Jon Voight's breakout film remains the only X-rated Best Picture winner
In Midnight Cowboy, Jon Voight played Joe Buck, a naive Texan hustler drifting through New York alongside Dustin Hoffman's ailing con man. Released with an X rating in 1969, it became the only film with that rating ever to win Best Picture. Both stars were nominated for Best Actor and lost to John Wayne.
Voight was born in Yonkers, New York, in December 1938, the son of a professional golfer. One brother became a volcanologist at Penn State; the other, known as Chip Taylor, wrote the songs Wild Thing and Angel of the Morning. Acting first appealed to him at a Catholic boys' school in White Plains, and after an art degree from Catholic University of America in 1960 he trained in New York under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
His Broadway debut came in 1961 as Rolf in The Sound of Music, followed by guest parts on television westerns such as Gunsmoke and an acclaimed off-Broadway turn in Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. Films arrived late, in 1967. After Midnight Cowboy he starred with Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty in Deliverance, played an idealistic teacher on a remote South Carolina island in Conrack, and hunted hidden Nazis as a journalist in The Odessa File.
Coming Home in 1978 brought the Oscar. He played a cynical but decent paraplegic Vietnam veteran who falls for Jane Fonda's character, a role reportedly modelled on the veteran and antiwar campaigner Ron Kovic, and also won the best actor prize at Cannes. His escaped convict in Runaway Train, drawn from a story by Akira Kurosawa, earned a Golden Globe and another Oscar nomination in 1985. A planned lead in John Cassavetes's Love Streams fell through when he asked to direct it too.
Television later gave him a comic cameo on Seinfeld, in which George buys a car supposedly once owned by Voight, and a late-career hit as Mickey Donovan in Ray Donovan, which won him a fourth Golden Globe in 2014. Films featuring him have taken more than 5.2 billion dollars worldwide, and he is the father of Angelina Jolie.
Source: Jon Voight
