Jon Voight

Born: 29th December 1938
Where: Yonkers, New York

Jon, the father of actress Angelina Jolie, embraced the dramatic arts while still a teenager, and worked his way from high school stages to Broadway while still in his 20s.

He enjoyed some success on stage, debuting on Broadway in 1961 as an Austrian teen sympathetic to the Nazis, in The Sound of Music and returning there six years later in That Summer, That Fall.

Jon's breakthrough role came in 1969's Midnight Cowboy with his Oscar nominated turn as male prostitute Joe Buck.

Timing is everything, and in 1978, with the wounds from the Vietnam War still fresh, Jon won a Best Actor Oscar as the maimed vet who falls for an officer's wife (Jane Fonda) in Hal Ashby's Coming Home.

The film provided Jon with a terrific part as the once gung-ho Marine, now paralyzed, who overcomes his wounds to help others in the same situation.

1985 marked a turning point in Jon's career when he appeared in Andrei Konchalovsky's thriller Runaway Train.

For this performance as a brutal escaped convict, Jon earned his third Best Actor Academy Award.

He gave an award-winning performance in The Last of His Tribe, as real-life anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, discoverer of the last surviving member of a small Indian tribe in pre-WWI California.

In 2001, he offered a trio of performances, adopting a British accent, he was seen in a quasi-fantasy sequence as Lord Croft, the missing father of the titular Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, portrayed by real-life daughter Angelina Jolie.

In Pearl Harbor, Jon impersonated US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was virtually unrecognizable under the makeup which was also the case in his Oscar-nominated turn in the Michael Mann-directed biopic Ali.