John Malkovich

John Malkovich is one of the most important and charismatic actors in cinema today. He has appeared in over 65 films - many of them classics - and has also been a director and producer for several years.

John Malkovich was born in 1953 in Christopher, Illinois, about 500 kilometers south of Chicago. His mother is of Scottish descent, his father of Croatian descent. Malkovich studied at Illinois State University and kept his head above water with jobs as a bus driver, painter and salesman. However, he did not receive his degree until 2005 - the university waived his last outstanding exam, a test on the United States Constitution.

In 1976 John Malkovich became an ensemble member at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, which his friend Gary Sinise - today also a well-known actor - had founded. Malkovich still regularly returns to the theater where he earned his first spurs as a stage actor.

In 1983, John Malkovich moved to New York to star alongside Dustin Hoffman in the Broadway version of Arthur Miller's drama Death of a Salesman. The play was such a success (Malkovich received an Emmy for it) that Volker Schlöndorff produced a TV movie version in 1985.

Malkovich had already appeared in the 1984 anti-war film The Killing Fields - Schreiendes Land. In the same year, he received his first Oscar nomination for a supporting role in Places in the Heart.

John Malkovich celebrated his final breakthrough in 1988 as the ice-cold seducer Vicomte de Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons.

The opulent costume drama won three Oscars; John Malkovich's interplay with Michelle Pfeiffer and Glenn Close was highly praised worldwide.

With Dangerous Liaisons, John Malkovich established himself as the most distinguished performer of complex, abysmal, often highly intelligent and intellectually condescending characters. He was nominated for both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his role as a psychopathic assassin in Wolfgang Petersen's In the Line of Fire (alongside Clint Eastwood). In Con Air he played a dangerous criminal, in Eragon the tyrannical king. However, his range of characters also includes the sympathetic villain (Ripley's Game), the failed intellectual (Heaven Over the Desert, Shame) and the cynic (The Man in the Iron Mask). In the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading, he played a frustrated CIA analyst.

He was seen in the blockbuster Transformers 3, among others, and also co-starred with Bruce Willis in R.E.D. and alongside Angelina Jolie in The Stranger Son. He was given a very special tribute in 1999: in the surreal film Being John Malkovich, he plays himself. In it, a puppeteer (John Cusack) accidentally finds an entrance into his brain. Most recently, he has appeared in film productions such as Bird Box alongside Sandra Bullock, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile with young star Zac Efron, and in the Netflix series Space Force.

John Malkovich has also worked with Austrian director Michael Sturminger and conductor Martin Haselböck on three musical theater projects since 2008: The Infernal Comedy about the Austrian wife-killer Jack Unterweger, The Giacomo Variations about the life of Giacomo Casanova (filmed under the title "The Casanova Variations") and Just Call me God —written for the opening of the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. Malkovich has also performed and recorded a text version of Beethoven's incidental music to Goethe's "Egmont" with the Orchester Wiener Akademie for their RESOUND BEETHOVEN series under the title “Roll Over Beethoven.”