Biography
A hulking character actor who brings new meaning to the concept of versatility, Oliver Platt has appeared in a dizzying array of films that make him instantly recognizable but not instantly placeable to the average filmgoer. Since making his screen debut as an oily Wall Street drone in
Mike Nichols'
Working Girl (1988), Platt has lent his talents to almost every conceivable genre, including period dramas, political comedies, children's films, and campy horror movies.
The son of a U.S. Ambassador, Platt was born in Windsor on January 12, 1960, Platt and his family soon moved to Washington, D.C. Thanks to his father's job, he had an exceptionally itinerant childhood. By the time he was 18, he had attended 12 different schools in places as diverse as Tokyo, the Middle East, and Colorado. Long interested in acting, Platt received a BA in drama from Boston's Tufts University; following graduation, he remained in Boston for three years to pursue his stage career. In 1986 he moved to New York, where he performed in a number of off-Broadway productions and had the lead in the 1989 Lincoln Center production of Ubu.
Following his screen debut in
Working Girl, Platt began finding steady work in such films as
Married to the Mob (1988),
Postcards from the Edge (1990),
Beethoven (1992) -- which featured him and future collaborator
Stanley Tucci as puppy thieves -- and
Benny and Joon (1993). He also proved himself adept at cheesy period drama in
The Three Musketeers (1993), which cast him as Porthos, and at all-out comedy, as demonstrated by his turn as a struggling comic in
Funny Bones (1995). Rarely cast as a leading man, Platt has always been visible in substantial supporting roles, equally comfortable at portraying nice guys, bad guys, and just flat out weird guys alike. As
Ashley Judd's suitor in
Simon Birch (1998), he was the straight man, while in
The Impostors (1998), his second collaboration with Tucci (two years earlier he served as associate producer for the latter's
Big Night), he again displayed his capacity for broad physical comedy as a struggling actor who finds himself a stowaway on an ocean liner. In
Dangerous Beauty (1998), Platt was able to exercise his nasty side as a bitter nobleman-turned-religious zealot in 16th-century Venice; that same year, his capacity for exasperated quirkiness was displayed in
Bulworth, which cast him as
Warren Beatty's put-upon, coke-snorting campaign manager.
1999 proved to be a somewhat disappointing year for Platt, as two of his films,
Three to Tango (which featured him as a gay architect) and the schlock-horror
Lake Placid, which cast him as an idiosyncratic mythology expert, were both critical and commercial flops. A third film that year,
Bicentennial Man -- in which Platt played the scientist who turns the titular robot (
Robin Williams) into a man -- fared somewhat better. The following year, Platt's comic abilities were again on display in
Gun Shy, in which he hammed it up as a bottom-rung mafioso with an overblown ego. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide