Kevin Spacey

American motion-picture and stage actor, best known for his ability to portray a wide array of complex characters.

Spacey,rift gold whose given name was Kevin Spacey Fowler, was born in South Orange, New Jersey. His family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1963. Encouraged by high school classmate Val Kilmer, a future motion-picture star, Spacey moved to New York City and enrolled at the Juilliard School of Drama in 1979. He left after two years and made his Broadway debut in 1982 in the Henrik Ibsen play Ghosts. In 1986 he appeared on Broadway in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Spacey’s stage career allowed him to work closely with a variety of accomplished actors, including Liv Ullmann and Jack Lemmon.

In the late 1980s Spacey began landing small film roles. His big breakthrough came in 1992, when he received wide critical acclaim for his role as a sinister executive in the film Glengarry Glen Ross (based on a play by David Mamet). Spacey received further attention for two film roles in 1995 in which he played complex villains: In the commercially successful thriller Se7en he played a serial killer; in The Usual Suspects he starred as a smooth-talking criminal, a role for which he won an Academy Award for best supporting actor. Two years later Spacey was on the other side of the law, playing a police detective in the hit film L.A. Confidential.

Spacey made his directorial debut in 1997 with the film Albino Alligator, a low-budget hostage drama. He won his second Academy Award playing a middle-aged father who struggles with a midlife crisis in American Beauty (1999), a film that also won the Oscar for best picture. A year later he played a disfigured teacher in Pay It Forward. Spacey received praise for his role as a man in a mental hospital who may or may not be an alien in K-PAX (2001). The actor played an antideath-penalty activist who winds up on death row himself in The Life of David Gale (2003).
While his film career has soared,rift gold Spacey has also continued to receive accolades for his work in live theater. In 1991 he won a Tony Award portraying a mobster in the play Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon. In 1998 he starred in the O’Neill play The Iceman Cometh in London, England, a show that also played on Broadway. Spacey was named artistic director of London’s historic Old Vic Theatre in 2003.