James Woods

As of 2013, his two Oscar nominated performances were for his portrayals on real life characters: Richard Boyle in Salvador (1986) and Byron de la Beckwith in Ghosts of Mississippi (1996).

2001: While on a commercial flight from Boston to Los Angeles in August, he noticed a group of men acting suspiciously on the plane and informed a flight attendant that he felt they were planning to hijack the plane. He has thus been in several interviews with FBI agents since the September 11 attacks.

Is ambidextrous (as seen in The Virgin Suicides (1999), writes on chalkboard with both hands).

Received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on October 15, 1998.

Not to be typecast solely as hostile hoodlums, Woods has further expanded his range to encompass providing voice-overs for animated productions including Hercules (1997), Hooves of Fire (1999), and Stuart Little 2 (2002).

Woods was equally impressive as sneaky hustler Lester Diamond who cons Sharon Stone in Casino (1995), made a tremendous H. R.

Haldeman in Nixon (1995), portrayed serial killer Carl Panzram in Killer: A Journal of Murder (1995), and then as accused civil rights assassin Byron de la Beckwith in Ghosts of Mississippi (1996).

Quit smoking cigarettes in 1993. Played as a man trying to break the habit using drastic, preventive measures in Stephen King's Cat's Eye (1985).

Fired his agent for not telling him of Quentin Tarantino's offer to star as Mr. Orange/Freddie in Reservoir Dogs (1992).

The decade of the 1990s started off strongly with high praise for his role as Roy Cohn in the television production of Citizen Cohn (1992).

He and his then fiancée filed a $2 million suit for harassment against his ex-girlfriend Sean Young in 1988, alleging that, for instance, Young left a disfigured doll on his doorstep and trampled the couple's expensive flower bed. The case was settled out of court in 1989.

-station owner in David Cronenberg's mind-bending and prophetic Videodrome (1983), as gangster Max Bercovicz in Sergio Leones mammoth epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984), and scored a best actor Academy Award nomination as abrasive journalist Richard Boyle in Oliver Stone's gritty and unsettling Salvador (1986). There seemed to be no stopping the rise of this star as he continued to amaze movie-goers with his remarkable versatility and his ability to create such intense, memorable characters.

Woods quickly followed up with another role in another Joseph Wambaugh film adaptation, The Black Marble (1980), as a sleazy and unstable cable-T. V.

However, it was Woods' cold-blooded performance as the cop killer in The Onion Field (1979), based on a Joseph Wambaugh novel, that seized the attention of movie-goers to his on-screen power.

Got his third television role, as Caz in Kojak: Death Is Not a Passing Grade (1974), after Richard Dreyfuss and Martin Sheen had turned it down.

After appearing in a handful of New York City theater productions, Woods scored his first film role in All the Way Home (1971) and followed that up with meager supporting roles in The Way We Were (1973) and The Choirboys (1977).

James earned a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; dropping out during his sophomore year in 1967, he then headed off to New York with his fraternity brother Martin Donovan to pursue aspirations to appear on the stage.

He graduated from Pilgrim High School in 1965, near the top of his class.

James Howard Woods was born on April 18, 1947 in Vernal, Utah, the son of Martha A. (Smith) and Gail Peyton Woods, a U. S. Army intelligence officer who died during Woods' childhood. James is of Irish, English, and German descent. He grew up in Warwick, Rhode Island, with his mother and stepfather Thomas E. Dixon.