Ethan Hawke Bio
Ethan Green Hawke (born November 6, 1970) is an American actor, author, and film director. He is known for his versatility across a wide range of roles, starring in both blockbusters and independent films. In a career on both stage and screen spanning more than four decades, Hawke has received numerous accolades, including a Daytime Emmy Award, as well as nominations for four Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, a British Academy Film Award, and a Tony Award.
Hawke made his film debut at age fourteen in Explorers (1985) and gained wider recognition for his role as a student in Dead Poets Society (1989). During the 1990s, he established himself as a leading man with Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites (1994), Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997), and Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998). He earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for portraying a rookie police officer in the crime thriller Training Day (2001). Hawke collaborated with Richard Linklater in the acclaimed Before trilogy (1995–2013). The latter two films garnered him two Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay. Hawke starred in Linklater’s coming-of-age drama Boyhood (2014), earning nominations for the Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Early Life and Background
Ethan Green Hawke was born in Austin, Texas, on November 6, 1970. His father, James Hawke, was an insurance actuary, while his mother, Leslie Green, was a charity worker and teacher. Hawke’s parents were high school sweethearts from Fort Worth, Texas, and married when his mother was seventeen. They separated and later divorced in 1974, when he was four years old. After his parents’ separation, Hawke was raised by his mother. They moved several times before settling in Brooklyn, New York City, where he attended the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights.
When Hawke was ten or twelve, his mother remarried, and the family relocated to West Windsor Township, New Jersey. There, he attended West Windsor Plainsboro High School before transferring to the Hun School of Princeton, a boarding school from which he graduated in 1988. Around this time, Hawke volunteered with his mother’s organization, the Alex Fund, a charity that supported educational opportunities for underprivileged children in Romania. In high school, Hawke aspired to become a writer but developed a strong interest in acting. He made his stage debut at age thirteen in a McCarter Theatre production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan.
Path to Hollywood
Hawke later performed in his high school’s productions of Meet Me in St. Louis and You Can’t Take It with You. During his time at the Hun School, he also studied acting at the McCarter Theatre, located on the Princeton University campus. After graduating, Hawke studied acting at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh but left after being cast in Dead Poets Society (1989). He later enrolled in New York University’s English program for two years before leaving to pursue acting full-time.
With his mother’s permission, Hawke attended his first casting call at age fourteen and was cast in Joe Dante’s Explorers (1985), playing a misfit schoolboy alongside River Phoenix. Although the film received positive reviews, it performed poorly at the box office, leading Hawke to step away from acting for a time after its release. He later described the experience as difficult to handle at such a young age. In 1989, Hawke had his breakthrough role as a shy student in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society. The film was critically and commercially successful, winning the BAFTA Award for Best Film.
Ethan Hawke Career
Early Career (1985–1993)
After filming Dead Poets Society, he auditioned for his next project, the comedy-drama Dad (1989). In 1991, Hawke co-founded Malaparte, a Manhattan-based theater company that operated until 2000. His first leading role came with Randal Kleiser’s film White Fang (1991), an adaptation of Jack London’s novel of the same name, in which he portrayed a young Klondike gold prospector who befriends a wolfdog. A writer for The Oregonian appreciated how he kept the film from being ridiculous or overly sentimental, while Roger Ebert praised how he was properly callow at the beginning and properly matured at the end.
In A Midnight Clear (1992), his character leads a group of American soldiers during World War II, tasked with capturing a small squad of German troops stationed in the Ardennes forest in France. Hawke made his Broadway debut in 1992, portraying the playwright Konstantin Treplev in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Lyceum Theater in Manhattan. He then played Nando Parrado, one of the survivors of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash in the Andes, in the survival drama Alive (1993), adapted from Piers Paul Read’s 1974 non-fiction book.
Breakthrough (1994–2000)
Hawke’s next role was in the Generation X drama Reality Bites (1994), in which he portrayed a disaffected slacker who mocks the ambitions of his love interest, played by Winona Ryder. The film did moderately well at the box office, grossing $41 million on a budget of $11 million. Hawke starred in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), the first installment of the Before film trilogy. He portrayed a young American man who meets a young French woman and they both disembark in Vienna. The reception for the film and Hawke’s performance was positive, with the former receiving a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Hawke directed the music video for Lisa Loeb’s US Billboard Hot 100 number-one single “Stay (I Missed You)”; Loeb was then a member of Hawke’s theater company. Spin magazine named the video its Video of the Year in 1994. Hawke published his first novel, titled The Hottest State, in 1996, which tells the story of a love affair between a young actor and a singer. He described writing the book as both the scariest but also one of the best things he ever did.
Notable Works and Milestones
Hawke called his script in Andrew Niccol’s science fiction film Gattaca (1997) one of the more interesting ones he had read in a number of years. In it, he played the role of a man who infiltrates a society of genetically perfect humans by assuming another man’s identity. Alongside Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert De Niro, he starred in Great Expectations (1998), a contemporary film adaptation of Charles Dickens’s novel of the same name, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. He criticized the film’s time of release, stating that nobody gave a shit about anything but Titanic for about nine months after particularly another romance.
Ethan Hawke Award Nominations
Ethan Hawke has received numerous nominations throughout his career, including four Academy Award nominations, two Golden Globe nominations, and a BAFTA nomination, showcasing his talent and versatility as an actor.
Ethan Hawke Awards Won
Hawke has won several awards, including a Daytime Emmy Award, recognizing his contributions to film and television.
Ethan Hawke Family
Ethan Hawke was married to actress Uma Thurman from 1998 to 2005. They have two children together, Maya Hawke and Levon Hawke, both of whom have pursued careers in acting. In 2008, he married Ryan Shawhughes, with whom he has two daughters.
Personal Life
Hawke identifies as a feminist and has criticized the film industry for being a boys’ club. He is a supporter of the Democratic Party and has been involved in various philanthropic efforts, including co-founding the Young Lions Fiction Award to recognize outstanding fiction by writers under 35.
