Christopher Walken

Posted May 31, 200817 yr

Christopher Walken (born March 31, 1943) is an Academy Award-, BAFTA Award-, and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning American film and theatre actor.

Walken is a prolific actor who has spent more than 50 years on stage and screen. He has appeared in over 100 movie and television roles, including The Deer Hunter, The Dead Zone, A View to a Kill, At Close Range, King of New York, Batman Returns, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, The Funeral, and Catch Me If You Can, and in TV's Kojak and The Naked City. Walken gained a cult following in the 1990s[citation needed] as the Archangel Gabriel in the first three The Prophecy movies, as well as his frequent guest-host appearances on Saturday Night Live. In the United States, films featuring Walken have grossed over $1.8 billion. In 1979, Walken won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Deer Hunter, where he played a disturbed Vietnam veteran alongside Robert De Niro. Walken was nominated again in 2002 for Catch Me if You Can. He won the Clarence Derwent Award for his performance in The Lion in Winter in 1966 and an Obie for his 1975 performance in Kid Champion. He has played the main role in the Shakespeare plays Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Coriolanus.

Walken debuted as a film director and script writer with the short (five-minute) film Popcorn Shrimp in 2001. He also wrote and acted the main role in a play about Elvis Presley titled Him in 1995.