Facts about Brad Pitt
Brad Pitt Biography
One of the leading movie heartthrobs of the early 21st century, Brad Pitt won his first Oscar in 2020 for his supporting role in the film Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood.
Brad Pitt grew up in Missouri and studied journalism at the University of Missouri before dropping out to become an actor. Boyish and sexy, he scored as the scoundrelly hitchhiker in the 1991 movie Thelma and Louise (with Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon), a small role that nonetheless catapulted him to much bigger things.
Despite having the golden glow (and flowing dark blond locks) of a leading man, Brad Pitt quickly became known as a movie star who didn’t always have to be the star. Pitt co-starred with Tom Cruise in Anne Rice‘s Interview With A Vampire (1994), with Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys (1995, earning Pitt his first Oscar nomination) and with Harrison Ford in The Devil’s Own (1997). As a leading man, Pitt appeared in David Fincher‘s Se7en (1995, with Morgan Freeman), and then in Fincher’s brutal urban psychodrama Fight Club (1999, with Edward Norton). Pitt’s memorable quote from that film — “The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club” — turned into an oft-quoted Hollywood line.
Brad Pitt has done ensemble comedy in Ocean’s Eleven (2001, with George Clooney) and its sequels, and in the Coen brothers 2008 comedy Burn After Reading. And, of course, he’s done big-budget star vehicles like Troy (2004, with Pitt as the weak-heeled Achilles), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005, opposite Angelina Jolie), the aging-backwards fantasy The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008, earning his second Oscar nomination), and Inglorious Basterds (the 2009 World War II film directed by Quentin Tarantino). In 2011 he was again Oscar-nominated for his role as baseball whiz Billy Beane in Moneyball, and he starred in the Oscar-nominated drama Tree of Life (directed by Terrence Malick).
Brad Pitt’s other films include A River Runs Through It (1992), Seven Years in Tibet (1997), The Mexican (2001), Babel (2006), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, with Casey Affleck), the sci-fi thriller World War Z (2013), The Big Short (2015) and the World War II drama Allied (2016, with Marion Cotillard).
In 2019, Brad Pitt co-starred with Leonardo DiCaprio in the Tarantino film Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood. His role, that of a rugged stunt man and loyal sidekick to an aging Western star, showed off his golden-boy charm to best advantage and won him his first Academy Award as the year’s best supporting actor.
Extra credit
Once engaged to actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Brad Pitt married actress Jennifer Aniston in 2000. They divorced in 2005, amid rumors that Pitt had begun a romantic relationship with Angelina Jolie, his co-star from Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Those rumors were confirmed early in 2006, when Jolie legally changed her two adopted children’s names to Zahara Jolie-Pitt and Maddox Jolie-Pitt. Pitt and Jolie then had a daughter together — Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, who was born on May 27, 2006 in the country of Namibia — adopted a four-year-old boy, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt (b. 2003 in Vietnam), and then had twins named Knox Léon and Vivienne Marcheline on 12 July 2008. Pitt’s children are, in order of age: Maddox (b. 2001 in Cambodia), Pax (b. 2003 in Vietnam), Zahara (b. 2005 in Ethiopia), Shiloh (b. 2006 in Namibia), and the twins Knox and Vivienne (b. 2008)… After years of cohabitation, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie married at Chateau Miraval in Le Val, France on August 23, 2014. Two years later, in September of 2016, Jolie announced that she had filed for divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences.”