Billy Bob Thornton Biography

Billy Bob was a born rocker. He recalls accidentally burning someone's barn down while sneakily smoking with some friends. His grandfather knew it was him, made him understand the weight of his crime, but never grassed him. And the boy was a player. At 9, he received his first drum-kit. His first public performance was at a PTA meeting, thrashing out an instrumental version of The Ballad Of The Green Berets. He formed a band, The McCoveys, named after Wille McCovey, a black baseball star with the San Francisco Giants who smashed an amazing 521 homers. A later High School band was Stone Cold Fever who bashed out the hits of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

After High School, he kept it up, working tough jobs and playing bars at the weekend. By day, he laboured hard for the Highway Department, hauled hay, drove a bulldozer, toiled at a factory making screen doors. He also, at 19, found work at a nursing home in Malvern. At first he was the maintenance man then, when it was noticed how he'd chat to the patients (not all of them old), he became social director, organising entertainment, like bingo games. One gripe was that the patients were not permitted to discuss their past - this was deemed therapeutically unhelpful. He would tackle this experience later, with his breakthrough hit Sling Blade.

Throughout the Seventies, Billy Bob believed his future to be in music. He joined a local soul group, Blue And The Blue Velvets, singing and drumming, then formed his own band, Hot 'Lanta, named after a track by The Allman Brothers. There'd also be Tres Hombres, named after ZZ Top's hit album of 1973, who'd reach the heights of opening for Hank Williams Jr and would release an LP called Gunslinger. With him in the band was guitarist Michael Shipp. He'd later film part of Sling Blade in Shipp's barn in Benton, Arkansas. While playing, Billy Bob would also roadie for others, notably for Canadian band Lighthouse, on a couple of US tours.

There was also marriage. In 1975, aged 20, he got hitched to Melissa Ross. "I went bowling one night and ended up married", he now says. It lasted two years and produced a daughter, Amanda. Thornton would have no part in her upbringing, and only formed a relationship with the girl when she was in her twenties. Thrown a little, in 1977 he took the unusual step (for a rocker) of enrolling at Henderson State University at Arkadelphia, majoring in psychology ("though I mostly majored in billiards"). He lasted just two semesters, music was still in his blood. Still desperate to make it as a rock star, he took off for New York City with his childhood neighbour Tom Epperson who fancied being a famous novelist. They lasted a barely credible ten hours. "Greenwich Village terrified us", said Epperson later. "Steam coming out of the grates and the subway rattling underneath - that really terrified us. We went back to Arkansas in disgrace".

By 1981, they were ready to try again. While at High School, Thornton had become interested in drama. He was something of a writer too, having penned stories from the age of 9. Now he and Epperson took off for Los Angeles, with $500 to their names. They would write scripts together, while Billy Bob learned to act. Maybe he'd get some work singing too, or behind the kit. For years, they struggled, Billy Bob taking all manner of jobs, including working for an answering service. At one point, the food ran out almost entirely, and they lived exclusively on potatoes. Trouble was on the cards, and it came to Billy Bob, who was admitted to hospital with the heart condition myocarditis, brought on by malnutrition. Luckily, the doctor on duty was an ole boy from Arkansas who let him stay in for a week without insurance. Once released, he was also allowed, by an understanding teacher, to continue his acting classes for nothing. So badly betrayed by his own body, he was afraid to move around, and basically stuck around East Hollywood, not up to much at all.

Thornton had a real problem getting work. His very name, which to snobby casting directors reeked of Southern stupidity, worked against him. Then, at last, he won a role in the TV movie The Man Who Broke 1,000 Chains, a chain-gang drama directed by Daniel Mann, a veteran who'd made The Teahouse Of The August Moon with Marlon Brando, and also helmed Butterfield 8 and Our Man Flint. Horribly, performing before this famous film-maker, Billy Bob could not deliver his four lines correctly. On and on the torture went till Thornton was consumed by embarrassment and self-loathing. He returned to his dressing-room and in the mirror saw himself, clad in a conductor's uniform, resembling "a cue ball on a collar". He thought of Val Kilmer, the film's star, a good-looking youngster with a burgeoning reputation, and began to taunt himself, coming on like the backwoods idiot he at that moment considered himself to be. And, in doing so, he recited pretty much the entire opening monologue of what would later become Sling Blade.

Continuing with acting classes, Billy Bob also came up with a one-man show, featuring various characters, including that of Karl Childers, the name he gave this new drawling, drooling Southerner. He'd hire theatres to perform before any producers or casting directors he could entice down. A few parts came his way. He made his screen debut as a hillbilly psycho (that name again!) in the sub-Deliverance Hunter's Blood, then there was the early Adam Sandler pic Going Overboard, and the risible Chopper Chicks In Zombietown. In the meantime, there was a real blow when his brother Jimmy Don, like Billy Bob a musician and writer, died of heart disease at 30. It left a deep scar. "Jimmy was more talented than I'll ever hope to be", recalled Thornton. "Anytime anything good happens for me, I feel guilty and wish it were me who died instead".

The early Nineties were something of a rollercoaster. First, Billy Bob and Epperson had a script accepted and filmed. This was One False Move, a taut and brutal tale of LA cops chasing coke dealers across the country. Billy Bob took a prime role, with the movie starring Bill Paxton and actress Cynda Williams. The film was a cult success, and won the writing pair some assignments. None, including Bel-Aire Patrol for Disney, came to anything. Neither did Thornton's marriage to his co-star Williams, which lasted just a year. They remained friends, though, and soon appeared together in The Killing Box. This was his third disastrous marriage, a romance with actress Toni Lawrence having bloomed and withered back in '86-'87. Epperson and Thornton partnership did at least bear fruit in the end - they co-wrote The Gift, Camouflage and A Family Thing.

Some decent, if usually small parts, did now come Thornton's way. He appeared in Francis Ford Coppola's TV series The Outsiders, based on his own movie and, fulfilling his mother's prophesy, in Burt Reynolds' Evening Shade. Via the producers of the latter, Billy Bob then won a three-year stint in the successful Washington-based political sit-com Hearts Afire. He played Billy Bob Davis (that name AGAIN!), part of a team loosely based on the good ole boys surrounding Bill Clinton. Clinton himself, a close friend of the show's producer Harry Thomason, would take a keen interest in Billy Bob's progress. As Governor Clinton, he personally congratulated his fellow native of Arkansas on getting the role then, later, he'd offer help when Billy Bob's Malibu home burned down and, through an intermediary, advised him on his Oscar campaign for Sling Blade. In return, Thornton would help raise money to restore Big Bill's childhood home.

While succeeding on TV, Billy Bob's film career stuttered. There were small roles in Indecent Proposal and Tombstone (with Paxton and - damn him! - Val Kilmer). There was also the Steven Seagal-directed eco-thriller On Deadly Ground, the subversive indie hit Floundering (with John Cusack, later his co-star in Pushing Tin), Jim Jarmusch's superb Dead Man and the sweet The Stars Fall On Henrietta, starring Robert Duvall. Duvall would become a mentor to Thornton, encouraging him to write A Family Thing (an incendiary drama where Duvall and James Earl Jones starred as half-brothers), and would accept a role in Sling Blade, calling Billy Bob "a hillbilly Orson Welles". Thornton returned the compliment by turning up in Duvall's own The Apostle. There was also the small matter of another marriage. In 1992, Billy Bob met Pietra Cherniak outside an Italian restaurant in West Hollywood. "I guess there's not a snowball's chance in hell I could get your phone number", he drawled. She couldn't understand a word and took HIS number instead. They married a year later and she bore him two sons, William (named after Arkansas' legendary William Langston), and Harry (after Thomason).

Now came the big time. In 1993, Thornton had managed to get a 25-minute short made, titled Some Folks Call It A Sling Blade, where he starred as the child of his earlier shame, Karl Childers. Molly Ringwald had played the reporter who questions Childers in hospital, thus revealing his terrible upbringing. But Thornton was not happy with the results and, in the Autumn of 1994, while at his mother's house, he wrote a full-length script. For his main character, he drew on the Childers he'd built up with his theatre group and in the short, but also on a much earlier memory. "I was raised," he later remembered "in a place where a guy who was kind of deformed, and couldn't talk plain, was made to live out in back of his parents' house. They fed him like a dog . . . he struggled, just to walk . . . his mother said she was scared by a snake when she was pregnant, and it caused him to come out like that - he was the Devil's child. It turned out he had polio. That's where I got the set-up for where Karl comes from". Some said Karl was a new take on Forrest Gump. Thornton said he was more like Chauncey Gardner, Peter Sellers' character in Being There.

Luckily, Thornton's script was taken up by a production company called The Shooting Gallery who allowed his full rein. This was especially important at the casting stage. Billy Bob needed the right actors, as he himself - as Karl, the cross between Boo Radley and Frankenstein's monster - would appear in nearly every scene. So in came Duvall, John Ritter (who'd starred in Hearts Afire) and Dwight Yoakam, a country singer who Thornton knew would understand the character of the weird, complicated and psychotic boyfriend slaughtered by Karl at the end (they'd later form a production company together, and Thornton would appear in Yoakam's South Of Heaven, West Of Hell). There was also a place for Rick Dial, a friend of Billy Bob's from the age of 8.

Famously, Sling Blade was a huge hit. Made for $1 million, it quickly made $65 million. Thornton received calls of congratulations from Elizabeth Taylor and Bruce Willis. He was Oscar-nominated as Best Actor, but lost out to Geoffrey Rush, who played another savant in Shine. But, fulfilling another of his mother's foretellings, he did win for Best Adapted Screenplay. Now he was made. He put on 50 pounds to play Darrell, the freaky mechanic in Oliver Stone's U-Turn, revisited Planet Clinton with Primary Colours and (purely for the money and the connections) played the head of NASA ground control in Armageddon, trying to stay calm while Bruce Willis and his renegade drilling team saved the Earth. He and Willis got on well and promised to do a comedy together. And they would, playing dopey bank robbers who kidnap then both fall for Cate Blanchett in Bandits.

It wasn't all good. Pietra would sue for divorce and, in 1997, take out a retraining order against him, to keep him away from her and the boys. But love came back quickly, in the shape of Laura Dern (then splitting from long-time love Jeff Goldblum), who Billy Bob met when they both appeared on the "coming out" double episode of Ellen. He gave up drinking - she thought she had found the one.

She hadn't. After being Oscar-nominated once again for Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan, where brothers Billy Bob and (again) co-star Bill Paxton find $4 million in a wrecked plane, Thornton went off to Toronto to film Pushing Tin. Here he played a maverick air traffic controller who wars with co-worker John Cusack. His young, sexy wife in the movie was the upcoming Angelina Jolie. The pair fell for each other crazily. Dern found out via the media that Billy Bob wasn't coming home. She said it was like "sudden death".

Thornton and Jolie would hit the headlines continually for their unconventional affair (and, after 2000, marriage). He wore her underwear to the gym, they cut each other in bed, she had a nurse bleed him and Fed Ex her his blood. They paid $3 million for the ex-home of Guns N'Roses' guitarist Slash in Beverly Hills, with Thornton using the basement studio to record his solo Country album, Private Radio. He also released a single, called Angelina.

Billy Bob just kept pushing. In the Coen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There, he played Ed Crane, a hairdresser involved in blackmail and murder in 1949 California - for which he's hotly tipped to win a second Oscar. And he became a big budget director with All The Pretty Horses, starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz. The film - exceptionally beautiful - was a success, but Thornton wasn't pleased with cuts made by the producers. A big fan of American literature, including Harper Lee, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and, of course, Cormac McCarthy , he felt the story had been emasculated.

But by now a series of great roles were coming Billy Bob's way. In Monster's Ball, he was Hank Grotowski, a prison warder with a racist father (Peter Boyle) and troubled son (Heath Ledger), who falls for a young black woman (Halle Berry) struggling to raise her child. Sadly, Hank is not aware that one reason she's struggling is that he recently executed her husband, played by Puff Daddy. It was a stark and merciless drama, with both Thornton and Berry in top form. Indeed, her performance made Berry the first ever black woman to win a Best Actress Oscar. There was a further furore around the sex scenes - far more graphic and intense than was the norm.

2002 also brought The Badge where Billy Bob played a homophobic sheriff who, investigating the murder of a transsexual, is shunned by heterosexual society and has to turn for help to those he previously despised. Then there was Waking Up In Reno where he was Lonnie Earl, one quarter of two trashy couples travelling from Little Rock to Reno for a monster truck rally. His partner, played by Natasha Richardson, hasn't had sex with him in years, but Charlize Theron, girlfriend of his buddy Patrick Swayze, may well have done. And it looks like she's pregnant. Oops.

After this it was back to jail with Levity, where Billy Bob's been inside for 19 years after killing a teenager, obsessing over his victim throughout. Now he's out and looking for redemption, which may be provided by weird preacher Morgan Freeman, and maybe by Kirsten Dunst or Holly Hunter. A tough choice. And then there was yet more Coen Brothers madness with Intolerable Cruelty, where Billy Bob joined George Clooney, Catherine Zeta Jones and Geoffrey Rush in the comic tale of a twisted but brilliant gold-digger who plans to marry into a fortune and wreak revenge on a womanising Beverly Hills attorney who foiled one of her plans. Billy Bob would play a gushing Texas oil baron who falls victim to the beautiful snake, a poor innocent who sees love where only greed exists.

Off-screen, his love-life was also in turmoil. In 2001, he'd made Angelina Jolie his fifth wife, and together they'd adopted a Cambodian boy, named Maddox. By 2002, though, the marriage was already on the rocks, with Jolie filing for a divorce that would be made final in May, 2003. Rumours of Thornton's serial infidelity flew, but the couple said little publicly until late 2004 when Billy Bob finally blamed the break-up on his own fear. "I am a scared person," he told The Sunday Times. "I walked away. It's the most stupid thing I've ever done. I fell in love the hardest I have ever fallen, and that was a scary thing. Nothing was her fault, absolutely nothing, it was all down to me. I was afraid she would see how scared I was and realise I was not the man she thought I could be".

After a brief part playing the US President opposite Hugh Grant's clever but bumbling Prime Minister in Love Actually, Thornton moved on to another comedy, and thankfully one with a far sharper edge. This was Bad Santa which saw him as a drunken con-man who, each Christmas, gets a mall-job as Santa, with his midget accomplice as his elf. When they've cased the joint, they turn it over and disappear into the frozen night. This year, though, in Phoenix, things are different. Thornton is spotted being horrible to the kids, plus drinking, thieving and fornicating, and has to resort to blackmail to keep his plot on track. Soon, everything descends into chaos. Not a film for children, Bad Santa was hilarious and a huge hit. And it could so easily have gone to Bill Murray or Jack Nicholson, who both expressed interest but turned it down for Lost In Translation and Something's Gotta Give respectively. Lucky for Thornton they did. Not only did the film gain him Hollywood brownie points and another Golden Globe nomination, it also introduced him to a new partner. Following the Jolie separation, he'd dated model Danielle Dotzenrod, but he couldn't stay out of a serious relationship for long. On the Bad Santa set he met Connie Angland, some 10 years his junior. In 2004 she would bear him his first daughter, Bella.

While continuing his musical career (2003 saw him release and tour another album, The Edge Of The World), Billy Bob was now getting busy onscreen. Chrystal saw him as yet another sad sack released from jail, this time being a dope farmer who, fleeing the cops, has caused a car accident that saw his child killed and his wife's neck broken. Returning home he finds her relieving her constant grief and physical pain with a life of promiscuity. But while she now learns to live again, his own grief and guilt have emptied him and he falls back into the drug-life and a confrontation with a local kingpin. Examining loss, human fragility and redemption, it was a harsh movie, but it saw Thornton continue a run of fine performances which he carried into his next feature, an ambitious remake of The Alamo. Featuring the biggest film-set ever constructed in America, this saw Billy Bob steal the show as Davy Crockett, not simply a gung-ho hero but a former Congressman trying to cope with his own false mythologization. Steering away from constant action, the film dealt seriously and sensitively with the Texans' awful wait for reinforcements that would never come, as the armies of Santa Ana brought death ever closer. Unfortunately, dealing with this iconic American event in terms of character study, this excellent movie was a financial catastrophe.

Thornton, though, moved instantly on to another hit with Friday Night Lights, playing Gary Gaines, coach of the Permian Panthers high school football team in Odessa, Texas. Based on HG Bissinger's bestseller, this saw him attempting to maintain the side's championship-winning ways while under vast pressure from townsfolk whose sense of self-worth is based almost entirely on the team's success. Quiet and wise, he knows it's just a game, but also knows it's more than just a game for them, and tries to retain his dignity amidst the barrage of advice and abuse.

Next, Harold Ramis's Ice Harvest would see Billy Bob reunited with his Pushing Tin co-star John Cusack, where lawyer Cusack, overseeing strip-joints for a local mobster, plans a Yuletide rip-off. Then, rejoining the writers of Bad Santa, he'd star in a remake of The Bad News Bears, directed by Richard Linklater, the indie whizz kid who'd hit mainstream pay-dirt with School Of Rock. Naturally, Thornton would take the Walter Matthau role as the crotchety, beer-swilling old geezer who struggles to shape a team of misfit kids into a winning baseball side. Then there'd be Fade Out, a psychological drama that had Billy Bob as a schizophrenic screenwriter who believes his wife Milla Jovovich is out to kill him, his writings blurring with his real life. The movie would be directed by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cristofer, who'd written The Witches Of Eastwick and directed Angelina Jolie in her breakthrough hit, Gia. And there'd be Mr Woodcock, a tough comedy where a motivational author, believing he's conquered the demons of his youth, discovers his mother is set to marry Thornton, playing the arse-kicking high school gym teacher who made his life a misery all those years ago.

As an indie star with mainstream appeal and an artist of true taste and spirit, Billy Bob Thornton may well get the opportunity to match the works of his cinematic heroes - John Ford, John Huston and Billy Wilder. In the meantime, the turnip-like baby from Arkansas has a signature clothing line, a burgeoning musical career and does pretty much as he pleases. Not bad, Bubba, not bad at all.

Dominic Wills