Benicio del Toro

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Benicio Del Toro (2014)

Benicio del Toro (born February 19, 1967 in San Juan ) is a Puerto Rican actor .

For his role as Javier Rodríguez in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic - Power of the Cartel , he received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as well as a BAFTA Award , Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild Award in 2001 .

Life

Benicio del Toro was born as the second son of Gustavo del Toro and Fausta Sánchez-del Toro. His parents were wealthy lawyers in Puerto Rico, which is where del Toro spent most of his childhood. When he was nine, his mother died of hepatitis . Initially, his godmother Sarah Del Torres, also a lawyer, took care of him. He was known to be a lively student at the Catholic school he attended.

After his father got married, del Toro went to boarding school in Pennsylvania , USA , when he was 13 . Del Toro was left on his own here at first, as he was separated from his family for the first time and initially spoke little English. But he found contact and friends mainly through playing basketball. He graduated from school in 1985, his senior year also included Michael Davies, who later became Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? produced.

When he was 18, del Toro enrolled at the University of California at San Diego , majoring in economics . Actually, he should follow the family tradition and become a lawyer, even he himself had never considered a career as an actor before. At the university, however, he successfully applied for a role in a play. Since the rules for the cast of the play said that you either had to be at least in the second year of study or had to be enrolled in drama , i.e. theater studies , del Toro quickly changed his major to drama . He didn't tell his family about it until later. When it became apparent that he was serious about acting, the family was reluctant to support him at first. His older brother Gustavo, who studied physics at UCLA in Los Angeles , let him live with him.

Regarding the view of his family and the godmother, who did not see acting as a safe profession, he said: I didn't see it that way. I saw it as a marriage . He wouldn't have minded becoming a lawyer, he even saw certain parallels between the profession of lawyer and that of actor. In acting, however, he felt that he had found his calling, even if it made him the only one in his family who was striving for an artistic career.

Benicio del Toro went to New York to study at the Circle in the Square drama school , which is right on Broadway . A short time later he returned to California - he received a scholarship for the Stella Adler Academy of Acting in Los Angeles and studied there for several years. Del Toro said he owed a great deal to Stella Adler, who died in 1992.

In November 2011, he acquired Spanish citizenship in addition to his existing US citizenship, which was granted to him due to existing family ties to Barcelona.

At the 71st Cannes Film Festival in 2018 he was selected as jury president for the side series Un Certain Regard .

Cinematic creation

First appearances as opponents of Crockett and Bond

Two years after graduating from high school in Mercersburg, del Toro got his first appearance in film after participating in several theater projects, albeit once on television. He was cast for a supporting role in the crime series Miami Vice . After the episode show business ( Everybody's in Showbiz ) in the spring of 1987, there were several small roles for him on television. Del Toro didn’t care much for his work on TV, it was too superficial and too quick for him, and he didn’t have the time to develop the character of each character.

At first, work in cinema productions was rare and only available to a limited extent. Between 1988 and 1994 he played minor and major supporting roles in several films, but these have not yet made him known. One of the most important of these roles for him was that as Dario , a sadistic henchman an opponent of James Bond in License to Kill in 1989th

During this time, del Toro was in his early to mid-twenties, he played supporting roles in films with Sean Penn ( Indian Runner ), John Cusack ( Money for Nothing ), Javier Bardem ( Huevos de Oro ), Rosie Perez ( Fearless) ) and Ed Harris ( China Moon ). He played in two productions with the Italian actress Valeria Golino ( Big Top Pee Wee and Indian Runner ), from 1988 to 1992 the two were engaged to each other.

The usual suspects

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a little bit of allegations

The real start of his film career was the role in The Usual Suspects . Here del Toro played as one of the five said suspects, Fred Fenster , alongside, among others, Kevin Spacey and Gabriel Byrne . As a "window" he mimes an outsider among the gangsters, who in a fine suit and with an arrogant expression speaks his own English, which even his cronies can hardly understand. His interpretation of a one-dimensional criminal from the script, peppered with peculiarities, brought him the first real recognition in Hollywood. The film had box office success and achieved a certain cult following.

Film roles before the Oscar

Benicio del Toro (2012)

In 1995 and 1996 del Toro had a lot to do, he played in four productions within a year and made a short film himself called Submission . This rhythm was too fast for him, he missed the time he needed to really get used to the characters. Among the films he has starred in is a production with Wesley Snipes and Robert De Niro ( The Fan ) and a biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat , a self-destructive artist who lived in Andy Warhol's New York era in the 1980s . In the following, del Toro slowed down and played alongside Alicia Silverstone at her request as an unwilling kidnapper in anger in the luggage . Although this was a first major role in a relatively expensive film, the film was not a box office success.

For his role as Dr. Gonzo at the side of Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , he put on more than 20 kilograms in 1998 in order to give the Oscar Zeta Acosta- inspired role of lawyer a certain stoutness.

In 2000 several films with del Toro came out again. Directed by Guy Ritchie , he played a supporting role in Snatch - Pigs and Diamonds as a gangster with a penchant for gambling and fancy clothes. In Christopher McQuarrie's first directorial work , The Way of the Gun , he again played a criminal. At the side of Ryan Phillippe , he kidnapped a heavily pregnant surrogate mother to extort money from her wealthy clients. McQuarrie wrote the script for The Usual Suspects .

Success with traffic

The third film in 2000 with del Toro, which was shown in New York and Los Angeles at the end of December, became a high point in his filmography. The choice of the start date made it possible for the film to be included in the Academy Awards in March 2001 as a proposal for the film year 2000 .

In Traffic , del Toro played a rather cynical but not unsympathetic drug investigator in Mexico who tries to stay true to himself between the professional integrity that is actually required and the corruption and danger surrounding him.

Benicio del Toro received an Oscar for his portrayal of Javier Rodríguez as Best Supporting Actor . Three more Oscars go to the film, one of which goes to director Steven Soderbergh . Other awards to del Toro, among many others, include a Silver Bear at the 2001 Berlinale and a Golden Globe Award .

Films after the Oscar

Since 2001, del Toro has appeared in other films, including as a deranged Indian in The Promise . The role earned him a 2002 ALMA Award nomination . In 2003 it was shown in 21 grams , the second film by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu . Del Toro played a major supporting role as a depressed ex-inmate who takes great guilt when he runs over a father with his two young daughters. For his portrayal he was nominated again for an Oscar for best supporting actor in 2004, but had to give the trophy to Tim Robbins . In the comic adaptation of Sin City by Robert Rodriguez in 2005, he played the supporting role of the brutal policeman Rafferty, whose death almost resulted in the breaking of a truce between the Mafia, police and prostitutes.

His success with critics and audiences has earned del Toro several offers for leading roles, which is only reflected with some delay. At the side of Halle Berry he had taken on a larger role in the drama Eine neue Chance , which was released in theaters in Germany in June 2008. In a film project by Steven Soderbergh called Che about the Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara , del Toro took on the title role. The biography includes two feature films, Che - Revolución is about the early years, Che - Guerrilla is about the years up to Guevara's death in Bolivia in 1967. The films premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008, where del Toro was awarded the Actor Award for his role .

2010 saw del Toro with Wolfman in the cinema. In the remake of the horror classic from 1941 , he took on the title role. In the same year he was appointed to the competition jury of the 63rd Cannes Film Festival .

Filmography

Benicio Del Toro at Comic-Con 2013

Awards (selection)

Web links

Commons : Benicio del Toro  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Interview with Del Toro 1997 ( Memento of April 28, 2006 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on January 8, 2008 (English)
  2. ↑ El gobierno concede a Ricky Martin la nacionalidad española para poder casarse , in: El País of November 14, 2011, accessed on July 23, 2012 (Spanish)
personal data
SURNAME Toro, Benicio del
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Puerto Rican actor
DATE OF BIRTH 19th February 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH Santurce , Puerto Rico