Sam Rockwell

Biography: Sam Rockwell was born Nov. 5, 1968, in Daly City, Califonia. His mother and father were both actors at this time. The family moved to New York when Sam was two years old, living first in the Bronx and later in Manhattan. When Sam was five years old, his parents split up, at which point he and his father moved to San Francisco where he subsequently grew up, while summers and other times were spent with his mother in New York. Sam made his debut acting when he was 10 years old alongside his mother and later attended J. E. McAteer High School within a program called SOTA. While still in high school, Sam got his first big break when he appeared in the Francis Ford Coppola made for TV film Clownhouse (1988). The plot revolved around 3 escaped mental patients dressing up as clowns and terrorizing 3 brothers home alone; Sam played the eldest of the brothers. The next big break was supposed to come in 1989 when Sam was slated to star in a short lived NBC tv-series called "Dream Street", but was soon after fired. After graduation Sam returned to NYC for good, and for two years he had private training at the William Esper acting studio. He appeared in a variety of roles, such as the ABC after school special Over the Limit (1990) (TV), HBO's Dead Drunk (1992) (playing an alcoholic in both), the head thug in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and guest starring in an Emmy winning episode of "Law & Order", while working a string of regular dayjobs and perfoming in plays. In 1994, a Miller Ice beer commercial finally enabled him to quit his various day jobs to concentrate on his acting career which culminated in him having 5 movies out by 1996, Basquiat (1996), _Search for One-eye Jimmy, The (1996)_ , Glory Daze (1996), Mercy (1996) and Box of Moon Light (1996), and it was Box of Moon Light (1996) that would prove to be Sam's real break-out movie in the film industry. In Tom DiCillo's film, Sam found himself playing a peculiar backwoodsman called The Kid, a manchild living in a half-built mobile home in the middle of nowhere with a penchant for dressing like Davy Crockett, who manages to bring some much-needed chaos into the life of an electrical engineer played by John Turturro. The movie was not a box office success, but managed to generate a lot of critical acclaim for itself and Sam, and in 1997 he found himself the star of another critical hit film, Lawn Dogs (1997). Once again Sam portrays a societal outcast in the form of Trent, a working class man living in a trailer, earning a living mowing lawns inside a wealthy gated Kentucky community. Soon Trent finds himself befriended by 10 year old Devon ( Mischa Barton), and the movie deals with the difficulties in their friendship and the outside world. Sam also made strong perfomances in the quirky, independent comedy Safe Men (1998), in which he plays one half of a pretty awful singing duo (the other half played by Steve Zahn) which gets mistaken for two safe-crackers by the jewish mafia, and the offbeat hitman trainee in Jerry and Tom (1998) against Joe Mantegna. A few smaller appearances in Woody Allen's Celebrity (1998) and the 1999 movie version of Midsummer Night's Dream, A (1999) (in which he played Flute) later, Sam found himself with large parts in two of the bigger hit movies to emerge late last year - Green Mile, The (1999) and Galaxy Quest (1999), wowing audiences and critics alike with his chameleon perfomances as a crazed killer in the former and a goofy actor in the latter. After well over 10 years in the business, Sam has well earned his success.… Expand