Jeff Goldblum

On 30 June 2026 a 73 year old man opened a world tour at the Royal Albert Hall, backed by a fifty piece orchestra, playing piano and singing jazz standards. Most of the room knew him as the mathematician who warned everybody about the dinosaurs. Jeff Goldblum has spent about fifty years doing both things, and only in the last decade has anyone treated the music as more than a hobby.

He was born on 22 October 1952 in West Homestead, a small borough outside Pittsburgh, into a Jewish family. His father was a doctor, his mother worked in radio. At seventeen he moved to New York to train at the Neighborhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner, and by nineteen he was making his Broadway debut.

His first film was Death Wish (1974), playing one of the thugs who attack Charles Bronson's family. In Annie Hall (1977) he had a single line, on the phone at a party, about having forgotten his mantra. That was the pattern for most of a decade.

The Big Chill (1983) changed it. In the ensemble of old friends reuniting at a funeral he was suddenly a face people recognised, even if the leading roles still weren't coming.

A fly, a Goya and a British comedy

Then came The Fly (1986). David Cronenberg cast him as Seth Brundle, the scientist who steps into a teleportation pod with an insect and spends ninety minutes falling apart. It won the Oscar for makeup and it is still the first thing plenty of people think of when they see his face.

His co-star was Geena Davis, whom he'd met on an earlier shoot. They married in 1987 and divorced in 1991.

What he did next was odd for a newly bankable American actor: two European films. One was The Mad Monkey (1989), a Paris set thriller by the Spanish director Fernando Trueba, with Miranda Richardson. It won six Goya awards in Spain, best film among them.

The other was The Tall Guy (1989), written by Richard Curtis and directed by Mel Smith. Goldblum plays a hopeless American stooge in a London theatre show, humiliated nightly by Rowan Atkinson, who falls for the nurse played by a young Emma Thompson. It was one of Thompson's first film roles.

In The Player (1992), Robert Altman had him turn up as himself, one more actor circling an industry the film takes apart.

Ian Malcolm and the summer of 1993

Then Jurassic Park arrived. Steven Spielberg gave him the mathematician Ian Malcolm, dressed head to toe in black, talking about chaos theory and telling everyone this will end badly, alongside Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Richard Attenborough.

The shot of him lying back with his shirt open became a meme roughly twenty five years later, which he has taken with good humour ever since.

Three years on he had another giant hit with Independence Day (1996), as the cable company technician who works out what the aliens are doing and brings their shields down with a virus, sharing the load with Will Smith. It was the highest grossing film of that year.

The Lost World (1997) followed, this time with Malcolm carrying the picture, and then the voice of Aaron in The Prince of Egypt (1998).

The 2000s were quieter on screen and busier everywhere else. He did two seasons of 'Law & Order: Criminal Intent', earned a Tony nomination in 2005 for Martin McDonagh's 'The Pillowman' on Broadway, and spent the summer of 2010 at the Vaudeville Theatre in the West End, opposite Mercedes Ruehl in Neil Simon's 'The Prisoner of Second Avenue'.

He has also directed a short film, 'Little Surprises', which picked up an Oscar nomination, and has taught acting for decades at Playhouse West in Los Angeles.

Wes Anderson, the Grandmaster and the Wizard

The second half of his career has two homes. One belongs to Wes Anderson, who has used him in The Life Aquatic (2004), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Isle of Dogs (2018) and Asteroid City (2023), where he plays the alien.

The other is franchise work. In Thor: Ragnarok (2017) he built the Grandmaster out of improvisation, with Taika Waititi letting him run at Chris Hemsworth. The same character shows up dancing in a credits scene of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

He returned as Ian Malcolm for a couple of scenes in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and properly in Jurassic World: Dominion (2022), twenty nine years after the first one.

On television he has mostly played himself, in The World According to Jeff Goldblum (2019), the Disney+ series in which he asks strangers about trainers, ice cream and tattoos. In 2024 he was Zeus in 'Kaos', the Netflix comedy about the Greek gods that the platform cancelled five weeks after it launched.

Then there is Oz. He plays the Wizard in Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025), opposite Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. A charming fraud who turns out to be the villain is exactly the register he does best.

Records, family and a tour at 73

The jazz isn't a late life whim. He has been playing weekly in small Los Angeles rooms with his band, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, for decades, though the first album only arrived in November 2018, a few weeks after his 66th birthday. 'Still Blooming' followed in 2025 and 'Night Blooms' in 2026, the latter with Scarlett Johansson, Erivo and Ariana Grande singing on it.

After the Royal Albert Hall he took the band to Madrid, Barcelona, Antwerp and Paris before heading to North America for the autumn.

He says little about his private life. He was married to the actress Patricia Gaul from 1980 to 1985, then to Geena Davis, and since 2014 he has been with the Canadian Olympic gymnast Emilie Livingston, with whom he has two sons born in 2015 and 2017. The four of them turned up at the opening ceremony of the Milan Winter Olympics in February 2026.

He got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2018 and shows no sign of slowing down. How many actors of his generation are still filling concert halls with a piano at 73?

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Jeff Goldblum is Death Wish (1974); in all, 37 films and 4 TV shows over 52 years. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Friends (1994), with 508 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 15 titles. The person they have worked with most is Steven Spielberg, on 5 films, among them Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park.