Sean Penn

On August 17, 1960, Sean Justin Penn entered the world and began his acting and directing career in the United States. He won an Academy Award for his roles in the movies "Mystic River" and "Milk." There was no high school in Malibu when Penn was growing up, so he split his time between Malibu Park Junior High and Santa Monica High. Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, two actors who shared his childhood neighborhood, were among his earliest filmmaking partners. Penn, the son of two actors, decided against attending university in favor of a career in theater.

On December 4, 1974, Penn made his tv acting premiere in a Little House on the Prairie episode that was directed by his father, Leo Penn. He had a few TV appearances, notably an episode of Barnaby Jones (1979), before relocating to New York in the eighties. Penn's acting in the aforementioned crime dramas was widely praised. Penn's breakthrough performance was as the high on marijuana surfer in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High". His image as a serious actor was cemented by 1983's "Bad Boys," but his brief marriage to Madonna and the ensuing media harassment led to the commercial disaster of 1985's "Shanghai Surprise" and violent incidents with photographers. He later married Robin Wright (1993) after finding fame as a self-important lawyer in "Carlito's Way" (1993) and a death-row convict in "Dead Man Walking" (1996). Their marriage lasted for a long time and was rather stable (1995). Penn won for his depiction of a street-wise father desperate to avenge the murder of his daughter in "Mystic River," following his success in "Sweet and Lowdown" (1999) and "I Am Sam" (2001). He abandoned his bad-boy image and became a political activist, irking conservatives with his friendship with despised international leaders and has called for the impeachment of President Bush. Penn kept up his on-screen output with 2008's "Milk" despite his unshakeable reputation as a nasty and arrogant Hollywood outsider due to his inability to play the Hollywood game.

The "Tree of Life," an impressionistic drama directed by Terrence Malick, starred Penn as a guy who is constantly troubled by his past. Penn has provided his voice for a number of animated films and TV shows, such as "Persepolis" (2007) and "Angry Birds" (2012). Returning to the theatres, Penn starred in "The Professor and the Madman" (2019), a film that showcased the creation of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Despite these criticisms, Penn's body of work is universally regarded as among the best of all time, earning him comparisons to the likes of Marlon Brando in the contemporary era. Penn recently directed and starred in the film "Flag Day" in 2021, in which his daughter, Dylan Penn, plays a young woman who discovers that her incarcerated father has been lying to her. Later that same year, he appeared in "Licorice Pizza," a coming-of-age drama directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. In the 2022 TV miniseries "Gaslit," Penn portrays Attorney General John Mitchell during the Watergate scandal.

Penn's involvement in politics and society extends beyond the realm of filmmaking; he has, for example, spoken out against the Bush administration, communicated with the heads of Cuba and Venezuela, and assisted with relief operations following natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Haitian earthquake in 2010.