Short Biography

Javier Ángel Encinas Bardem (born March 1, 1969, Gran Canaria, Spain) is an Academy Award-winning Spanish actor who has starred in over two dozen films in Spain. He had garnered critical acclaim as an actor for films such as Jamón, jamón, Carne tremula, Boca a boca, Los Lunes al sol and Mar adentro.

Bardem has been nominated for best actor for his role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona for the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards with fellow actors Sean Penn of Milk, Jeremy Renner of The Hurt Locker, along with Mickey Rourke of The Wrestler and Richard Jenkins. Bardem has previously been awarded a Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award, BAFTA, four Goyas, two European Film Awards and two Coppa Volpis for his work. He is notable as the first Spanish actor to be nominated and win an Oscar, the nomination being for Before Night Falls and the historic Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 2007 film No Country for Old Men.

Early life

Bardem is the son of Carlos Encinas and the actress Pilar Bardem. Bardem comes from a long line of filmmakers and actors who have been working since the earliest days of Spanish cinema; he is the grandson of actors Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro, and the nephew of screenwriter and director Juan Antonio Bardem. Both his older brother and his older sister, Carlos and Mónica Bardem, are actors. His film debut was at the age of six and a half in the film El Pícaro (The Scoundrel) and he appeared in several television series before turning to painting and, eventually, sports. Before acting professionally, Bardem was a member of the underage Spanish national rugby team.

Career

Javier Bardem, Festimad 2007Bardem starred in his second major motion picture, The Ages of Lulu, when he was 20. In 1992, he made his first international hit with Jamón, jamón, which also starred Penélope Cruz. After starring in roughly two dozen films in his native country, he would eventually land his international breakthrough performance role in Julian Schnabel`s Before Night Falls in 2000, as Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role, the first time for a Spaniard. This also marked Bardem`s first English language speaking role. In 2002 he starred in John Malkovich`s directorial debut, The Dancer Upstairs.

Bardem won the Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his role in 2004`s Mar Adentro, released in the United States as The Sea Inside, in which he portrayed the quadriplegic turned assisted-suicide activist Ramón Sampedro , who unsuccessfully brought his case to the Spanish courts, yet eventually succeeded in persuading several friends to assist him and committed suicide. That year he also made a brief appearance as a vicious crime lord who summons Tom Cruise`s hitman to do the dirty work of dispatching witnesses, in Michael Mann`s crime drama Collateral, which also starred Jamie Foxx. In 2007 Bardem acted in two film adaptations; the Coen Brothers` No Country for Old Men, based upon the novel of the same name and the adaptation of the classic Colombian novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. In No Country for Old Men, he plays chilling sociopath killer Anton Chigurh. For that role, he became the first Spanish actor to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also won a Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award for Best Supporting Actor, and also won the Critics` Choice Award for Best Supp

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