- Born
- Birth nameVincent Phillip D'Onofrio
- Nicknames
- The Human Chameleon
- Noffy
- Height6′ 3½″ (1.92 m)
- Vincent Phillip D'Onofrio was born on June 30, 1959 in Brooklyn, New York, to Phyllis, a restaurant manager and server, and Gene D'Onofrio, a theatre production assistant and interior designer. He is of Italian descent and has two older sisters. He studied at the Actors Studio and the American Stanislavski Theatre. Vincent D'Onofrio is known as an "actor's actor". The wide variety of roles he has played and the quality of his work have earned him a reputation as a versatile talent.
His first paid role was in Off-Broadway's "This Property Is Condemned". He continued appearing in plays and worked as a bouncer, a bodyguard and a delivery man. In 1984, he made his Broadway debut in "Open Admissions", followed by work in numerous other stage plays. In 2012, D'Onofrio returned to teach at the Lee Strasberg Theater & Film Institute. As a film actor, D'Onofrio's career break came when he played a mentally unbalanced recruit in Full Metal Jacket (1987), directed by the renowned Stanley Kubrick. For this role D'Onofrio gained nearly 70 pounds. He had a major role in Dying Young (1991), and appeared prominently in the box-office smash Men in Black (1997) as the bad guy (Edgar "The Bug").
Other films of note in which he has appeared are Mystic Pizza (1988), JFK (1991), The Player (1992), Ed Wood (1994), The Cell (2000), The Break-Up (2006) and Jurassic World (2015). In 1996, D'Onofrio garnered critical acclaim along with co-star Renée Zellweger for The Whole Wide World (1996), which he helped produce. He also made a guest appearance in The Subway (1997), where he played an accident victim who could not be rescued and was destined to die. For this performance he won an Emmy nomination. In 2000, he both produced and starred in Steal This Movie (2000), a biopic of radical leader Abbie Hoffman.
In 2001, D'Onofrio took the role which has likely given him his greatest public recognition: Det. Robert Goren, the lead character in the TV series Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001). Goren is based on Sherlock Holmes but, instead of relying upon physical evidence like Holmes, D'Onofrio's character focuses on psychology to identify the perpetrators, whom he often draws into confessing or yielding condemning evidence. He played the part for 10 years.
In his career D'Onofrio's various film characters have included a priest, a bisexual former porn star, a hijacker, a serial killer, Orson Welles, a space alien, a 1960s radical leader, a pulp fiction writer, an ingenious police investigator and Stuart Smalley's dope-head brother. His on-screen love interests have included Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Renée Zellweger, Marisa Tomei, Tracey Ullman, Rebecca De Mornay and Lili Taylor. One of his latest roles is in Marvel's Daredevil (2015) as Daredevil's nemesis, Wilson Fisk. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and children.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Roger Burns <rogerburns@pobox.com>
- SpouseCarin van der Donk(March 22, 1997 - present) (filed for divorce, 2 children)
- ChildrenElias Gene D'OnofrioLuka D'Onofrio
- ParentsPhyllis D'OnofrioGene D'Onofri
- RelativesElizabeth D'Onofrio(Sibling)Hawk D'Onofrio(Niece or Nephew)
- Towering height and rotund frame
- Often plays soft-spoken characters with troubled pasts
- Gained a world record 70 pounds for his role in Full Metal Jacket (1987).
- "I want you to be big -- Lon Chaney big," Stanley Kubrick informed D'Onofrio during the filming of Full Metal Jacket (1987).
- Daughter: Leila George, born March 20, 1992. Her mother is actress Greta Scacchi.
- Gained 45 pounds for his role in The Salton Sea (2002).
- One of the founders of the River Run Film Festival (Winston-Salem, North Carolina), along with his sister, Elizabeth D'Onofrio, and their father, Gene D'Onofrio.
- [on acting] Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls. The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That's Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that.
- I took a route of acting, rather than starmaking, so it cost me a lot financially.
- [on his career choices] It's something that I've been saying for years when people ask me how I pick the things that I do. I pick the things that scare me the most. You have to like the story first. I'm not gonna play a part that doesn't instill some kind of fear in me. If I read a part, and suddenly, I'm thinking halfway through, "I'm not sure I could get away with this", I think of everything I can think of to keep me from doing it, that's the one I should do.
- I am a method actor, but I'm also a film actor as well as a method actor. Characters that don't have humility, whether they are heroes or villains, are hard to relate to. All characters in every aspect of what we do should have humility. If they don't, then they're a cartoon character. I know that during actual performance scenes, what I need to trigger myself off, and I know how to trigger it off so that it will trigger you off, which will also influence how you feel when I'm expressionless.
- I'm not gonna make excuses for other actors. I'm just talking about myself. The good actors that I've met - I've met some of the best actors that we'll ever see - and I know for sure the one thing that we all have in common when we all look in each other's eyes, is that we're all struggling to achieve 100%. That's all I see when I see another artist. All of us are trying to achieve 100% in our work. That's all we struggle to do. We never do, but we never stop trying until the day we die. It's that struggle to achieve 100%, that's where our performance lies, that's what the audience gets. They get the struggle.
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