Woody Harrelson

Woodrow Tracy Harrelson was born on July 23, 1961, in Midland, Texas, to Diane Lou, a secretary, and Charles Voyde Harrelson, a convicted hitman who received a life sentence for the 1979 murder of federal judge John H. Wood Jr. and died in federal prison on March 15, 2007. Harrelson grew up in a Presbyterian household with his two brothers, Jordan and Brett, the latter of whom also pursued acting. The family relied on his mother's income, and Harrelson has said he had little contact with his father during childhood. He attended The Briarwood School in Houston before relocating in 1973 to Lebanon, Ohio, his mother's hometown, where he graduated from Lebanon High School in 1979. He went on to study theater and English at Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity and became acquainted with future vice president Mike Pence, graduating in 1983.

Harrelson first gained widespread recognition playing bartender Woody Boyd on the NBC sitcom Cheers, joining the cast in season four in 1985 and remaining with the show through its final season in 1993. He received five Primetime Emmy Award nominations for the role, winning Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series in 1989. Concurrent with his television work, he began building a film career, starting with the 1986 football comedy Wildcats alongside Goldie Hawn. He reunited with Wildcats co-star Wesley Snipes in the box-office hit White Men Can't Jump in 1992 and again in Money Train in 1995. In 1993, he appeared opposite Robert Redford and Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal, which earned more than $265 million worldwide. He then took on the role of Mickey Knox in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers in 1994.

His film work through the mid-1990s and beyond brought him increasing critical recognition. He earned his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for The People vs. Larry Flynt in 1996, followed by nominations for Best Supporting Actor for The Messenger in 2009 and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in 2017, in which he played police chief Bill Willoughby. Additional notable film credits include The Thin Red Line, No Country for Old Men, Seven Pounds, Zombieland, 2012, Seven Psychopaths, The Edge of Seventeen, and Triangle of Sadness. He portrayed Haymitch Abernathy across all four films in The Hunger Games series from 2012 to 2015, Tobias Beckett in Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018, and the antagonist known as The Colonel in War for the Planet of the Apes in 2017. He also appeared in the Now You See Me film series beginning in 2013, Venom: Let There Be Carnage in 2021, and Suncoast in 2024.

On television, Harrelson earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for portraying Republican strategist Steve Schmidt in the 2012 HBO film Game Change, directed by Jay Roach and written by Danny Strong, in which he starred alongside Julianne Moore, Sarah Paulson, and Ed Harris. He received additional Emmy recognition for playing Louisiana detective Marty Hart opposite Matthew McConaughey in the first season of HBO's True Detective in 2014. In 2023, he portrayed E. Howard Hunt in the HBO limited series White House Plumbers.

Beyond film and television, Harrelson has maintained a presence in live theater. He appeared on Broadway in 1999 in The Rainmaker. In the winter of 2005 and 2006, he starred in Tennessee Williams' Night of the Iguana at the Lyric Theater on London's West End. He co-wrote Bullet for Adolf with Frankie Hyman and directed its production at Hart House Theatre in Toronto, Ontario, which ran from April 21 to May 7, 2011, before the play moved Off-Broadway to New World Stages, where it ran from July 19 to September 30, 2012. In 2016, Harrelson announced plans to direct, write, produce, and star in Lost in London, a film shot in a single take that premiered live on January 19, 2017.