Tim Robbins turned down a million dollars and won Cannes instead
Around 1991 Tim Robbins was offered a million dollars to star in a comedy called Folks! He said no and took the lead in Robert Altman's The Player, playing a scheming studio executive. The gamble earned him the Best Actor prize at Cannes and launched a career on both sides of the camera.
Robbins was born in West Covina, California, on 16 October 1958 and grew up in Greenwich Village, where his father sang with the folk group the Highwaymen and managed The Gaslight Cafe. He began acting at twelve, including the title role in a musical version of The Little Prince, and graduated in drama from UCLA in 1981. That year he founded the experimental Actors' Gang theatre company in Los Angeles with friends from his college softball team and John Cusack.
Early screen work included a pilot nicknamed Merlin in Top Gun. His breakthrough came in 1988 as the cocky pitcher Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham, after which, he said, scripts simply arrived without auditions, though he rejected many that treated violence as entertainment or glorified vigilante justice. In 1992 he wrote and directed Bob Roberts, a mock documentary about a right-wing Senate candidate, and two years later starred opposite Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption.
Directing became central. Dead Man Walking, his 1995 drama about capital punishment starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, earned him an Oscar nomination for directing, and Roger Ebert called it a film that works as an exercise of philosophy. He won the supporting actor Oscar for Clint Eastwood's Mystic River in 2003, playing a man scarred by childhood trauma; at 6 feet 5 inches he was then the tallest actor ever to win an Academy Award. His Actors' Gang staging of Orwell's 1984 toured as far as Athens, Melbourne and Hong Kong.
Music runs in the family. Offered a record deal after Bob Roberts, he declined out of respect for his father's hard-won craft, finally releasing an album of songs written over 25 years in 2010. A lifelong Mets fan, he saw them win the World Series on his 11th birthday. Since 2023 he has starred in Silo.
Source: Tim Robbins
