Brad Pitt

About

William Bradley "Brad" Pitt is an American actor and producer, popularly known for his role as Tyler Durden in Fight Club (1999), Billy Beane in Moneyball (2011), and Rusty Ryan in Ocean`s Eleven (2001) and its sequels. With his production house, Plan B Entertainment, he has received several awards and nominations. Tagged as the world`s `most attractive man` by several magazines over the years, Pitt is one of the most powerful people of the American film industry.

EARLY LIFE

Brad Pitt was born on December 18, 1963 in Shawnee, Oklahoma. His father William Alvin Pitt ran a trucking company, and mother Jane Etta was a school counsellor. He has two younger siblings, Doug born in 1966 and Julie Neal born in 1969. Pitt attended Kickapoo High School wherein he was a member of the golf, swimming and tennis teams and participated in the Forensics clubs, school debates, and musicals. He then joined the University of Missouri in 1982, majoring in journalism with a focus on advertising. Pitt left the university two weeks before earning his degree, and moved to Los Angeles where he took acting lessons and worked odd jobs.

PERSONAL LIFE

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Pitt was involved in relationships with many of his co-stars, including Robin Givens (Head of the Class), Jill Schoelen (Cutting Class), and Juliette Lewis (Too Young to Die? and Kalifornia). Along with this, his romance and engagement to his Seven co-star Gwyneth Paltrow, who he dated from 1994 to 1997, was very popular. On July 29 2000, Pitt married actress Jennifer Aniston, whom he had met in 1998, in a private wedding ceremony in Malibu, but in January 2005 they decided to separate. Aniston filed for divorce two months later, which was finalized by the Los Angeles Superior Court on October 2, 2005.

While the divorce proceedings were on, he got involved with his Mr. & Mrs. Smith co-star Angelina Jolie. Their relationship continued and Jolie got pregnant with Pitt`s child. After being together for seven years, they announced their engagement in April 2012 and got married on August 23, 2014, in a private ceremony in Chateau Miraval, France. They have six children altogether. However, Jolie filed a divorce from Pitt in September 2016.

TELEVISION CAREER

Pitt made his television debut in the year 1987 with a two-episode role on the NBC soap opera Another World, along with a guest appearance on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains in November. After this, he was seen in four episodes of Dallas, a CBS primetime series, and a guest appearance on the Fox police drama 21 Jump Street. Pitt essayed the role of a drug addict Billy Canton in the 1990 NBC television movie Too Young to Die? He then starred in six episodes of the Fox drama Glory Days.

MOVIE CAREER

Brad Pitt took acting lessons from Roy London during his struggling days in Los Angeles. In 1987, his acting career began with uncredited parts in the films No Way Out, No Man`s Land and Less Than Zero. The Dark Side of the Sun (1988), a Yugoslavian-U.S. co-production, marked Pitt`s first leading role portraying a young American who is taken by his family to the Adriatic to find a remedy for a skin condition; due to the outbreak of the Croatian War of Independence the film was not released until 1997. However, his first movie to reach theatres was the horror film Cutting Class (1989), and then a supporting role in the comedy Happy Together in the same year.

In 1991, he was seen in Across the Tracks, and later gained recognition for his supporting role in Ridley Scott`s film Thelma & Louise, playing a small-time criminal who befriends Thelma played by Geena Davis. His love scene with Davis in the movie got him the tag of a sex symbol. In the next year, he featured in Ralph Bakshi`s fantasy Cool World and Robert Redford`s biographical A River Runs Through It. The year 1994 saw him star as the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac in the romantic horror film Interview with the Vampire, winning two MTV Movie Awards at the 1995 ceremony. Subsequent to this, he appeared in Legends of the Fall (1994), set in the American West during the first four decades of the twentieth century, for which he received his first Golden Globe Award nomination in the Best Actor category.

In Pitt`s next, he essayed the role of a detective opposite Morgan Freeman and Gwyneth Paltrow in the crime thriller Seven (1995). Then came a supporting role as Jeffrey Goines in Terry Gilliam`s science-fiction 12 Monkeys in the same year, for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In subsequent years he appeared in movies like The Devil`s Own (1997) as the Irish Republican Army terrorist, Seven Years in Tibet (1997) as an Austrian mountaineer, a lead role in the fantasy romance Meet Joe Black (1998) and as Tyler Durden in Fight Club (1999).

He opened 2001 with Snatch, The Mexican and Spy Game. In November, he made a guest appearance in the eighth season of the television series Friends. He wrapped up the year with Ocean`s Eleven, in which he portrayed the role of Rusty Ryan. In 2004 he starred in the movie Troy portraying the character of the great warrior Achilles, followed by a second appearance as Rusty Ryan in Ocean`s Twelve (2004), a sequel to Ocean`s Eleven. After this, he was seen in the Doug Liman-directed action comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith in 2005, in which his chemistry with Angelina Jolie, was highly appreciated.

The Pitt-Cate Blanchett starrer multi-narrative drama Babel in 2006 was screened at a special presentation at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and was later featured at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. That same year, the actor`s company Plan B Entertainment produced The Departed, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Pitt appeared in the 2007 movie Ocean`s Thirteen playing Rusty Ryan for the third time. In the following year, he was seen in the black comedy Burn After Reading, and then was cast as Benjamin Button, the lead in David Fincher`s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) for which he earned his first Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, fourth Golden Globe and second Academy Award nomination; all in the category for Best Actor. Post this, in 2009 the actor played the lead in the Quentin Tarantino directed war film Inglourious Basterds, which premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. In 2012, he appeared in Killing Them Softly, and in the next year he acted in and produced World War Z. In 2015, Pitt starred alongside his wife Jolie in By the Sea, which was Jolie`s third directorial effort. He also acted in and produced the biographical comedy-drama The Big Short that got him his third Academy Award nomination as a producer.

Pitt`s 2016 releases include Allied. His other notable works include War Machine (2017), Deadpool 2 (2018), Ad Astra (2019). His extraordinary performance in the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) earned him the most coveted Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.