How Old Is Sean Penn- Biography, Movies, & Facts

Sean Penn, whose full name is Sean Justin Penn, was born in Santa Monica, California, on August 17, 1960. He is an American film actor and director renowned for his range and compelling performances.

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Penn, a son of actors, decided against attending college and instead joined the Los Angeles Repertory Theater. After making a few appearances on television, including one in a 1979 episode of Barnaby Jones, he relocated to New York City in 1980. Penn’s well-received performances in the 1981 productions of Taps and the Off-Broadway play Heartlands laid the way for his iconic portrayal of the underachieving surfer Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Following that, he played a variety of roles that showed off his intensity and versatility, such as a teenage delinquent in Bad Boys (1983), a punk rocker-burglar in Crackers (1984), a World War II marine about to deploy in the love story Racing with the Moon (1984), and a spy selling U.S. government secrets to the KGB in The Falcon and the Snowman (1985). He received positive reviews from critics even when the movie he appeared in was not well However, following his marriage to pop icon Madonna in 1985, Penn’s career saw a decline. Penn spent a month in jail in 1987 as a result of repeated, often violent, altercations with paparazzi. The couple co-starred in the critically panned 1986 film Shanghai Surprise before their marriage broke up in 1989.

However, Penn’s subsequent films fared better, and he also experimented, penning and helming Indian Runner (1991) and The Crossing Guard (1995). In the 1995 film Dead Man Walking, in which he played a death row inmate opposite Susan Sarandon, he received his first Academy Award nomination. He co-starred in She’s So Lovely (1997) with his second wife, Robin Wright (married 1996; divorced 2010), for which he won the Cannes Film Festival’s best actor award, and later received Oscar nods for Sweet and Lowdown (1999) and I Am Sam (2001). The Pledge was another outstanding direction. In the thriller, Jack Nicholson played a police officer determined to track down a child killer. For his work in the movie 21 Grams (2003), Penn won the best actor prize at the Venice Film Festival. The following year, he won the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of the bereaved father of a slain young lady in the movie Mystic River (2003).

The Interpreter (2005), The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004), and All the King’s Men (2006) are some of Penn’s latter movies. The former is an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s novel about a populist politician. Penn made a comeback as a director with Into the Wild (2007). The movie, which is based on the same-titled best-selling book by Jon Krakauer, follows Christopher McCandless, an idealistic college grad who rejects materialistic culture as he hitches through the American West and travels alone into the wilderness of Alaska.

Penn portrayed the title character in the 2008 film Milk, which chronicled the life of Harvey Milk, one of the country’s first openly gay government politicians. He was honoured with a second Academy Award for best actor for his vivacious portrayal of Milk. In Fair Game, Penn portrayed Joseph C. Wilson, a former American diplomat who was another real-life person (2010). The suspenseful story was inspired by the 2003 controversy in which White House employees allegedly tried to discredit Wilson’s opposition to the American-led Iraq War by leaking the identity of Wilson’s wife, a secret CIA agent named Valerie Plame.

In Terrence Malick’s 2011 movie The Tree of Life, Penn played a character who was plagued by childhood memories. In subsequent films, Penn portrayed a former rock star who becomes a Nazi hunter in This Must Be the Place (2011), a crime boss from the middle of the 20th century named Mickey Cohen in the noir drama Gangster Squad (2013), and a former assassin whose history catches up with him in The Gunman (2015). Penn has provided voices for cartoon characters in Persepolis (2007) and Angry Birds (2016). In the 2018 television drama The First, which was based on the first manned voyage to Mars but was cancelled after one season, he played a seasoned astronaut. In The Professor and the Madman (2019), about the creation of The Oxford English Dictionary, Penn made a triumphant comeback to the big screen.

Quick Facts About Sean Penn