Biography

		Life Story
		Film and Career

So many actors claim to despise the film industry. All that matters is big profits, they say, the Lowest Common Denominator is King. Yet very few do anything about it. Very few use the industry with intelligence, playing the tawdry game but using their money and influence to get classier projects off the ground. 

One who does is Tim Robbins, who'll accept a whacking pay packet to appear in trash like Mission To Mars, then spend time and money on pet projects like The Cradle Will Rock. Another such maverick is Robbins' close friend, John Cusack, action star of Con Air, but also the co-writer and star of indie hits High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Blank. Superstar AND artist - a difficult balancing act.

Considering his background, how could it have been any other way? Cusack was born on the 28th of June, 1966, in Evanston, a northern district of Chicago, right on Lake Michigan. His father, Richard, worked in advertising, then moved into documentary film-making (he'd win an Emmy) and acting (he appeared in his children's first movies, then later such blockbusters as The Fugitive and While You Were Sleeping). His mother, Nancy, gave up teaching maths to look after the children - in order, Ann, Joan, Bill, John and Susie.

Richard and Nancy moved to Chicago from New York in 1965. Oddly for Irish-Catholics, they believed in "a kind of Joseph Campbell theory of pursuing bliss. Whatever excites or makes you happy is what you should be doing". And what excited the Cusack kids was acting. 

When John was but 3, Ann (5 years his senior) would organise plays for the siblings to enact. She would be Cinderella, Joan would play the Ugly Stepsister, Bill was Prince Charming and John, well, strangely considering who turned out to be the international heart-throb, John was always the dog.

John remembers life at home as one continuous performance. There were a lot of laughs, many emanating from the hilarious Joan, but the kids were not just messing about. At 8, John joined the Piven Theatre Workshop, run by family friends Byrne and Joyce Piven. Ann and Joan were already regulars, as was the Pivens' son Jeremy, who'd become a lifelong friend of John's, appearing in many of his movies, and as the doctor-cousin in Ellen. John watched his sisters in shows then, finally, made his own debut, in Chekov's The Darling. He recalls "these wonderful lights, like a dreamscape". Though he'd originally wanted to play baseball, now acting was to be his life.

John, described by an old friend as "a pudgy little kid", was hugely enthusiastic - though "not pushy". He was funny too, which allowed him to "get away with stuff". He hated life at Evanston Township High School, despising The Establishment and feeling like an absolute outsider. But he threw himself into extra-curricular work. With his mother's help, by 12 he was getting himself radio ad work and voiceover jobs. By 14, he'd appeared in many stage productions and was already known as a "brilliant and generous" improviser.

Soon came the movies. Joan was first, appearing (alongside Richard) in My Bodyguard, in 1980. And both Richard and Joan would appear (briefly) in John's debut, the Brat Pack public school sex comedy Class, filmed during summer vacation when John was 16. Here Andrew McCarthy had an affair with room-mate Rob Lowe's mother, Jacqueline Bisset. 

John played one of their wise-ass school-buddies. In one memorable scene, nearly caught smoking by a teacher, he performs that neat smoker's trick where you hold your cigarette with your tongue, hiding it INSIDE your mouth. Very smooth, very Cusack.

Next came two more Brat Pack vehicles. First there was John Hughes's Sixteen Candles, starring Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall, then Grandview USA, with C.Thomas Howell, Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Then, with John still in High School, came the first real starring role, Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing. Here John was Walter "Gib" Gibson, a boy who decides to drive cross-country for guaranteed sex. 

Along the way, he meets an entirely different type of girl, and his ambitions change. The film was well-received but, more importantly, it introduced John to co-star Tim Robbins, another extremely tall maverick. Robbins would be a huge influence on Cusack's career and attitudes but, for now, he was a drinking buddy. During the filming of The Sure Thing, they would often "snarf" together, that is, make a hole in a beer can, pop the top, drink the contents in one, then crush the can, John Belushi-style, on their foreheads. Once, foolishly, Cusack managed to cut his head quite badly. Reiner, fortunately, forgave him.

John enrolled at New York University, but stayed for just one semester. He had bigger fish to fry. Teen movies were hot, he was a charismatic teenage actor - he was lucky, and he knew it. Sadly, aside from small roles in Reiner's Stand By Me and the excellent Broadcast News (another of Joan's), his movies were forgettable fare. Then things changed - fast. In Tapeheads, Cusack again encountered Robbins, as the pair played failed security guards who near-accidentally start a successful video production company. 

Now close friends, Cusack visited the Actors Gang theatre Tim was running in Los Angeles and loved the energy, the experimentalism and the spirit of adventure. "It was mesmerising," he recalls "I decided to take that style and do it in my home town".

And he did. Along with school-friends Steve Pink and DV DeVincentis (who, with Jeremy Piven, would later become Cusack's main support in Hollywood) he formed New Crime Theatre in 1988. Like the commedia dell'arte, they would wear masks and white-face, aiming their words and actions directly at the audience. In the late Eighties, Cusack would direct the satirical Alagazam . . . After The Dog Wars (co-written by Robbins) and Ivan Goll's Methusalem, a class struggle drama, for which John was cited at the Joseph Jefferson Awards.

And now the movie roles were getting better too. Now came John Sayles' baseball flick Eight Men Out, where Cusack played Buck Weaver, innocent but condemned along with the other members of the Chicago "Black Sox" who threw the 1919 World Series. Then came another Chicago role (Cusack LOVES his hometown) when, in Shadowmakers, alongside Paul Newman, he played a University of Chicago physicist working on the atomic bomb. These were John's first "adult" roles.

But the teen-star thing was tough to shake. Inbetween these movies came Cusack's biggest hit yet, Say Anything. Having hated High School so badly, and having wanted to leave for so long, Cusack was reluctant to go back, even for work. Besides, he was a theatre director in his early twenties, and very mature and experienced for his age. So he initially turned the film down, causing first-time director Cameron Crowe to visit him in Chicago. 

Crowe was surprised to find that, unlike the Hollywood Brat Packers, Cusack actually had a life. Rather than constantly obsessing over the next role, he'd sit around with his friends, studying the latest albums by Public Enemy or Elvis Costello. Crowe finally managed to persuade him to take the part, by describing the lead, Lloyd Dobler, as "a guy who chose optimism as a revolutionary act, but wasn't naïve to what was going on in the world".

So, Cusack did it, and made of himself an unlikely sex symbol. As the super-witty semi-loser Dobler, trying to win the hand of the incredibly beautiful and brainy valedictorian Ione Skye, he was superb. But what stole him so many hearts was one supremely romantic moment when he holds a boom-box above his head and plays her Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes. Most women between the ages of 25 and 40 STILL love him for that.

But Cusack wanted out of the teenie roles, and next came a defining part, as Angelica Huston's con-man son in Stephen Frears' super-cool The Grifters. This saw Cusack where he wanted to be. He'd grown up watching Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Redford and Newman, actors who applied themselves to complex roles. These were ACTORS, not celebrities. You NEVER saw them on chat-shows discussing their love-life. He resolved to follow their grand example.

If, that is, he was to act onscreen at all. After the tepid reception afforded to True Colours, where Cusack played a sneaky wannabe politico, he was unsure about his direction. He accepted small roles in big productions, like Woody Allen's Shadows And Fog, Robbins' hilarious satire Bob Roberts, and the fabulously moving Map Of The Human Heart. But there was nothing major till Allen asked him to play the young stage writer in Bullets Over Broadway. Cusack was brilliant - curious and cocksure, amused, fearful and shocked - particularly funny in his dealings with the masterfully over-the-top Dianne Wiest. He was back.

Next he was a thoroughly quizzical visitor to Anthony Hopkins' stool-obsessed health farm in The Road The Wellville, then played opposite his hero Pacino in City Hall (both co-starring Bridget Fonda). Then came the roles that made him. Cusack maintains that "for my best opportunities - other than America's Sweethearts - I've had to write my own movies". And that's what he did now. He'd formed a film production offshoot of New Crime Theatre back in the early Nineties, and struck a two-year deal with Paramount who, keen to make movies "like Sliver", rejected all their proposals. 

But Cusack and his school-chums persisted, and wrote a comedy thriller called Grosse Pointe Blank, about an assassin who, as cover for his latest killing, attends his 10-year High School reunion. They took it to Disney, and offered to make the movie for a mere $15 million, if the corporation "let it be what it is". Combining Cusack's love of Monty Python and John Woo, the film was a great success, and introduced him to co-star (and lover) Minnie Driver.

Now Cusack's attitudes had changed. He'd always loathed the insincerity of Hollywood but, realising he had to be there to get movies made, he moved to Los Angeles (though he kept a place in Chicago). He'd always refused to make blockbusters, having turned down the Woody Harrelson role in Indecent Proposal and the Bill Paxton role in Apollo 13 (his mother, according to legend, had refused to let him do the arduous Platoon back in the Eighties). 

But now, realising one big role could allow him to make three Grosse Pointe Blanks, he took on Con Air, as the sandal-wearing agent chasing Cage and Malkovich's crim-packed aircraft across the States.

From here on, Cusack alternated mega-movies with smaller, more personal projects. He played reporter John Kelso, verbally jousting with Savannah smoothie Kevin Spacey in Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil (he also found time for a relationship with director Clint Eastwood's actress daughter Alison - he's also dated Claire Forlani and Lili Taylor). 

Then came all-star war-pic The Thin Red Line, and the excellent Pushing Tin, where an ultra-competitive Cusack waged war against fellow air-traffic-controller Billy Bob Thornton. He even appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman. Looking surprised by the adulatory applause, he was asked by Letterman why he'd never been on before. "Traffic. Bad traffic", came the reply.

In between these high-budget productions, there was the (where else?) Chicago-set Hellcab and the classy TV western The Jack Bull, written by Cusack's dad and made by New Crime. John played Nelson Rockefeller in Tim Robbins' political theatre drama The Cradle Will Rock and, bearded and long-haired, he was the super-intense master-puppeteer who discovers a portal into his ex-co-star's head in Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich. 

Then came another New Crime production, with Cusack starring as record-shop owner Rob Gordon, recalling his disastrous relationships and swapping elitist musical jibes in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, directed by Grifters-guy Stephen Frears. Cusack's past as a music-obsessive (he's now good mates with the likes of Sheryl Crow, Gwen Stefani and Liz Phair), allowed him to choose the score.

Next, he reappeared with High Fidelity girlfriend Catherine Zeta-Jones in America's Sweethearts, also starring Julia Roberts and Billy Crystal. Here Cusack is a major star who's split from fellow star and lover Zeta-Jones just before the release of their next movie, Crystal having to hide the fact from the press. It was a massive hit, with the third highest first weekend take ever enjoyed by a rom-com. 

Then came more high-profile romance, with Kate Beckinsale in Serendipity, a thoroughly charming venture enlivened by Cusack's comic duels with an outrageously affected Eugene Levy. Then, naturally, it would be back to the art-house, with a brief role in Spike Jonze's Adaptation, and then Max, originally titled Hoffman. 

This was a controversial piece where Cusack played a suave and sophisticated art dealer in Munich who takes pity on a struggling artist named Adolf Hitler (the pair were both WWI veterans, Cusack's character having lost an arm in the conflict). The movie would be attacked by various Jewish groups for "humanising" Hitler, but the furore died down once the Jewish Defamation League had actually seen it - the group would, with gratifying honesty, apologise to the producers.

Arriving hot on Max's heels would come Identity, an ingenious thriller where Cusack played the chauffeur of movie star Rebecca De Mornay, whose limo knocks a woman down during a storm and takes her and her family to a nearby hotel. Here the tempest traps ten people (amongst them cop Ray Liotta and his killer prisoner Jake Busey) who, naturally, begin to drop like flies. But are these murders, or just freakishly timed accidents? Director James Mangold cleverly changed the story's perspective to keep the audience guessing and earned himself a surprise Number One hit.

Cusack next stepped up for another of those Buy More Time roles when he took the lead in John Grisham's The Runaway Jury, which concerned the undermining of a court trial featuring a major gun manufacturer. As well as Cusack's old cohort Piven, the movie also saw him alongside such heavyweights as Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman.

Aside from writing and making movies, Cusack is a keen kickboxer (he took it up for the part in Say Anything) and an extreme sportsman. He's been helicopter snowboarding in the mountains of British Columbia, and went surfing in Hawaii with surfing legend Laird Hamilton. 

Cusack went out on the big waves, even though it was only his second time. Wiping out spectacularly, he was rolled and, very dangerously, pulled under, only to emerge unscathed with a big smile on his face. Very smooth, very Cusack. In the love stakes, 2002 saw him end a 4-year affair with Scream star Neve Campbell (many said she's too young for him) and take up with Meg Ryan whom he'd met some 6 years before when they were both providing voices for Anastasia.

There was also an underground movement to push him into politics. Cusack makes his liberal leanings well known, and publicly castigated Michael Moore for not supporting Al Gore and thus helping George Bush slime his way into the White House. 2002 would see Cusackforpresident.com spring up, a site dedicated to the great man's political potential. Cusack, meanwhile, kept his good works quiet. Very few realised that, through New York's Schoolhouse Foundation, he had helped fund three new public schools in the city.

As it stands, John has still not received the professional accolades afforded to sister Joan - twice Oscar-nominated for Working Girl and In & Out. But as a gambling man (while filming America's Sweethearts in Nevada, he and his driver once won $20,000 in a single evening), he would surely put money on himself one day winning at least one of those golden statues. As a great actor, and a daring producer, he stands a better chance than most. As for the presidential question, well, it looks like it's a straight race with Will Smith and Arnie. ~ Dominic Wills

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