Biography of Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke first appeared on stage when he was 13, in a high school production of St. Joan. He was 14 when he made his first movie, starring opposite River Phoenix in Explorers, about teen boys in outer-space. Four years later, Dead Poets Society made Hawke a heartthrob. He played the fragile kid in Robin Williams' class, who said, "Truth is like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold."

Hawke has often portrayed lonely or wayward young men, with a few days' stubble or a goatee. For young audiences, the whiskers give Hawke an aura of rakish charm. For an older crowd, it's a look that says 'perpetual adolescent.'

His films are usually as serious as Hawke himself, including Alive: The Miracle of the Andes, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Gattaca, Snow Falling on Cedars, Training Day, and 2000's high-rise corporate-backstabbing Hamlet. He directed the starving-artist mood piece Chelsea Walls. Reality Bites was a rarity, a Hawke film that could arguably be called a comedy.

Hawke's five-year marriage to Uma Thurman collapsed in 2003, as both he and she apparently had concurrent affairs. Hawke frolicked with a Montreal woman, Jennifer Perzow, as he was in Canada filming Taking Lives, while Thurman was 'taking direction' from Kill Bill's Quentin Tarantino.

When they split up, Hawke moved into New York's Chelsea Hotel, where he had filmed Chelsea Walls two years earlier.

Hawke has written two novels. The first, The Hottest State, is about young performers in love, and Newsweek said it was "one of the least pretentious things ever written by someone with a goatee." A film version, directed by Hawke, has been in assorted stutter-steps of preproduction for years.