Profile: James Woods

The army brat
Born in 1947, James Woods was the son of a soldier and was raised as an "army brat" at military bases. That said, the family was a very close and happy one, with Woods's father instilling a love of art and literature in his son. One of Woods's fondest memories is his father sitting him on his lap and reciting Shakespeare "chapter and verse".

The young Woods originally intended to follow in his father's footsteps and serve in the military himself. In fact, he was just weeks away from beginning his training with the US Air Force when a freak accident involving a window caused severe injury to his wrist tendons. The Air Force retracted their offer of a place, and Woods had to think again about his future.

Pursuing the dream
The fact that Woods was a phenomenally gifted student meant that doors tended to swing grandly open for him. And so, after realising he couldn't be a pilot, he enrolled at the super-prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study political science.

A career in the government looked certain for Woods - but there was just one problem. Having joined the student theatre group, he realised his real passion lay in acting, not political science. He threw himself into play after play, and finally, in 1969, he phoned his mother to say he was going to quit his degree to become an actor.

After "the longest pause in the history of telephonic communication" (as Woods later recalled), his mum gave her blessing. Woods himself was worried he was making a big mistake, but he reassured himself that his late father would have understood his desire to follow his dreams.

Rise to fame
He had been an academic star at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but Woods gave it all up for the uncertainty of the New York acting world. Being a stubborn sort of guy, he didn't give up - going to audition after audition until he started getting regular theatre parts.

He made his screen breakthrough with the 1971 TV movie All the Way Home, but after that it was bit-parts all the way until 1979 when he received rave reviews (and cemented his reputation as an edgy actor) with the role of a psychotic killer in the film The Onion Field. A-list status later came with celluloid classics like the 1984 gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America and the 1986 thriller Salvador. Woods was also Quentin Tarantino's first choice for the Tim Roth part in Reservoir Dogs, but the fee was so low that Woods's agent turned it down without even asking the actor's opinion. Woods later fired the agent when he realised what had happened.

No Method in the madness
Woods has always played unique, daring roles (just see him as the sleazy, hallucinating TV executive in Videodrome). His very approach to acting has also been rebellious, as he always utterly rejected the "Method" style of performance that was popularised by peers like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro.

The Method, which calls for actors to emotionally and psychologically immerse themselves in their roles and "become" the characters they play, never made sense to Woods, who witheringly summed up the Method as "all these guys running around pretending to be turnips or whatever the hell they do".

Instead, Woods went against the Method convention by placing his own personality at the forefront and often improvising as he goes along. Filmmakers have often taken this into account - for the movie Vampires, director John Carpenter actually filmed every scene twice: first with Woods sticking to the script, and again with Woods improvising.


The poker king
One of Woods's greatest passions (other than acting) is poker - and you can actually play against him yourself if you want.

Over the past few years, Woods has been an active champion of the game, popularising it among his celebrity buddies and happily spreading the word that he loves to play online. He particularly enjoys matching wits with his fans, although he's also revealed that his greatest poker rival is fellow actor Ben Affleck, who apparently "knows all the maths" but isn't great at bluffing.

Incidentally, Affleck's father Tim once worked as a stage manager and was the man who first encouraged the young Woods to become an actor - a true story that Ben Affleck was often told while growing up but never actually believed until Woods himself confirmed it.