Profile of John Cusack on Famous Like Me

John Paul Cusack (born June 28, 1966) is an American film actor, born in Evanston, Illinois to a liberal Irish-Catholic family. His father Dick Cusack, as well as his siblings Ann, Bill, Joan, and Susie have also been actors.

Cusack began acting in childhood. He attended the Piven Theatre Workshop in Chicago and he did many voice-overs for commercials and appeared in some stage productions by the age of 12. His first film was the comedy Class in 1983. In 1988, he founded a theatre group ("The New Criminals"), for which he has directed several productions.

After success at an early age as the star of several teen-oriented films, Cusack has generally sought roles which cast him as an ethically conflicted everyman. He is often cast as an anti-hero, but has played a wide variety of characters. He frequently appears in films with members of his family (particularly Joan) and with Jeremy Piven, whose parents, Byrne and Joyce Piven, founded and continue to run the Piven Theatre Workshop.

After playing mostly character roles for a number of years, Cusack became an A-list star in 1997 with the black comedy Grosse Pointe Blank (which he also co-wrote and produced) and the action movie Con Air, both of which were very commercially successful. He continues to choose roles in movies outside the mainstream, however, such as Being John Malkovich and High Fidelity.

Cusack spent a year at New York University before dropping out, reasoning that he had "too much fire in my belly".

Since May 2005 he's been a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post.

He is not married, but has been romantically linked to a number of women. Cusack is fiercely private of his life and rarely makes public appearances between his films or events. He said "celebrity is the worst thing that can happen to an actor."

• The Contract (2005) **filming
• The Martian Child (2005) **post-production
• The Ice Harvest (2005) as Charlie Arglist
• Must Love Dogs (2005) as Jake
• Runaway Jury (2003) as Nicholas Easter
• Identity (2003) as Ed
• Max (2002) as Max Rothman
• Serendipity (2001) as Jonathan Trager
• America's Sweethearts (2001) as actor Eddie Thomas
• High Fidelity (2000) as record store owner Rob Gordon
• Being John Malkovich (1999) as Craig Schwartz
• Pushing Tin (1999) as Nick Falzone
• The Jack Bull (1999) as Myrl Redding
• The Thin Red Line (1998) as Captain John Gaff
• Anastasia (1997)(voice) Dimitri
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) as reporter John Kelso
• Con Air (1997) as U.S. Marshal Vince Larkin
• Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) as hitman Martin Q. Blank
• Bullets Over Broadway (1994) as David Shayne
• Bob Roberts (1992)
• Shadows and Fog (1992)
• True Colors (1991) as Peter Burton
• The Grifters (1990) as Roy Dillon
• Say Anything... (1989) as Lloyd Dobler
• Fat Man and Little Boy (1989) as Michael Merriman
• Tapeheads (1988) as Ivan Alexeev
• Eight Men Out (1988) as baseball player Buck Weaver
• Stand by Me (1986) as Denny Lachance
• One Crazy Summer (1986) as Hoops McCann
• Better Off Dead... (1985) as Lane Meyer
• The Journey of Natty Gann (1985)
• The Sure Thing (1985) as college student Walter "Gib" Gibson
• Sixteen Candles (1984)
• Grandview, U.S.A. (1984) as Johnny Maine
• Class (1983) as Roscoe Maibaum

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