Ethan Hawke Biography

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Born November 6, 1970, in Austin, TX, to teenage parents who separated when he was a toddler, Hawke was raised by his mother. The two led an itinerant existence until she married again, and the family settled in Princeton Junction, NJ. 

There Hawke began to study acting at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, and at the age of 14, he made his film debut in Explorers (1985). A sci-fi fantasy flick that starred the actor alongside River Phoenix, it didn’t make much of an impact upon its theatrical release, but thanks to the presence of both Hawke and Phoenix, it went on to a second life on cable.

Following his debut, Hawke stopped acting professionally to attend Carnegie Mellon University. His college career didn’t last long, however; while still a student, Hawke was chosen to play one of the young protagonists of Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society. 

The 1989 film, which marked the beginning of Robin Williams’ turn toward more dramatic roles, was a success, and Hawke, in his role as the shy, cringing Todd Anderson, made prep school angst look so photogenic that he soon had something of a teenage following.

After starring as Ted Danson’s son in Dad the same year, Hawke went on to make a string of movies that allowed him to demonstrate his talent but never quite propelled him further into the realm of stardom. White Fang (1991) provided him with a go at adventure by casting him as a young gold miner who forms a bond with the titular canine, while Waterland (1992) had Hawke plumbing the depths of mild delinquency as the troublesome student of an emotionally estranged Jeremy Irons.

Unfortunately, almost nobody saw Waterland, and the same could be said of Hawke’s other film that year, the WWII drama A Midnight Clear. Lack of an audience obscured the actor’s strong performances in both films, and it was not until 1994 that he began to gain recognition for something besides Dead Poets Society.

In that year, Hawke created something of a reputation for himself, both on- and offscreen. Offscreen, he became tabloid fodder when he was caught dancing with a then-married Julia Roberts and thus gained a certain — if fleeting — kind of notoriety.

On screen, the actor starred in Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites, portraying the kind of goateed, ennui-mired, more-sensitive-than-thou slacker that helped get him labeled as such in real life. Matters weren’t helped when, that same year, the actor published The Hottest State, a meditation on love from the point-of-view of an angst-ridden twentysomething that was scorned by many critics as pretentious posturing.

After starring as another sensitive student of life in Richard Linklater’s romantic talkathon Before Sunrise (1995), Hawke went back to his sci-fi roots with Gattaca (1997), a near-future parable about the dangers of genetic engineering. Although the film was a relative disappointment, it did present Hawke with an introduction to co-star Uma Thurman, whom he married in 1998 and had a daughter with later that same year. 

Also in 1998, the actor starred opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations; despite mixed reviews, the film heightened Hawke’s profile while further establishing him as one of the leading interpreters of sensitive-boy artistic angst.

After a starring turn as one of the titular Newton Boys alongside Matthew McConaughey, Skeet Ulrich, and Vincent D’Onofrio in Richard Linklater’s neglected 1998 Western, Hawke took on an entirely different role in 1999. Starring in Scott Hicks’ Snow Falling on Cedars, he portrayed a journalist investigating the murder of a Japanese-American man in post-WWII Washington State. The same year, he appeared in Joe the King, the directorial debut of his friend and Midnight Clear co-star Frank Whaley.

In addition to his film work, Hawke has remained active in the theater. He was the artistic director of the now-defunct Malaparte, a New York theater company that he co-founded with a group of actors including Robert Sean Leonard, Frank Whaley, and Josh Hamilton. He has also worked behind the camera, directing the music video for Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” in 1994.

Hawke subsequently earned some of the best reviews of his career to date as the title character of Michael Almereyda’s 2000 adaptation of Hamlet. Set in modern-day New York, the film allowed Hawke to give the famously tortured prince a slackerish spin that more than one critic noted seemed to come naturally to the actor. 

The following year, he could be seen in an altogether different feature, portraying a rookie cop opposite Denzel Washington in Training Day, Antoine Fuqua’s gritty cop drama.

He also collaborated again with director Linklater, first for Tape, a drama co-starring Robert Sean Leonard and wife Thurman, and then for Waking Life, a groundbreaking animated feature in which the actor reprised the role of Before Sunrise’s Jesse.

2001 also marked Hawke’s first significant foray behind the camera as the director of Chelsea Walls, a multi-character drama about various artists living in New York’s famed Chelsea Hotel.

In 2002, Hawke played alongside Frank Whaley in The Jimmy Show and made an appearance on the hit television drama Alias the next year. The year 2003 was not a banner one for the actor — after rumors of an affair between Hawke and a young model began circulating among various television and print tabloids, Uma Thurman announced their official separation after five years of marriage.

In 2004, Hawke starred with Angelina Jolie in director D.J. Caruso’s Taking Lives and reprised his Before Sunrise role opposite Julie Delpy in Linklater’s sequel Before Sunset, a film which also provided the long-time actor with his first screenwriting credit.

On May 1, 1998, Hawke married actress Uma Thurman, whom he met on the set of Gattaca (1997). Their relationship resulted in two children, daughter Maya Ray Thurman-Hawke (born July 8, 1998) and son Levon Roan Thurman-Hawke (born January 15, 2002). The couple separated in 2003, amid allegations of Hawke’s infidelity, and filed for divorce the following year. Hawke married for a second time in June 2008, wedding Ryan Shawhughes, the former nanny to his and Thurman’s children. The wedding came a few weeks before the birth of Hawke and Shawhughes’s daughter, Clementine Jane Hawke, on July 18, 2008.

Hawke lives in Chelsea, a Manhattan neighborhood in New York City,[118] and owns a small island in Tracadie, Nova Scotia. Hawke is a relative of Tennessee Williams on his father’s side: Cornelius Williams, father of Tennessee Williams, was Hawke’s great-great-uncle. He supports the United States Democratic Party and supported Bill Bradley, John Kerry and Barack Obama for President of the United States in 2000, 2004 and 2008, respectively. Hawke is also a co-founder and sponsor of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, an annual prize of $10,000 for achievements in fiction writing by authors under age 35.

2005 saw Hawke star in the action thriller Assault on Precinct 13, a loose remake of John Carpenter’s 1976 film of the same title, with an updated plot. Hawke played Sergeant Jake Roenick, a Detroit policeman working desk duty in a rundown police station. Assault on Precinct 13 received reasonable reviews; some critics praised the dark swift feel of the film, while others compared it unfavorably to John Carpenter’s original. Hawke also starred that year in the political crime thriller Lord of War, playing an Interpol agent chasing an arms dealer played by Nicolas Cage.

In 2006 Hawke was cast in a supporting role in the film Fast Food Nation, an adaptation by Linklater and Eric Schlosser of Schlosser’s bestselling 2001 non-fiction book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Hawke directed his second feature, The Hottest State, based on his eponymous 1996 novel. The movie was screened at a special presentation at the 2006 Venice International Film Festival and was released in theaters in 2007.

Hawke then appeared alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, and Albert Finney in Sidney Lumet’s crime drama Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007). Hawke played an ex-husband in desperate need of child support who decides to rob his parent’s jewelry store with his desperate brother (Hoffman), with disastrous consequences. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone praised Hawke’s performance, noting that he “digs deep to create a haunting portrayal of loss”. USA Today called the movie “highly entertaining”, describing Hawke and Hoffman’s performances as excellent.

In 2008 Hawke starred alongside Mark Ruffalo in the crime drama What Doesn’t Kill You. Despite the favorable reception, the film was not given a proper theatrical release due to the bankruptcy of its distributor. 2009 saw Hawke appear in two features: New York, I Love You, a romance movie comprising 12 short films, and Staten Island, a crime drama interweaving three storylines. The following year he starred as a vampire researcher trying to save humanity from extinction in the horror-thriller Daybreakers (2010).

The feature received reasonable reviews, and earned $50 million worldwide. His next role was in Brooklyn’s Finest, released in March 2010, as a narcotics officer who uses his position to steal drug money and vigilante justice. The film opened to mediocre reviews, yet his performance was well-received, with the New York Daily News concluding, “Hawke – continuing an evolution toward stronger, more intense acting than anyone might’ve predicted from him 20 years ago – drives the movie.”

Hawke appear opposite Kristin Scott Thomas in The Woman in the Fifth 2011 to play a CIA black ops agent in The Numbers Station, and to portray a violinist in A Late Quartet. Aside from film, Hawke star as Starbuck, the first officer of the Pequod whaleship, in a television adaptation of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick (2011).