Celebrity Biographies
William fichtner
He has charisma. He may never play a leading role, but he has worked with some great directors, on fast-paced, wildly popular titles. As if that were not enough, William Fichtner can say that one of his works, “Crash”, won the Oscar for best film.
William Edward Fichtner, of German descent, was born at Mitchel Air Force Base on Long Island, New York. It goes without saying that his father was in the military, and also one of his four sisters would follow that career. Interestingly, he studied criminal justice at Farmingdale State College, which would later grant him an honorary doctorate. He became an actor thanks to his tutor at that institution, Don Harvey, who took him to see a Broadway play, and inoculated him with the acting virus, to the point that he studied at the prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York. .
His first jobs led him to television, series like As the World Turns (1987) and Baywatch (1989). In the cinema, he would be seen briefly in prestigious titles such as Malcolm X ( Spike Lee , 1992) and Quiz Show ( Robert Redford , 1994). A very singular and easily recognizable face, of a tough guy who could be said to be hiding something, made him the ideal character actor for titles with a lot of whiplash, warfare, adventures or science fiction. He wouldn’t be disgusting to the video game world either, lending his voice to “Grand Theft Auto.”
In the fantastic genre chapter we saw him in 1995 in Virtuosity and Strange Days , in the latter directed by Kathryn Bigelow . He has also walked in Contact ( Robert Zemeckis , 1997), Armageddon ( Michael Bay , 1998), Ultraviolet (2006), The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) –brief but intense role in the opening scene of the bank robbery– and Elysium ( Neill Blomkamp , 2013) –an evil businessman, cold as ice–. He has been twice in the war in 2001, repeating with Michael Bay at Pearl Harborand in Black Hawk shot down under Ridley Scott . The German Wolfgang Petersen directed him in The Perfect Storm (2000), and among his police thrillers include Heat ( Michael Mann , 1995) and Kidnapping (1997). He has also been in an Oscar-winning film for best picture, the ensemble Crash (2004).
His face became popular on the small screen as a persistent fugitive-chasing FBI agent in Prison Break (2007). Two years earlier he had been in the prison film The Clan of the Bonebreakers , a deteriorated remake of Bonebreaker , Robert Aldrich ‘s classic , as a guard without many scruples. An all-round actor who does not stop working, he has recently been seen in The Lone Ranger ( Gore Verbinski , 2013), one of the most negatively criticized titles among those starring Johnny Depp .
Fichtner was married to actress Betsy Aidem, with whom he had a son. In 1998 he married the also actress Kymberly Kalil, with whom he has another son, and who is currently retired from the screen.