Jon Voight

Info

Full Name: Jon Voight
Date of birth: December 29, 1938 (87 years old)
Location: Yonkers, New York
Country: USA

Jon Voight has been active for 55 years, participating in 35 movies that average a 6.4/10 score.

Videos eCartelera

Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

Joe Buck, the naive Texan hustler of 'Midnight Cowboy' (1969), turned Jon Voight into a star almost overnight. He was born on 29 December 1938 in Yonkers, New York, to a Catholic family of Slovak and German descent; his father taught golf for a living, and his brothers made names of their own, Barry as a volcanologist and Chip Taylor as the songwriter behind 'Wild Thing' and 'Angel of the Morning'.

Voight started out on Broadway, playing young Rolf in 'The Sound of Music' in 1961 and marrying his castmate Lauri Peters, his wife from 1962 to 1967. After years of stage and television work, film stardom found him in his thirties.

From Joe Buck to the 'Coming Home' Oscar

John Schlesinger's film paired him with the Ratso Rizzo of Dustin Hoffman and remains the only film with an X rating ever to win the Best Picture Oscar; Voight got his first nomination with barely a handful of credits behind him. He followed it with the war satire 'Catch-22' (1970), John Boorman's harrowing 'Deliverance' (1972) alongside Burt Reynolds and the thriller 'The Odessa File' (1974).

Then came the role that defined the decade for him: Luke Martin, a paraplegic Vietnam veteran who falls for an officer's wife, in Hal Ashby's 'Coming Home' (1978) opposite Jane Fonda. It won him the Best Actor Oscar, the acting prize at Cannes and a Golden Globe. Franco Zeffirelli's boxing weepie 'The Champ' (1979) and the escaped convict of 'Runaway Train' (1985), another Globe and a third Oscar nomination, followed. He also wrote and starred in 'Lookin' to Get Out' (1982), where a seven year old Angelina Jolie made her first screen appearance. Then the eighties went quiet on him.

Villains for hire: 'Heat', 'Mission: Impossible' and 'Ali'

The nineties brought him back as a character actor of the first rank: the veteran fixer of Michael Mann's 'Heat' (1995) with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, the treacherous Jim Phelps opposite Tom Cruise in 'Mission: Impossible' (1996), the snake hunter of 'Anaconda' (1997), the crooked lawyer of 'The Rainmaker' (1997) and the rogue agency man of 'Enemy of the State' (1998) with Will Smith.

He crammed three transformations into 2001 alone: Franklin D. Roosevelt in 'Pearl Harbor', sports broadcaster Howard Cosell in 'Ali', which earned him a fourth Oscar nomination, and Lord Croft in 'Lara Croft: Tomb Raider', playing father to his real daughter. After that he settled into family films and franchises: 'Holes' (2003), 'National Treasure' (2004) and 'its sequel' with Nicolas Cage, 'Transformers' (2007), 'Four Christmases' (2008) and 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them' (2016).

Mickey Donovan, Trump and Angelina

Television gave him a second golden age. He was the chilling villain of season seven of '24' and, above all, Mickey Donovan, the charming and toxic jailbird of 'Ray Donovan', sparring with Liev Schreiber from 2013 to 2020 and winning the Golden Globe in 2014.

His politics travelled the opposite road to most of Hollywood. The young man who marched against Vietnam became Donald Trump's loudest supporter in the business, picked up the National Medal of Arts in 2019 and in January 2025 was named special ambassador to Hollywood alongside Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone, later presenting a plan to bring film production back to the United States. He hasn't stopped acting either: he was the tycoon Hamilton Crassus in Francis Ford Coppola's 'Megalopolis' (2024) and a KGB agent in 'Reagan' (2024) with Dennis Quaid.

After Lauri Peters he married actress Marcheline Bertrand in 1971, mother of his children James Haven and Angelina; they separated when Angelina was a baby, and Bertrand died in 2007. His bond with his daughter has swung between public ruptures and reconciliations for two decades, falling out in 2002, mending around 2010 and cooling again in recent years over politics. In March 2026 he lost his brother Chip Taylor, who died at 86. At 87, Voight is still working and still making headlines, as often for his politics as for his films.