Short Biography

James Woods has played a long list of ruthless creeps and cold-blooded bastards, including the cop-killer in The Onion Field, the entrepreneur who offered torture on cable TV in David Cronenberg`s Videodrome, a particularly slimy gangster in Once Upon a Time in America, a professional killer in Best Seller, Sharon Stone`s pimp-boyfriend in Martin Scorsese`s Casino, the notorious H. R. Haldeman in Nixon, a serial killer and child rapist in Killer, the assassin of Medgar Evers in Ghosts of Mississippi, and a coke-snorting anti-Semite in Pretty Persuasion.

He has also played a few memorable good guys -- the burnt-out reporter in Salvador, the maverick lawyer in True Believer. On TV, he played a Jewish artist in Buchenwald opposite Meryl Streep in the mini-series Holocaust, prisoner of war James Stockdale in In Love and War with Jane Alexander, and the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous in My Name is Bill W with James Garner. He is currently starring as a tough lawyer on the CBS drama Shark with Jeri Ryan.

His father worked in Army intelligence, necessitating frequent moves, and Woods spent his childhood in Utah, Illinois, Virginia, Guam, and Rhode Island. He was 12 when his father died. His mother, who had never worked before, provided for the family by starting a daycare center that proved popular and profitable. One of the children she cared for was Jim Langevin, who now represents Rhode Island in Congress.

Woods says his IQ is 180, and he was smart enough to get into M.I.T., where he studied political science for a career at the State Department. His plans were derailed after he joined the drama club and appeared in several school plays. He dropped out to become an actor, and worked in fringe theater for a few years. His big break was a mid-sized part in a Broadway play, which he landed by adopting a fake British accent after he overheard the director say he wanted an English actor for the part. He won a Theater World Award for his 1972 performance in the play Moonchildren, a comedy with Christopher Guest. After a few small movie roles, he first caught critics` attention in Elia Kazan`s 1972 Vietnam morality tale The Visitors. He has taken only two acting lessons in his life, and he says "The Method" is shit.

His romantic life has provided a great deal of fodder for the paparazzi press. After his first marriage ended in a messy divorce, he fell for horse trainer Sarah Owen, who is 16 years younger than he. In 1987, she accused him of verbal and physical abuse, including pointing a gun at her and ordering her to strip, lie on the floor, and say, "I am a whore, I am a baby killer." Two years later they were married, for barely four months. During their messy divorce, she told the tabloids Woods was addicted to pornography, had forced her to have an abortion, and that she had caught him masturbating outside her mother`s bedroom. He has since referred to her as "The AntiChrist".

In a story that received widespread media attention, Woods dated Sean Young in 1988, then sued her for harassment the next year, alleging she had sent him pictures of dead babies and animals, that either she or a friend of hers had destroyed his garden, left a mutilated doll on his doorstep, and generally acted like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Young denied everything, but the lawsuit sealed her reputation as a nutcase. An aspect of the matter that drew less attention, however, is that the case was settled out-of-court, by Wood

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