Harvey Keitel

Born: 13th May 1939
Where: Brooklyn, New York, USA

The former shoe salesman has made his name in roles demanding brooding intensity such as George Baines in Jane Campion's Oscar-winning The Piano.

Other notable performances include Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ and Reservoir Dogs.

It was after working as a court stenographer, that Keitel joined an actor's guild and began his dramatic profession.

He was thrown out of a vocational school for truancy and at sixteen went to Lebanon in the Marine Corps, returning to the states to sell shoes.

It was in 1965 that Keitel answered a newspaper advert by a student named Martin Scorsese who was seeking actors for his first film, Who's That Knocking at My Door?

1973 saw Keitel gain fame in his first major role when Scorsese cast him in his first major feature, Mean Streets, first of many of his collaborations with Robert De Niro.

The following year he played the abusive boyfriend of Ellen Burstyn's Alice in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, once again directed by Scorsese.

By this time Keitel had made a name for himself and was spotted by director Francis Ford Coppola who cast him in Apocalypse Now.

Keitel and Coppola had a huge falling out and whilst on location in the Phillippines the actor was sacked and was replaced by Martin Sheen.

Back in the safe arms of his friend Scorsese, Keitel quickly embarked on his next project, which was Taxi Driver - his second feature with De Niro.

It was on Broadway that he spent most of the 80s - until 1988 when he played Judas Iscariot in Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, opposite Willem Dafoe and Paul Greco.

At the forefront of the Hollywood scene, Keitel was cast in the box office record breaking Thelma And Louise, opposite Susan Sarandon and Gina Davis.

Also in 1991 he portrayed the mobster Mickey Cohen in Barry Levinson's Bugsy, which earned him his first Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

In 1992 Harvey changed the course of career form actor to producer. His work on Reservoir Dogs, directed by Quentin Tarantino, was critically acclaimed.

Over time, Keitel became typecast as an intense, back-alley thug, and this stereotype proved impossible to avoid in films such as The Last Temptation of Christ where he played an apostle with a Brooklyn accent!

He finally managed to drop the thug persona in Campion's award-winning The Piano, for which he received an Australian Best Actor Award.

Roles followed in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, From Dusk Till Dawn and Cop Land and the submarine drama U-571.

In 2001, he starred in Istvan Szabo's World War Two drama Taking Sides as an American officer interrogating a supposed Nazi sympathiser.

The following year he portrayed Che in the comedy drama Dreaming of Julia and followed the role with an FBI agent in the Disney adventure National Treasure.