1.
Clint Eastwood
Actor, Gran Torino
Perhaps the icon of macho movie stars, Clint Eastwood has become a standard in international cinema. Born in San Francisco, he is the son of Clinton Eastwood, Sr., a factory worker, and Ruth Wood (née Runner). The family frequently moved around Northern California when Clint was growing up before settling in Oregon...
2.
Paul Newman
Paul Leonard Newman was born in January of 1925, the second son of Arthur and Theresa (nee' Fetsko) Newman in Cleveland, Ohio. The Newmans were a well-to-do family and Paul grew up in a nice home in Shaker Heights. Newman's father, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Hungary, was the owner of a highly successful sporting goods store...
3.
Al Pacino
Actor, The Godfather
Known for his forceful dramatic presentation, Al Pacino is most closely associated with the roles of Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy, as well as Tony Montana of the legendary gangster film Scarface. But it was his performance as Frank Slade, a blind, retired Lt. Colonel, in Scent of a Woman that won him the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1993...
4.
Jack Nicholson
Actor, The Shining
Abandoned by his father in his childhood, he was raised believing his grandmother was his mother and his mother was his older sister. The truth was revealed to him years later when a Time magazine journalist uncovered the truth while preparing a story on the star. Jack had an on-and-off relationship with actress Anjelica Huston...
5.
Robert De Niro
Actor, Goodfellas
Robert De Niro, who is thought of as one of the greatest actors of his time, was born in New York City in 1943 to two artists. He was trained at the Stella Adler Conservatory and the American Workshop. He first gained fame for his role in Bang the Drum Slowly, but he gained his reputation as a volatile actor in Mean Streets...
6.
Humphrey Bogart
Actor, Casablanca
The son of a moderately wealthy Manhattan surgeon (who was secretly addicted to opium) and a famed magazine illustrator, Humphrey Bogart was educated at Trinity School, New York City, sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in preparation for medical studies at Yale. He was expelled from Phillips and joined the U.S...
7.
Morgan Freeman
Actor, The Shawshank Redemption
With an authoritative voice and calm demeanor, this ever popular American actor has grown into one of the most respected figures in modern US cinema. Born in June 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee, the young Freeman attended Los Angeles Community College before serving several years in the US Air Force as a mechanic between 1955 and 1959...
8.
Dustin Hoffman
Actor, Kramer vs. Kramer
Graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1954. Went to Santa Monica City College where he dropped out after a year due to bad grades. But before he did, he took an acting course because he was told that "nobody flunks acting." Also received some training at Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. Decided to go into acting because he did not want to work or go into the service...
9.
James Stewart
Actor, Rear Window
James Maitland Stewart was born on 20 May 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania where his father owned a hardware store. He was educated at a local prep school, Mercersburg Academy, where he was a keen athlete (football and track), musician (singing and accordion playing) and sometime actor. He won a place...
10.
Cary Grant
Actor, North by Northwest
Once told by an interviewer, "Everybody would like to be Cary Grant," Grant is said to have replied, "So would I." His early years in Bristol, England, would have been an ordinary lower-middle-class childhood except for one extraordinary event. At age nine, he came home from school one day and was told his mother had gone off to a seaside resort...
11.
Robert Redford
Born on August 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California, to Charles Robert Redford, an accountant for Standard Oil, and Martha Hart. His mother died in 1955, the year after he graduated from high school. Charles Robert Redford Jr. was a scrappy kid who stole hubcaps in high school and lost his college baseball scholarship at the University of Colorado because of drunkenness...
12.
Anthony Hopkins
Actor, Hannibal
Anthony Hopkins was born on 31 December 1937, in Margam, Wales. Influenced by Richard Burton, he decided to study at College of Music and Drama and graduated in 1957. In 1965, he moved to London and joined the National Theatre, invited by Laurence Olivier, who could see the talent in Hopkins. In 1967, he made his first film for television, A Flea in Her Ear...
13.
Sean Connery
Thomas Sean Connery was born on August 25, 1930 in Fountainbridge, Edinburgh. His mother, Euphamia C. Maclean, was a cleaning lady, and his father, Joseph Connery, was a factory worker and truck driver. He also has a brother named Neil Connery, who works as a plasterer in Edinburgh. Before going into acting...
14.
Henry Fonda
Actor, Once Upon a Time in the West
Born in Grand Island, Nebraska, Henry Fonda started his acting debut with the Omaha Community Playhouse, a local amateur theater troupe directed by Dorothy Brando. He moved to the Cape Cod University Players and later Broadway, New York to expand his theatrical career from 1926 to 1934. His first major roles in Broadway include "New Faces of America" and "The Farmer Takes a Wife"...
15.
Marlon Brando
Actor, The Godfather
Marlon Brando is widely considered the greatest movie actor of all time, rivaled only by the more theatrically oriented Laurence Olivier in terms of esteem. Unlike Olivier, who preferred the stage to the screen, Brando concentrated his talents on movies after bidding the Broadway stage adieu in 1949...
16.
Michael Caine
Actor, The Dark Knight
Born Maurice Micklewhite in London, Michael Caine was the son of a fish-market porter and a charlady. He left school at 15 and took a series of working-class jobs before joining the British army and serving in Korea during the Korean War, where he saw combat. Upon his return to England he gravitated toward the theater and got a job as an assistant stage manager...
17.
Kevin Spacey
Actor, American Beauty
As enigmatic as he is talented, Kevin Spacey has always kept the details of his private life closely guarded. As he explained in a 1998 interview with the London Evening Standard, "the less you know about me, the easier it is to convince you that I am that character on screen. It allows an audience to come into a movie theatre and believe I am that person"...
18.
Walter Matthau
Actor, The Odd Couple
Born Walter Matthow on October 1, 1920, to a pair of Russian-Jewish immigrants in New York City, Matthau grew up in poverty on the Lower East Side and started out selling soft drinks and playing bit parts at a Yiddish theater troupe at age 11. He was paid 50 cents for each of his occasional on-stage appearances...
19.
Jack Lemmon
Actor, The Apartment
Jack Lemmon's father was the president of a doughnut company. Jack attended Ward Elementary near his Newton, MA home. At age 9 he was sent to Rivers Country Day School, then located in nearby Brookline. After RCDS, he went to high school at Phillips Andover Academy. Jack was a member of the Harvard class of 1947...
20.
Gene Hackman
Actor, Unforgiven
The son of Eugene Ezra Hackman and Lydia (nee Gray), Gene Hackman grew up in a broken home, which he left at the age of 16 for a hitch with the US Marines. Moving to New York after being discharged, he worked in a number of menial jobs before studying journalism and television production on the G.I...
21.
Tommy Lee Jones
Actor, No Country for Old Men
Born in San Saba, Texas, the son of Clyde C. and Lucille Marie (Scott) Jones, Tommy Lee Jones worked in underwater construction and on an oil rig. He attended St. Mark's School of Texas, a prestigious prep school for boys in Dallas, on a scholarship, and went to Harvard on another scholarship.He roomed...
22.
Harrison Ford
Actor, Star Wars
Harrison Ford was born on July 13, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois. His father was Irish, his mother Russian-Jewish. He was a lackluster student at Maine Township High School East in Park Ridge Illinois (no athletic star, never above a C average). After dropping out of Ripon College in Wisconsin, where he did some acting and later summer stock...
23.
Edward Norton
Actor, Fight Club
Edward Norton was born on August 18, 1969 to parents Edward, an attorney who works for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Robin Norton, a former foundation executive and teacher who passed away of brain cancer on March 6, 1997. Edward also has two younger siblings named James and Molly...
24.
Brad Pitt
Actor, Se7en
An actor and producer known as much for his versatility as he is for his handsome face, Golden Globe-winning actor Brad Pitt's most widely-recognized role may be Tyler Durden in Fight Club. But his portrayals of Billy Beane in Moneyball, and Rusty Ryan in the remake of Ocean's Eleven and its sequels, also loom large in his filmography...
25.
Denzel Washington
Actor, American Gangster
Denzel Washington was born in December 28,1954 in Mount Vernon, New York. He was the middle child of the 3 children of a Pentecostal minister father and a beautician mother. After graduating from high school, Denzel enrolled at Fordham University intent on a career in journalism. However, he caught the acting bug while appearing in student drama productions and...
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