Javier Bardem wanted to be a painter, not Spain's first acting Oscar winner
Javier Bardem spent four years studying painting in Madrid and took acting jobs only to pay for canvases. He decided he was a bad painter, stayed in front of the camera, and his turn as the hitman Anton Chigurh made him the first Spanish actor ever to take home a supporting-role Oscar.
Born in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands on 1 March 1969, Bardem came from a family rooted in Spanish cinema. His grandparents Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro were actors, and his uncle, the director Juan Antonio Bardem, was jailed by the Franco regime over his anti-fascist films. His parents split soon after he was born, and his mother, the actress Pilar Bardem, raised him and his siblings alone. He first appeared on television in 1974 and also played rugby for Spain's junior national side.
Early work was humbling. A 1989 comedy sketch required him to wear a Superman costume, which made him doubt the whole career, and he once worked as a stripper for a single day. At 21 he had a small part in The Ages of Lulu, and its director Bigas Luna then cast him as the lead in Jamón jamón in 1992, opposite Penélope Cruz, whom he married in 2010. When John Malkovich offered him an English-language role in 1997, he declined because his English was still weak.
International fame arrived in 2000 with Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls, in which he played the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas and became the first Spaniard nominated for Best Actor. Al Pacino, his idol, left a message on his answering machine that Bardem counts among the finest gifts of his life. He won at Venice for The Sea Inside and at Cannes for Biutiful, which made him the first Best Actor nominee for an entirely Spanish-language role.
His Chigurh proved remarkably durable. In 2014 a Belgian psychiatrist and ten colleagues watched 400 films across three years, identified 126 psychopaths, and judged his the most realistic. Later roles ranged from the Bond villain Raoul Silva in Skyfall to Stilgar in Dune, and since 2018 he has been a Greenpeace ambassador for protecting Antarctica.
Source: Javier Bardem
