“On his deathbed-I could tell he wasn’t going to be around much longer, and kind of jokingly I said, ‘Well, what’s your conclusion? What is life?’ He took a long, thoughtful pause, and he said, ‘Will, life is a test.’ Wow. William died at age 97 in 2014, two years after Muriel. He’d put us in front of that, take off his belt, snap it a few times, and say, ‘You have a decision: Be a member of the happy family-or get this.’ We’d say, ‘I want to be a member of the happy family!’ ” “One of the few things we had of any value was a Flemish oil painting called The Happy Family, a home-and-hearth kind of thing. “When my father came home and there was a problem, he would take us to his study,” Dafoe says. They didn’t drink coffee! We’d sneak down and load up whatever was left over with cream and sugar. Occasionally my mother would have a book club, and the most exotic thing in the world was they’d pull out a coffee urn. “All my life, soda pop was not allowed in the house. “My father used to say, ‘You’ve gotta produce! You’ve gotta produce!’ ” Dafoe says. And almost all my sisters became nurses, so I was able to do something else.” He adopted the nickname Willem as a teenager to distinguish himself from his father. “I always feel like my first brother took the bullet for me,” Dafoe says, “because he became the doctor. Dafoe, whose real name is William, is the seventh of eight children born, in 1955, to William Dafoe, a doctor, and his wife, Muriel, a nurse. “You know what Houdini’s greatest escape was?” Punchline: Leaving his hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin. “We used to tell a joke when we were kids,” Dafoe has said. For me, it’s a city of memories and ghosts.” “New York is dear to me,” he says, “but it’s changed so much. I love this city, but it’s only because it’s a place of entry and an international city that it still has any culture at all, because what really rules? You go down the West Side Highway and you see those buildings going up, and it’s like, who’s gonna live in these? What do they cost? What’s going on? That’s a burden, and it’s a blessing.” In New York, “it’s kind of a tradition of no tradition, except for money. Thirteen years ago, while filming The Life Aquatic in Italy, Dafoe met the Italian director Giada Colagrande, whom he married shortly thereafter. Every once in a while, though, his eyes suddenly pop open, his cheeks contract, and he flashes that crazed, gap-toothed grin. As the conversation progresses, you begin to get used to his face like you would any other. He moves with the earned poise of a dancer, a by-product of four decades of physically demanding performance and 25 years of Ashtanga yoga. Sitting across from him on a sunny June morning is a little like being in a haunted house with the lights on and suddenly noticing the elegant architecture. Yet offscreen, he is warm, well-mannered, and surprisingly attractive. “I’m like the boy next door,” Dafoe once said of himself, “if you live next door to a mausoleum.” He is congenitally menacing. "I look at my life and think, how did I end up here?" It’s hot-the humidity is pushing 90 percent and McNally’s zeal for European authenticity extends even to the au naturel air-conditioning-but Dafoe is perfectly at ease in an open navy cardigan over a T-shirt. “Lucky Strike was like our kitchen,” Dafoe says. Its owner, Keith McNally, was once the proprietor of Lucky Strike, a downtown bistro around the corner from the Wooster Group Performing Garage. He has been nominated for an Oscar three times, each for best supporting actor: first in 1986 for Platoon, then in 2000 for Shadow of the Vampire, and most recently in 2017 for The Florida Project.įor Dafoe, Morandi is both convenient and sentimental. Even as he continues to work with contemporaries like Abel Ferrara and Paul Schrader, Dafoe has been embraced by some of the new century’s most original and disparate filmmakers, from Wes Anderson to Lars von Trier to Sean Baker. A., Oliver Stone’s Platoon, Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.
#Willem dafoe movies series
In 1980, Kathryn Bigelow cast Dafoe as the leader of an outlaw biker gang in her debut feature, The Loveless, and a series of reputation-making roles quickly followed: in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L. Together with the Kitchen, Max’s Kansas City, and CBGB, they would help to shape a cultural moment that is now the subject of as much fascination as fin de siècle Paris or Weimar Berlin. Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, Dafoe left the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for New York in 1977-the year of the blackout, the “Son of Sam” killings, and the wholesale arson of the Bronx-and fell in with an avant-garde theater collective soon to become the Wooster Group.