1:39PM, Oct 23, 2009
Born: June 28 1966
Where: Evanston, Illinois, USA
The versatile actor is equally at home starring in art house favourites such as Being John Malkovich as he is holding the line in action blockbusters such as Con Air or 2012.
The son of an Irish Catholic acting family (his father and siblings including sister Joan are all in the entertainment industry), he became a member of Chicago's Piven Theatre Workshop while he was still in primary school.
By 12, he already had several stage productions, commercial voice overs and industrial films under his belt. and made his feature film debut at 17, acting alongside Rob Lowe and Andrew McCarthy in the romantic comedy Class.
(at this time he spent a year at New York University before dropping out, saying that he had "too much fire in his belly")
His next role, as a member of Anthony Michael Hall's 1984 geek brigade in Sixteen Candles, put him on track to becoming a teen-flick fixture.
He hovered on the periphery of the Brat Pack, sidestepping the meteoric rise and fall of most of his contemporaries, but he stayed in the limelight with leads in films like The Sure Thing, Better Off Dead and Cameron Crowe's Say Anything.
A year later, he hit cinemas as a fully-fledged adult star, playing a bush-league con man caught between his manipulative mother (Anjelica Huston) and headstrong girlfriend (Annette Bening) in dark scammer comedy The Grifters.
He became a proven box office success with his role as a world weary hitman in the dark comedy Grosse Pointe Blank and as a US Marshall in the Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster Con Air alongside Nicolas Cage and John Malkovich.
Expanding his range, he took on demanding roles such as an obsessive puppeteer in Being John Malkovich, a lovelorn record store owner in High Fidelity, and a Jewish art dealer mentoring a young Adolf Hitler in Max.
He starred in the effective horror film 1408, based on Stephen King's short story of the same name and subsequently appeared as a widowed father in the Iraq War-themed drama Grace is Gone.
Recent roles include the part of a divorced researcher alongside Amanda Peet in Roland Emmerich's apocalyptic sci-fi thriller <a href=”http://movies.sky.com/must-see-movie-2012”>2012</a>.
