Jeff Goldblum

Jeffrey Lynn Goldblum was born on October 22, 1952, in West Homestead, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. His father, Harold Leonard Goldblum, was a physician who served as a major in the U.S. Army during World War II and later became chief of medicine at a Pittsburgh hospital; his mother, Shirley Jane Goldblum, worked as a radio broadcaster before running a kitchen equipment and appliances sales firm. Goldblum has a sister, Pamela, and an elder brother, Lee. Another brother, Rick, died in 1971 at age 23 while traveling in Morocco after contracting dysentery that led to kidney failure. Goldblum has credited Rick's influence for his interest in jazz piano and has said his brother's early death gave him a determination to focus and survive. The family's roots trace to the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, with ancestral connections to Starobin, now in Belarus, and Zolochiv, now in Ukraine.

At age 17, Goldblum relocated to New York City to pursue acting, studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner. His Broadway debut came in the Tony Award-winning musical Two Gentlemen of Verona, a production that launched a stage career spanning from 1971 to 2011. Over the course of that career he appeared on Broadway in The Moony Shapiro Songbook, The Play What I Wrote, and The Pillowman, as well as Seminar. His performance in The Pillowman earned him a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play in 2005.

Goldblum made his film debut in the 1974 Charles Bronson thriller Death Wish, playing a home-invading thug. Early small roles followed in California Split (1974), Nashville (1975), and Annie Hall (1977), in which he appears briefly as a party guest. He gained broader recognition through supporting work in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Big Chill (1983), and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984), before taking the lead in The Fly (1986). He starred as comedian Ernie Kovacs in the 1984 television film Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter, which dealt with the real-life kidnapping of Kovacs' daughters by his former wife.

Goldblum's profile rose substantially with his role as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park (1993), one of the highest-grossing films of all time, and he reprised the character in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), and Jurassic World Dominion (2022), tying with BD Wong for the most appearances among cast members across the franchise. He also starred as David Levinson in Independence Day (1996) and returned to that role in Independence Day: Resurgence (2016). Additional leading roles came in Earth Girls Are Easy (1989), The Tall Guy (1989), Vibes (1988), Into the Night (1985), and Deep Cover (1992). He played the title role in Adam Resurrected (2008), a film adaptation of Yoram Kaniuk's novel about a former Jewish German entertainer who becomes a ringleader among Holocaust survivors in a postwar asylum.

Goldblum became a frequent collaborator of director Wes Anderson, appearing in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Isle of Dogs (2018), and Asteroid City (2023). He played the Grandmaster in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and was cast as the Wizard of Oz in the two-part film adaptation Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025). He directed and appeared in the live-action short film Little Surprises, which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Live Action Short Film in 1996. In September 2006, Goldblum was announced as one of the founding members of a New York theater company called The Fire Dept.

On television, Goldblum joined the cast of Law & Order: Criminal Intent as Detective Zack Nichols, replacing Chris Noth, before departing in 2010 due to concerns about the show's future. He received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his work on Will & Grace and also appeared in Friends, Portlandia, and Inside Amy Schumer. He hosted the Disney+ series The World According to Jeff Goldblum from 2019 to 2022. In 2021, Washington Post features writer Travis M. Andrews published a biography of Goldblum titled Because He's Jeff Goldblum through Penguin Random House.

An accomplished jazz pianist, Goldblum leads the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, which performed weekly at the Carlyle Hotel in 2014 and played Glastonbury Festival. After signing with Decca Records, the band released its debut album, The Capitol Studios Sessions, on November 9, 2018, followed by I Shouldn't Be Telling You This and, in March 2023, Plays Well with Others. Goldblum also taught acting at Playhouse West in North Hollywood alongside Robert Carnegie.