Biography
An actor whose hulking presence belies his ability to slip quietly into an astonishing variety of roles, Vincent D'Onofrio is one of Hollywood's most unpredictable and compelling performers. Throughout his career, D'Onofrio has played a diverse range of characters, from
Full Metal Jacket's fatally unhinged army recruit to a wholly convincing
Orson Welles in
Ed Wood to a bisexual porn star in
The Velocity of Gary.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, on June 30, 1959, D'Onofrio was raised in the diverse locales of Hawaii, Colorado, and Miami's Hialeah section. His career as an actor began on the stage, with study under Sonia Moore of New York's American Stanislavsky Theatre and Sharon Chatten at the Actors Studio. D'Onofrio's early years in the theater were filled with an obligatory helping of obscurity and miniscule paychecks (so miniscule that he worked for a time as a bouncer to help pay the bills). His fortunes began to shift in 1984, when he joined the American Stanislavsky Theatre as a performer. There, he appeared in such well-regarded productions as Of Mice and Men and
David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and also made his Broadway debut in Open Admissions.
D'Onofrio debuted onscreen in the straight-to-oblivion 1983 comedy The First Turn-On!, but it was not until his haunting portrayal of Pvt. Pyle (a role for which the actor gained 70 pounds) four years later in
Stanley Kubrick's
Full Metal Jacket that he earned much-deserved notice for his work. Defying easy categorization, D'Onofrio next appeared in the romantic comedy
Mystic Pizza (1988), slimming down to his normal weight and giving a convincing portrayal as
Lili Taylor's lovestruck boyfriend.
Having thus given audiences a glimpse of his remarkable versatility, D'Onofrio spent the next few years making his presence felt in such films as
JFK (1991), in which he played assassination witness Bill Newman;
The Player (1992), which cast him in the pivotal role of ill-fated screenwriter David Kahane; and
Nancy Savoca's
Household Saints (1993), which, through a particularly odd feat of casting, had him playing the father of
Lili Taylor. Although D'Onofrio worked at a prolific pace, it was not until he portrayed Conan the Barbarian author Robert E. Howard in the 1996
The Whole Wide World that he really had his screen breakthrough. A low-key romantic drama about the relationship between Howard and a schoolteacher (
Renée Zellweger), the film allowed D'Onofrio to take center stage, rather than lend support to better-known co-stars. Critics roundly applauded his performance, but although the actor kept working steadily, he was by no means a Hollywood fixture. Eschewing the limelight, he turned in particularly memorable performances in
Feeling Minnesota (1996) as
Cameron Diaz's cuckolded fiancé and in the 1997 blockbuster
Men in Black, which cast him as the film's resident bad guy.
D'Onofrio had a host of projects lined up in 2000, lending support to the thrillers
Imposter and
The Cell, and starring as
Marisa Tomei's endearingly freakish boyfriend in
Brad Anderson's
Happy Accidents. He also had one of his biggest roles to date in
Steal This Movie, in which he starred as legendary 1960s activist
Abbie Hoffman. As D'Onofrio continued to carve a distinctive path in the world of indie feature films (with notable supporting roles in
The Salton Sea [2002] and
Thumbsucker [2005]), he gained the greatest notoriety of his career on television, as Detective Robert Goren in the phenomenally successful Law & Order spin-off
Criminal Intent. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide