In recent times he has been seen as a land manager on the sitcom Weeds , rich father of a kidnapped boy in Transporter 2 , and a mysterious deputy sheriff in The Dark Knight Rises . He also makes some effort as John Sculley, the Pepsi president who has gone over to Apple, in Jobs , an irregular biopic of the founder of the computer company.

Married to Caridad Rivera from 1980 to the present, Matthew Modine is the father of two children, Ruby and Boman Mark Rivera Modine.