Jon Voight
Jon Voight (born December 29, 1938, Yonkers, New York, U.S.) is an American actor who achieved stardom with his portrayal of the street hustler Joe Buck in the groundbreaking film Midnight Cowboy (1969) and went on to have a successful career taking on challenging leading and character roles in a wide range of movies and television shows.
Voight began acting while in high school and earned (1960) a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He moved to New York City and studied (1960–64) under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. Voight made his Broadway debut in 1961 in the role of Rolf in The Sound of Music. He continued working in theatre through most of the 1960s and in addition began making guest appearances on such television shows as Naked City, The Defenders, Coronet Blue, and Gunsmoke. Voight’s first film appearance was in the title role of the low-budget Fearless Frank (1967), and he had a small part in John Sturges’s Hour of the Gun (1967) before he was cast in the Academy Award winner Midnight Cowboy. He garnered an Oscar nomination for best actor for his performance.
Voight appeared in Mike Nichols’s war comedy Catch-22 and starred as an angry young man in The Revolutionary, both in 1970. He delivered a memorable performance as a city businessman forced to fight for his life in Deliverance (1972), and he portrayed the writer Pat Conroy in the film memoir Conrack (1974). Voight followed a lead role in the conventional thriller The Odessa File (1974) with a moving portrayal of a paralyzed Vietnam War veteran in the drama Coming Home (1978) that earned him Golden Globe and Oscar awards for best actor; the Cannes film festival also named him best actor for the role. He starred in the sports melodrama The Champ (1979) and earned another Oscar nomination for best actor for his turn as an escaped convict in the thriller Runaway Train (1985).
Voight later played Captain Woodrow Call in the TV miniseries Return to Lonesome Dove (1993), Jim Phelps in the movie Mission: Impossible (1996), a murderous government bureaucrat in Enemy of the State (1998), and the father of the title character (played by his real-life daughter, Angelina Jolie) in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Voight received a supporting actor Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the sports broadcaster Howard Cosell in the biopic Ali (2001).
Voight’s later films included the fantasy Holes (2003) and the adventure movies National Treasure (2004) and Transformers (2007). In 2017 he appeared as the gruff father of an art dealer who befriends a homeless man in Same Kind of Different As Me, which was based on the best-selling memoir of the same name. His movie credits from 2018 included the family drama Orphan Horse. In addition, Voight played the father of the title character in the TV series Ray Donovan (2013–20), for which he received Emmy Award nominations in 2014 and 2016; he also appeared in Ray Donovan: The Movie (2022). During this time he was cast as Chief Justice Warren E. Burger in Roe v. Wade (2019), a film about the controversial legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion.
In 2019 Voight was awarded a National Medal of Arts, cited “for his exceptional capacity as an actor to portray deeply complex characters.”