BIOGRAPHY

OCCUPATION: Actor, Screenwriter

REAL NAME: Matt Damon

DATE OF BIRTH: October 8, 1970

PLACE OF BIRTH: Cambridge, Mass., USA

SIGN: Libra

RELATIONS: Brother: Kyle

WHAT does it take to make it big in Hollywood? Talent and a 1,000-watt smile aside, not much more than a serendipitous casting in the lead role of a John Grisham movie. Just ask Matt Damon. As recently as 1996, Damon was just another beefcake struggling actor with a few good supporting roles to his credit and about the same level of national name-recognition as your average cable-access talk show host. But his unknown status changed overnight when the reigning godfather of popular cinema, director Francis Ford Coppola, handpicked Damon to headline his adaptation of Grisham's best-selling legal potboiler, The Rainmaker. Before he could say "Matthew McConaughey," Damon had become Tinseltown's latest rising star. No biz loves a protégé like showbiz loves a protégé, and the unprepossessing Damon soon found himself engulfed by a flood of A-list scripts, directors, and stars. Steven Spielberg snapped him up to star alongside Tom Hanks in the flag-waving World War II weeper Saving Private Ryan. Miramax pounced on a script for a film titled Good Will Hunting that Damon and his actor pal Ben Affleck had been shopping around; Damon was cast in the lead role, and the project was propelled onto the fast track when Miramax put critical darling Gus Van Sant in the director's chair and signed box-office heavyweight Robin Williams as Damon's co-star. Even bad-boy indie wunderkind Kevin Smith got in on the action, when he signed the young phenom to star in his religious satire Dogma.

In keeping with his Norman Rockwellian good looks and boyish demeanor, Damon was raised in the All-American burg of Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of that august institution of higher learning, Harvard University. Damon attended Cambridge Rindge & Latin School and appeared in several local theater productions during his boyhood. He and his longtime buddy from down the street, Ben Affleck, both got serious about acting at a young age, and worked as extras on films shot in and around Boston.

The aspiring performer was just sixteen years old when he announced to his parents that he was ready to make acting his profession, and asked them if he could jaunt down to New York to audition at a casting agency. Mom and dad told their son that he could go if he paid his own way, so Damon bankrolled the fateful trip using $200 he had earned from an appearance in a TJ Maxx commercial. By the time he entered Harvard, at age eighteen, Damon had logged his first feature-film credit: one line of dialogue in the 1988 romance Mystic Pizza. An appearance alongside Brian Dennehy in the TNT movie Rising Son followed in 1990, and Damon won his first substantial part in 1992's School Ties, a film that also starred Affleck and fellow up-and-comers Chris O'Donnell and Brendan Fraser.

Encouraged by his success, Damon dropped out of Harvard just twelve credits shy of earning his B.A. in English and headed to Los Angeles to commence his career as a struggling young actor. Within months of his arrival, Damon snagged a high-profile supporting role in action auteur Walter Hill's visually striking Western Geronimo: An American Legend, which gave him the opportunity to work alongside such luminaries as Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall. Damon's performance as the idealistic young narrator of the film won him a starring role in the TNT feature The Good Old Boys, in which he co-starred with fellow Harvard man Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed and co-scripted the movie.

But it was his next role, in 1996's Courage Under Fire, that proved to be Damon's big breakthrough. To prepare himself for the part of a strung-out Army medic haunted by his failure to act during a firefight with Iraqi infantry in the Gulf War, he lost forty pounds in just over three months by running twelve miles a day and by maintaining a strict diet of chicken, egg whites, steamed broccoli, and plain baked potatoes. The intense preparation paid vivid dividends, as the gaunt, hollow-eyed Damon stole the show from top-billed co-stars Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan, and won raves from several national critics.

On the basis of his galvanizing Courage performance, Francis Ford Coppola tapped Damon to breathe new life into the Grisham franchise, which was sagging somewhat after the decidedly lackluster returns of the downbeat Chris O'Donnell starrer The Chamber. News of that signing made Damon a red-hot property, understandably, and proved key in his efforts to sell the script for Good Will Hunting, a project he had conjured up several years previously while taking a playwriting class at Harvard. The finished draft, which Damon co-wrote with Affleck, had drawn the interest of several studios, but no one wanted to produce it with Damon and Affleck in the lead roles. The young authors stuck to their guns and refused several lucrative offers out of their stubborn insistence that they be allowed to star. Castle Rock finally bought the rights to Good Will Hunting in 1994, but the project was slow to develop and quickly ended up in turnaround mode. On the advice of Rob Reiner, Terrence Malick, and William Goldman, Damon and Affleck polished up the script, emphasizing a romantic subplot and tossing out altogether a man-on-the-run plotline that they had initially included to make the script more saleable. Miramax acquired all rights to the property shortly thereafter, and production shifted into high gear after Damon landed the Rainmaker lead. Though there were several fierce confrontations in the editing room, Damon and Affleck kept things light on the set of Good Will Hunting: when a visiting TV journalist asked them how they worked so well together, the childhood friends joked, "Because we're lovers."

Friendship with Affleck notwithstanding, Damon has had several young beauties on his arm over the past couple of years. After a romance with Elite model Kara Sands stalled out, he was rumored to have briefly dated his Rainmaker leading lady, Claire Danes. But we all know the drill — new movie, new leading lady — and Damon was soon thereafter squiring his Good Will Hunting co-star, Minnie Driver, about town. He recently ended a two-year relationship with Winona Ryder. On a more professional note, the newcomer came away from Good Will Hunting with more than just a reputation as a fine actor and a lothario: he scored two Golden Globe nominations, one for Best Actor and one for Best Screenplay, the latter of which he and Affleck won. Nominated in the same two categories by the Academy, Damon lost the Best Actor Oscar to Jack Nicholson on Oscar night, but once again, the two friends won the Best Original Screenplay statuette.

Damon followed up his title performance in Saving Private Ryan by appearing alongside Edward Norton in director John Dahl's gambler opus Rounders. Late 1999 witnessed his reteaming with Affleck, this time in Kevin Smith's religious satire Dogma. The film, which follows the quest of two fallen angels attempting to return to Heaven after having been sentenced to live out eternity in Wisconsin, also starred Alan Rickman and Chris Rock. On the heels of his Dogma outing came a lead role in director Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which he starred alongside Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law as "the most charming and deadly sociopath imaginable." Next up, Damon essays headlining duty in the Billy Bob Thornton-directed feature-film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed novel All the Pretty Horses.

Biography courtesy of Mr. Showbiz