Joaquin Phoenix Biography, Career, Movies, Awards, Wife

Joaquin Phoenix is a multi-award-winning actor noted for his acclaimed and often unusual performances, as well as his rigorous preparation and approach to his roles. After achieving early success with the 1989 film Parenthood, he went on to act in films such as Gladiator, Signs, and Walk the Line.

The latter garnered him an Academy Award nod for his portrayal of country singer Johnny Cash. Phoenix returned to the big screen after a hiatus with Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, followed by praised turns in Her and Inherent Vice before receiving his first Academy Award for his performance as the title supervillain in Joker.

Early Life

The birth of Joaquin Phoenix On October 28, 1974, Joaquin Rafael Bottom was in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Phoenix moved around a lot as a child since his parents were missionaries for the Children of God religious sect. His parents, John and Arlyn Bottom, spent time in Central and South America before leaving Children of God. After leaving the organization, the family adopted the surname Phoenix, after the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes, as a sign of their new life.

Joaquin and his siblings—older brother River, older sister Rain, and younger sisters Liberty and Summer—moved to Los Angeles around the age of four and quickly tried to make their mark in Hollywood. The Phoenix children enjoyed putting on shows for one another. “We were all very outgoing and used to sing and play music.” My parents always pushed us to be creative. “It seemed natural to start acting,” Phoenix told Interview magazine. Their mother worked at NBC as an executive secretary and utilized her connections with a high-profile child agent to help them obtain acting work.

Early Career

The Phoenix family adhered to particular ideals in their pursuit of acting stardom, refusing to appear in pop or fast food commercials. River was the Phoenix family’s first breakout star, appearing on the short-lived television series Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which aired from 1982 to 1983. Joaquin made a guest appearance on the show when he was 8 years old, which led to further minor television roles on shows including The Fall Guy, Hill Street Blues, and Murder, She Wrote. He even starred alongside River in an ABC Afterschool Special about dyslexia, playing brothers.

Joaquin was using the name Leaf at the time, which he had selected for himself when he was six years old. He wanted a nature-inspired name like his brothers, so he named himself Leaf after spending time outside raking leaves.

Phoenix made his cinematic debut in 1986 as a wannabe astronaut in the kids adventure film SpaceCamp. He also dabbled in primetime drama with Morningstar/Eveningstar, a story about destitute children who find shelter at a senior citizen center. This meeting of the young and old lasted barely a few episodes before being canceled.

When Phoenix left Hollywood, he got one of his biggest breaks. When he won a role in the Ron Howard-directed comedy Parenthood (1989), he relocated to Florida. Phoenix delivered an outstanding performance as Dianne Wiest’s rebellious son in the film. After this triumph, Phoenix, who was only 15 years old at the time, decided to put his career on hold and travel through Latin America on his own. While he avoided Hollywood, his brother, River, rose to prominence as one of the industry’s most promising young performers. Phoenix began using his birth name, Joaquin, instead of Leaf around this time.

Family Tragedy: Death of Brother River Phoenix

River collapsed outside the Viper Room nightclub in West Hollywood in 1993, as Joaquin and his famous brother were partying inside. When Joaquin called for assistance, paramedics arrived to resuscitate River. However, their efforts were futile, and River was transported to the hospital, where he died of a heroin overdose in the early hours of October 31. Later, the media broadcast and replayed Joaquin’s agonizing 911 call, exacerbating his pain.

Movies: GladiatorWalk the Line, and More

In Gus Van Sant’s To Die For (1995), Phoenix plays an alienated, underachieving kid who is lured by a success-hungry news reporter (played by Nicole Kidman). The New York Times’ Janet Maslin lauded Phoenix’s performance, writing that he addressed the character with a “raw, anguished expressiveness that makes him an actor to watch for.”A tsunami of films quickly followed. He co-starred alongside Liv Tyler in the 1997 romance drama Inventing the Abbotts. That romance blossomed into an off-screen relationship. Phoenix then collaborated with Oliver Stone on the neonoir thriller U-Turn (1997). Despite a superb ensemble that included Sean Penn and Claire Danes, the picture was a box-office failure.

Phoenix received critical acclaim the following year for his portrayal of an American imprisoned in Malaysia on drug charges and facing the death penalty in Return to Paradise (1998). Vince Vaughn and David Conrad co-starred as pals who must decide whether to return to the country and face their crimes. Clay Pigeons (1998), another film starring Vaughn, received little attention from reviewers or audiences. Phoenix then appeared in 8mm (1999) as an adult video store employee who assists a private detective (Nicolas Cage) in his investigation of illicit underground pornography. At the box office, the film was a surprise hit.

Phoenix nearly stole the Roman epic Gladiator from star Russell Crowe in 2000 as the tormented, jealous emperor Commodus. His performance in Ridley Scott’s summer blockbuster earned him nods for many of the acting profession’s most prestigious honors, including Academy honors. The A.V. Club’s Mike D’Angelo described his portrayal in Gladiator as a “gloriously mannered performance that raises angry sniveling to an art form.”The next year, Phoenix continued to show his versatility as an actor, first as a slick operator in The Yards, starring Mark Wahlberg, and then as French church authority Abbe Coulmier in Quills, about the institutionalized playwright Marquis de Sade.

Working with filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, Phoenix played Mel Gibson’s younger brother in the creepy thriller Signs (2002), which grossed over $227 million at the box office. He played a young guy who puts his little village at risk by investigating the mysterious forests that surround his town in his next collaboration with Shyamalan, The Village (2004). By this point, Phoenix was well-known for his proclivity to thoroughly immerse himself in the lives of his characters. “He’s acting on another level. According to co-star Bryce Dallas Howard, “he’s almost superhuman.”

Phoenix co-starred in the blockbuster action flick Ladder 49 (2004) with John Travolta, Robert Patrick, and Balthazar Getty the same year. Phoenix underwent professional training to prepare for his role as a new firefighter, and the extra effort was seen by audiences; the picture not only grossed more than $22 million in its first week, but it also received positive reviews from reviewers and fans. Before producing the video, Phoenix had a fear of heights, but his training—which included rappelling from a six-story tower—helped him uncover and overcome those worries, according to Phoenix. Later that year, he appeared as a cameraman in Hotel Rwanda, a film about the Rwandan genocide.

Phoenix outdid himself in his next major part, Walk the Line (2005), in which he played one of country music’s greatest stars, Johnny Cash. Phoenix had to learn to sing and play the guitar like Cash for the role, which required roughly six months of tuition with T-Bone Burnett, the film’s executive music producer. Reese Witherspoon, his co-star, went through her own rigorous musical training to sing like Johnny Cash’s wife, June Carter Cash.

To be in character, Phoenix requested that everyone on set refer to him as J.R., Cash’s given name. “I’m now embarrassed about it.” “But when I heard ‘Joaquin,’ it didn’t feel right,” Phoenix explained to Entertainment Weekly. The film and its cast were widely lauded by reviewers and received numerous nominations and awards. Phoenix was nominated for his first Academy Award in the Best Actor category, as well as his first Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. Even the soundtrack to the film, which featured vocals by Phoenix and Witherspoon, won a Grammy for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for Motion Picture, Television, or Other Visual Media.

Bringing the tough-guy Cash to life on the big screen took its toll on the actor. Phoenix entered rehab for his alcoholism after the filming wrapped. “There was a lot made of my going to rehab, and it seems very dramatic, but it wasn’t like that,” Phoenix explained to Time magazine. “I only recently became aware of my drinking as a way to unwind when I’m not working.” I basically went to a country club where no booze was served.”

Phoenix and Wahlberg reunited in 2007 for the gritty urban drama We Own the Night, in which they played brothers on opposing sides of the law. Also that year, he co-starred in Reservation Road with Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Connelly, playing a father obsessed with locating the driver of a car that fatally injured his kid in a hit-and-run accident. Two years later, Phoenix co-starred with Gwyneth Paltrow in James Gray’s independent drama Two Lovers (2009).

Return to Acting: The Master and Her

Phoenix eventually chose to go back in front of the cameras, and the results were amazing. In The Master (2012), his first film after a self-imposed break, he plays Freddie Quell, a young, alcoholic war veteran who is drawn into a quasi-religious cult led by charismatic Lancester Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The film, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, received widespread acclaim and earned Phoenix another Oscar nomination. Phoenix “projects a fearsome anxiety as his eyes scan a room” in The Master, according to film critic Roger Ebert, and the performance “in some ways seems to flow out of the bizarre persona he created during his meltdown, or whatever it was, two years ago.”

Phoenix worked with director Spike Jonze on Her (2013), a film about a lonely guy who establishes a strong relationship with an A.I. operating system spoken by Scarlett Johansson. Jonze had Phoenix in mind for the role after recalling his unsuccessful audition for the role of actor Chris Cooper in Jonze’s previous film Adaptation (2002). “Phoenix must virtually communicate the meaning and feelings of his film on his own,” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss remarked. That he accomplishes, with grace and depth.”

Phoenix co-starred with Jeremy Renner and Marion Cotillard in 2013’s The Immigrant before reuniting director Anderson for the neonoir version of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2014). Phoenix was “perfectly cast as the perpetually befuddled Doc, a private detective of sorts who immerses himself in pot in 1970s Los Angeles,” according to film critic Richard Roeper. Following that, he appeared as Jesus Christ in Woody Allen’s murder mystery Irrational Man (2015), the thriller You Were Never Really Here (2017), and the biblical Mary Magdalene (2018).

Academy Award

In 2018, it was announced that Phoenix would play the Joker, Batman’s archenemy, in a film directed by Todd Phillips, who also directed The Hangover. Phoenix stated that he preferred the idea of a realistic character study of a supervillain than a high-budget studio comic book film. “I think, underneath the excitement of these films, and the size of them, there are these incredible characters that are dealing with real life struggles,” Phoenix said in a statement. “And sometimes that is uncovered and exposed, and sometimes it isn’t, and so I always felt, like, there were characters in comics that were really interesting and deserve the opportunity to be kind of studied.”

Phoenix lost more than 52 pounds for the role to appear “wolf-like, malnourished, and hungry,” and he based the character’s laugh on footage of real-life persons experiencing pathological laughter.After its October 2019 release, Joker sparked outrage for its violent themes; Phoenix briefly stormed out of an interview when a reporter asked if he thought the film could inspire mass shooters. Despite the uproar, Joker grossed over $1 billion at the global box office.

Phoenix’s performance was universally praised, resulting in a spate of prizes throughout the season, culminating in his triumph for Best Actor at the February 2020 Academy prizes. Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers described Phoenix’s performance as a “virtuoso of unleashed id,” adding, “You don’t dare look away from him. “Tasha Robinson of The Verge called Phoenix “hypnotic as he spirals from fragile hope into increasingly outsized and confident acts of destruction.” Seven months before the Academy Awards, Pete Hammond of Deadline praised Phoenix’s performance “so dazzling risky and original you might as well start engraving his name on the Oscar right now.”

Later Roles: Beau Is Afraid

Phoenix’s next feature after Joker was the black-and-white independent film C’mon C’mon (2021), in which he played a middle-aged radio broadcaster on a cross-country road trip with his little nephew. Two years later, he played a severely paranoid guy fleeing from odd horrors in his attempt to return home to his mother in Ari Aster’s surrealist black tragicomedy Beau is Afraid. Peter Travers described it as Phoenix’s “most challenging role yet,” and he wrote that he “shows again why he’s one of the finest and most fearless actors of his generations as he steers us past the film’s lapses in clarity and coherence and into the hallucinatory hellzapoppin of Beau’s shell of a life.”

Relationship with Rooney Mara and Personal Life

In 2016, Phoenix began dating his Mary Magdalene co-star Rooney Mara. It was announced in July 2019 that the couple had gotten engaged. The stars welcomed their baby River, named after Phoenix’s late brother, in September 2020.

Phoenix is involved in a lot of charities outside of performing. He is on the board of the Lunchbox Fund, which delivers nutritious meals to underprivileged children. Phoenix has also spoken up for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He has been a vegan since the age of three, when he watched fisherman harshly torturing fish after catching them. He has also been involved with the Peace Alliance, which aspires to establish “a cabinet-level United States Department of Peace,” according to its website.

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