Jeff Daniels

Info

Full Name: Jeff Daniels
Date of birth: February 19, 1955 (71 years old)
Location: Athens, Georgia
Country: USA
Height: 1,90m

Jeff Daniels has been active for 43 years, participating in 36 movies that average a 6.7/10 score.

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Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

He was born in Athens, Georgia, on 19 February 1955, and lived there for about six weeks. His parents moved almost immediately to Chelsea, a small town in Michigan where his father ran the town's lumber company and eventually served as mayor. Jeff Daniels still lives there. That's the oddest thing about him: more than forty years of work in Hollywood and on Broadway, and he never once moved to Los Angeles or New York.

Circle Rep, then Woody Allen

Central Michigan University came first, and he dropped out of it once theatre got hold of him. In 1976 he took part in a repertory programme at Eastern Michigan University, where the director Marshall W. Mason spotted him and brought him to New York's Circle Repertory Company. Years of badly paid off Broadway work followed, and in 1982 he won an Obie Award for 'Johnny Got His Gun'.

His film debut was a small part in Milos Forman's 'Ragtime' (1981). Two years later James L. Brooks cast him as the cheating husband in 'Terms of Endearment' (1983), opposite Debra Winger. The film swept the Oscars and the door opened.

What really put him on the map was 'The Purple Rose of Cairo' (1985), in which Woody Allen asked him to play two people at once: Tom Baxter, the matinee hero who steps down off the screen to run away with Mia Farrow, and Gil Shepherd, the actor who plays him. It brought his first Golden Globe nomination.

The second arrived a year later with 'Something Wild' (1986), where Jonathan Demme turned him into a buttoned up office worker dragged off on a weekend by Melanie Griffith that goes very wrong.

Impossible to typecast

Jumping between registers without warning has been the pattern of his whole career. He did more comedy for Allen in 'Heartburn' (1986) and 'Radio Days' (1987), fought spiders in Frank Marshall's 'Arachnophobia' (1990) and played Colonel Joshua Chamberlain in 'Gettysburg' (1993), a real American Civil War figure he returned to in the 2003 prequel 'Gods and Generals'.

Then came 1994, the strangest year he's had. Within months he released 'Speed', as Keanu Reeves's partner on the LAPD bomb squad, and 'Dumb & Dumber', the Peter and Bobby Farrelly comedy in which he humiliates himself with no safety net alongside Jim Carrey. His representatives tried to pull him off it, and the studio offered him 50,000 dollars against Carrey's seven million in the hope that he'd walk. He said yes.

'Fly Away Home' (1996), '101 Dalmatians' (1996) and 'Pleasantville' (1998) followed, the last of those for Gary Ross, with Daniels as a black and white soda shop owner who discovers painting.

The 2000s pushed him towards prestige work: 'The Hours' (2002) for Stephen Daldry, 'Blood Work' (2002) for Clint Eastwood and 'Good Night, and Good Luck' (2005), George Clooney's film about the McCarthy witch hunts.

That same year he gave what is probably his best screen performance, as the selfish, fading novelist at the centre of Noah Baumbach's 'The Squid and the Whale' (2005), with Laura Linney as his ex wife. A third Golden Globe nomination came with it.

Since then he has kept mixing it up: 'Infamous' (2006), 'The Lookout' (2007), 'State of Play' (2009), 'Looper' (2012) for Rian Johnson, 'The Martian' (2015) and 'Steve Jobs' (2015), where he's the John Sculley who forces Jobs out of Apple. He also put the false teeth back in for 'Dumb and Dumber To' (2014).

A theatre in a Michigan town

In 1991 he did something almost nobody does and built a theatre company in his home town. The Purple Rose Theatre Company, named after the Allen film, has run in Chelsea ever since, and Daniels has written a good share of the plays staged there. One of them, 'Escanaba in da Moonlight', he adapted and directed himself as a film in 2001.

Broadway has been the other constant. He has three Tony nominations: 'God of Carnage' (2009), 'Blackbird' (2016) and 'To Kill a Mockingbird' (2018). The middle one has a British origin, since David Harrower premiered 'Blackbird' at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005 before it won an Olivier in London; Daniels played it off Broadway in 2007 and then on Broadway opposite Michelle Williams. His Atticus Finch, in Aaron Sorkin's version of Harper Lee, opened in December 2018, and he went back to it when the show reopened in October 2021.

Will McAvoy and a second career

Television arrived late and suited him. Sorkin handed him Will McAvoy, the sour news anchor of 'The Newsroom', in 2012, and in 2013 he won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series ahead of Bryan Cranston and Jon Hamm. Nobody saw it coming, least of all him.

Next was 'Godless' (2017), the Netflix western Scott Frank wrote and directed, with Daniels as the outlaw preacher Frank Griffin, soft spoken and genuinely frightening. It won him a second Emmy. In the same year he shot 'The Looming Tower' as the FBI agent John O'Neill, which brought another nomination.

After that he played James Comey in 'The Comey Rule' (2020), a small town police chief in 'American Rust' (2021) and a collapsing property tycoon in 'A Man in Full' (2024), David E. Kelley's Netflix adaptation of the Tom Wolfe novel. In January 2026 he turned up in the third season of 'Shrinking' as the father of Jason Segel's character.

Guitars, family and a Reagan

He married Kathleen Rosemary Treado, his girlfriend since university, in 1979, and they're still together. They have three children, Ben, Lucas and Nellie, all raised in Michigan and well away from the noise. Daniels has said more than once that he left Los Angeles in the mid eighties because he didn't trust fame.

His other habit is the guitar. He bought his first in Ann Arbor in 1976, spent twenty five years playing on his back porch without showing anyone, and has since released a run of albums, most of them to raise money for the Purple Rose. He tours with his son Ben's band.

Next up is 'The Brink of War', out in American cinemas on 14 August 2026, with Daniels as Ronald Reagan at the 1986 Reykjavík summit, Jared Harris as Gorbachev and J.K. Simmons as secretary of state George Shultz. At seventy one, he still isn't repeating himself.