Jonathan Paul Voight ( ; born December 29, 1938) is an American actor. Throughout his career, he has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and four Golden Globe Awards as well as nominations for four Primetime Emmy Awards. In 2019, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Films in which Voight has appeared have grossed more than $5.2 billion worldwide.
Associated with the angst and unruliness that typified the late 1960s counterculture, Voight won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of a paraplegic Vietnam veteran in Coming Home (1978). His other Oscar nominations are for playing Joe Buck, a would-be gigolo, in Midnight Cowboy (1969); ruthless bank robber Oscar "Manny" Manheim in Runaway Train (1985); and sportscaster Howard Cosell in Ali (2001). His other notable films include Deliverance (1972), The Champ (1979), Heat (1995), Mission: Impossible (1996), The Rainmaker (1997), Enemy of the State (1998), Pearl Harbor, Zoolander (both 2001), Holes (2003), National Treasure (2004), Glory Road (2006), Transformers, National Treasure: Book of Secrets (both 2007), and Pride and Glory (2008).
Voight is also known for his television roles, including as Nazi SS officer Jürgen Stroop in Uprising (2001) and Pope John Paul II on the eponymous miniseries (2005). His role as Mickey Donovan on the Showtime drama series Ray Donovan brought him newfound acclaim and attention among critics and audiences, as well as his fourth Golden Globe win in 2014. He also appeared on the thriller series 24 in its seventh season.
Despite earlier having liberal views, Voight has gained attention in his later years for his outspoken conservative and religious beliefs. He is the father of actress Angelina Jolie and actor James Haven.
Early life and education Jonathan Paul Voight was born on December 29, 1938, in Yonkers, New York, to Barbara () and Elmer Voight (), a professional golfer. He has two brothers, Barry Voight, a former volcanologist at Pennsylvania State University,Barry Voight Biography . Pennsylvania State University. Retrieved April 24, 2011. and James Wesley Voight, known as Chip Taylor (1940–2026), a singer-songwriter who wrote "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning". Voight's paternal grandfather and his paternal grandmother's parents were Slovak immigrants, while his maternal grandfather and his maternal grandmother's parents were German immigrants. Political activist Joseph P. Kamp was his great-uncle through his mother.
Voight was raised as a Catholic and attended the Catholic boys' Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York, where he first took an interest in acting. Following his graduation in 1956, he enrolled at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he majored in art and graduated with a B.A. degree in 1960. After graduation, Voight moved to New York City, where he pursued an acting career. He graduated from the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where he studied under Sanford Meisner.
Career 1961–1969: Early roles and breakthrough
Voight started his off-Broadway career in a revue called O Oysters, which ran in early 1961. He made his Broadway debut in the fall of 1961 as Rolf in The Sound of Music. In the early 1960s, Voight found work in television, appearing in several episodes of Gunsmoke, between 1963 and 1968, as well as guest spots on Naked City and The Defenders, both in 1963, Twelve O'Clock High in 1966, and Cimarron Strip in 1968. Voight's theater career took off in January 1965, playing Rodolfo in Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge in an Off-Broadway revival. Voight's film debut did not come until 1967, when he took a part in Phillip Kaufman's crimefighter spoof, Fearless Frank. He also took a small role in the 1967 western Hour of the Gun, directed by veteran helmer John Sturges. In 1968 he took a role in director Paul Williams's Out of It.
In 1968, Voight was cast in the groundbreaking Midnight Cowboy (1969), the film that would make his career. He played Joe Buck, a naïve male hustler from Texas, adrift in New York City. He comes under the tutelage of Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo, a tubercular petty thief and con artist. The film explored late 1960s New York and the development of an unlikely, but poignant friendship between the two main characters. Directed by John Schlesinger and based on a novel by James Leo Herlihy, the film struck a chord with critics and audiences. Because of its controversial themes, the film was released with an X rating and would make history by being the only X-rated feature to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Both Voight and Hoffman were nominated for Best Actor, but lost out to John Wayne in True Grit.
1970–1989: Stardom and acclaim
In 1970, Voight appeared in Mike Nichols's adaptation of Catch-22, and re-teamed with director Paul Williams to star in The Revolutionary, as a left-wing college student struggling with his conscience. Voight next starred in 1972's Deliverance. Directed by John Boorman, from a script that James Dickey had helped to adapt from his own novel of the same name, it tells the story of a canoe trip in a feral, backwoods America. Both the film and the performances of Voight and co-stars Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty received great critical acclaim, and were popular with audiences. Voight also appeared at the Studio Arena Theater, in Buffalo, New York, in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire from 1973 to 1974 as Stanley Kowalski.
Voight played a directionless young boxer in 1973's The All American Boy, then appeared in the 1974 film Conrack, directed by Martin Ritt. Based on Pat Conroy's autobiographical novel The Water Is Wide, Voight portrayed the title character, an idealistic young schoolteacher sent to teach underprivileged black children on a remote South Carolina island. The same year he appeared in The Odessa File, based on Frederick Forsyth's thriller, as Peter Miller, a young German journalist who discovers a conspiracy to protect former Nazis still operating within Germany. This film first teamed him with the actor-director Maximilian Schell, who acted out a character named and based on the "Butcher of Riga" Eduard Roschmann, and for whom Voight would appear in 1975's End of the Game, a psychological thriller co-starring Jacqueline Bisset and based on a story by Swiss novelist and playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
According to Joseph McBride's biography of Steven Spielberg, Voight was Spielberg's first choice for the role of Matt Hooper in the 1975 film Jaws and he turned down the role, which was ultimately played by Richard Dreyfuss.Joseph McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography (Da Capo Press, 1999), , p.236. Excerpt available at Google Books. However, in interview with Dr. Ben Carson on September 6, 2024, Voight was asked if he turned down the part of Quint in Jaws; Voight said that the offer of a part in Jaws is "a myth" and that Spielberg had actually offered him a part in a different, less successful film, a role that he turned down because he thought it was a "repeat of the character from Midnight Cowboy". In 1978, Voight portrayed the Vietnam veteran Luke Martin in Hal Ashby's film Coming Home, and was awarded Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, for his portrait of a cynical, yet noble paraplegic, reportedly based on real-life Vietnam veteran-turned-antiwar-activist Ron Kovic, with whom Jane Fonda's character falls in love. The film included a much-talked-about love scene between the two. Fonda won her second Best Actress award for her role, and Voight won for Best Actor in a Leading Role at the Oscars. In 1979, Voight once again put on boxing gloves, starring as an alcoholic ex-heavyweight in Franco Zeffirelli's The Champ with Faye Dunaway and Ricky Schroder. The film was an international success, but less popular with American audiences.
Voight next reteamed with director Ashby in 1982's Lookin' to Get Out, in which he played Alex Kovac, a con man who has run into debt with New York mobsters and hopes to win enough in Las Vegas to pay them off. Voight both co-wrote the script and also co-produced. He also produced and acted in 1983's Table for Five, in which he played a widower bringing up his children by himself. Also in 1983, Voight was slated to play Robert Harmon in John Cassavetes's Golden Bear-winning Love Streams, having performed the role on stage in 1981. However, a few weeks before shooting began, Voight announced that he also wanted to direct the picture and was consequently dropped.Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Ed. Ray Carney, London: Faber and Faber, 2001, p. 474 In 1985, Voight teamed up with Russian writer and director Andrei Konchalovsky to play the role of escaped con Oscar "Manny" Manheim in Runaway Train. The script was based on a story by Akira Kurosawa, and paired Voight with Eric Roberts as a fellow escapee, and Rebecca De Mornay as an assistant locomotive engineer. Voight received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and won the Golden Globe's award for Best Actor. Roberts was also honored for his performance, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Voight followed up this and other performances with a role in the 1986 film, Desert Bloom, and reportedly experienced a "spiritual awakening" toward the end of the decade. In 1989, Voight starred in and helped write Eternity, which dealt with a television reporter's efforts to uncover corruption.
1990–2012: Established actor
Voight began acting in television productions in the early 1990s, beginning with 1991's Chernobyl: The Final Warning, followed in 1992 by The Last of His Tribe and The Rainbow Warrior, the story of the ill-fated Greenpeace ship sunk by French operatives in Auckland Harbour. For the remainder of the decade, Voight would alternate between feature films and television movies, including a starring role in the 1993 miniseries Return to Lonesome Dove, a continuation of Larry McMurtry's western saga, 1989's Lonesome Dove. Voight played Captain Woodrow F. Call, the part played by Tommy Lee Jones in the original miniseries. Voight made a cameo appearance as himself on the Seinfeld episode "The Mom & Pop Store" airing November 17, 1994, in which George Costanza buys a car that appears to be owned by Jon Voight. Voight described the process leading up to the episode in an interview on the Red Carpet at the 2006 BAFTA Emmy Awards:
Well what happened was I was asked to be on Seinfeld. They said: "Would you do a Seinfeld?" And I said, and I just happened to know to see a few Seinfelds and I knew these guys were really tops; they were really, really clever guys, and I liked the show. And so I said "Sure!" and I thought they would ask me to do a walk-on, the way it came: "Would you come be part of the show?" And I said "Yeah, sure I'll do it." You know what I mean? Then I got the script and my name was on every page because it was about my car. And I laughed; it was hysterically funny. So I was really delighted to do it. The writer came up to me and he said "Jon, would you come take a look at my car to see if you ever owned it?", because the writer wrote it from a real experience where someone sold him the car based on the fact that it was my car. And I went down and I looked at the car and I said "No, I never had this car." So unfortunately I had to give him the bad news. But it was a funny episode.