Today's Birthdays

one click shows all of today's celebrity birthdays

Browse All Birthdays

43,625    Actors
27,931    Actresses
4,867    Composers
7,058    Directors
842    Footballers
221    Racing drivers
925    Singers
9,111    Writers

Get FamousLikeMe on your website
One line of code gets FamousLikeMe on your website. Find out more.

Subscribe to Daily updates


Add to Google

privacy policy



Famous Like Me > Actor > W > James Woods

Profile of James Woods on Famous Like Me

 
Name: James Woods  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 18th April 1947
   
Place of Birth: Vernal, Utah, USA
   
Profession: Actor
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia
James Woods

James Howard Woods (born April 18, 1947) is an American actor.

Born in Vernal, Utah, he grew up in Warwick, Rhode Island where he attended Pilgrim High School. His mother was of Irish Catholic descent and Woods was raised a Catholic. He conducted his undergraduate studies at MIT where he majored in political science (though he originally planned on a career as a surgeon), but dropped out in 1969, just before his graduation, in order to pursue a career in acting. Woods headed to New York City when he called his mother and told her the truth. While his mother wasn't thrilled at the prospect of her son pursuing a career as an actor, she blessed him to follow his dream. Before this transition to acting, however, he was considered a brilliant student and was permitted to enroll in a linear algebra course at UCLA while still in high school, having scored a perfect 800 on the verbal portion of the SAT and a 780 on the quantitative aspect. He is claimed to possess an I.Q. of 180.

His career has been noted for the intense characters he has chosen. He was nominated for an Academy Award twice: the first in 1987 for Best Actor in Salvador and again in 1996 for Best Supporting Actor for Ghosts of Mississippi. He has also garnered critical praise for his voice work for Hades in Disney's Hercules. His personal favorite of all of his roles, however, is as the domineering gangster Max in Sergio Leone's gangster epic Once Upon A Time In America (1984).

Woods appeared as himself in the episode of The Simpsons entitled "Homer and Apu", and in an episode of Family Guy entitled "Peter's Got Woods".

Woods and 9/11

On a flight to Los Angeles several weeks before the attacks on September 11th, 2001, Woods grew suspicious of four of his fellow-passengers: well-dressed men who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent. Woods became so convinced that the men were "casing" the plane that he kept his cutlery after lunch and shared his suspicions with a flight attendant. "I said, 'I think this plane is going to be hijacked.' I told her, 'I know how serious it is to say this,' and asked to speak to the captain." The first officer promptly assured Woods that the cockpit door would be kept locked and the plane landed safely.

On the evening of September 11th, Woods told the FBI in Los Angeles about the encounter. At six-forty-five the next morning he was roused by a telephone call from an FBI agent. "I said, 'I'll get ready and I'll come down to the federal building,'" Woods recalled. "He said, 'That's O.K. We're outside your house.'" When he was shown photographs, Woods thought he recognized two of the hijackers - Hamza Alghamdi, who was on United Airlines Flight 175 (which struck the south tower of the World Trade Center) and Khalid Almihdhar, who was on American Airlines Flight 77 (which struck The Pentagon).

According to writer Annie Jacobsen, FBI agents told her in a private conversation that Mohammed Atta, who was the unofficial leader of the 9/11 hijackers, was in fact on the flight with Woods.

Partial filmography

  • Kingdom Hearts II (2005)
  • Be Cool (2005)
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (voice of Mike Toreno) (2004)
  • Kingdom Hearts (2002)
  • Stuart Little 2 (voice) (2002)
  • John Q (2002)
  • Scary Movie 2 (2001)
  • Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (voice) (2001)
  • Any Given Sunday (1999)
  • The General's Daughter (1999)
  • The Virgin Suicides (1999)
  • John Carpenter's Vampires (1998)
  • Contact (1997)
  • Hercules (voice) (1997)
  • Ghosts of Mississippi (1996)
  • Nixon (1995)
  • Casino (1995)
  • The Specialist (1994)
  • Citizen Cohn (1992)
  • Chaplin (1992)
  • True Believer (1989)
  • The Boost (1988)
  • Best Seller (1987)
  • Salvador (1986)
  • Cat's Eye (1985)
  • Against All Odds (1984)
  • Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
  • Videodrome (1983)
  • Eyewitness (1981)
  • The Onion Field (1979)
  • The Choirboys (1977)
  • The Way We Were (1973)


Trivia

  • On the animated sitcom Family Guy, the high school of the fictional town of Quahog, Rhode Island is named after Woods.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article James Woods