Willem Dafoe

An actor with an experimental vocation and unorthodox choices, Willem Dafoe (Appleton, Wisconsin – USA, 1955) began his artistic career as a university student in Milwaukee where at age 19 he joined Theatre X (1975-1977), one of the first experimental theatre groups in the US, influenced by Living and by Grotowski, with which he performed in Offending the Audience by Peter Handke and in many of the plays by the director and artistic director John Schneider. In Europe, where he lived in 1976, he was at the legendary Mickery Theatre in Amsterdam, the heart of alternative international theatre, where he performed on stage in Folter Follies, a work by the founder, actor, director, playwright, producer and visual artist Ritsaert ten Cate.

He began his most important theatre training in New York, where together with director Elizabeth LeCompte and actors Ron Vawter, Kate Valk, Jim Clayburgh and Peyton Smith, he co-founded The Wooster Group, with which he would perform on stage for over twenty years (1977-2003), participating in many of the productions, which featured a singular blend of languages and texts – from the classics to American counterculture, from Flaubert to Lenny Bruce – that made it the fulcrum of the underground scene in 1980s New York,  establishing collaborations with many artists – Ken Kobland, Jim Strahs, Richard Foreman, Trisha Brown, John Lurie, Bruce Odland, Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Tipton, Frances McDormand, Hans Peter Kuhn, and Amir ElSaffar.

In addition to the Wooster Group, Willem Dafoe worked with directors who have left their mark in international theatre with their imagery. Richard Foreman, playwright, director and experimental theoretician, equally renowned on European stages and founder of “ontological-hysteric” theatre, would call him for Miss Universal Happiness (1985) and The Idiot Savant (2009). Robert Wilson chose him for The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic (2011), and alongside Mikhail Baryshnikov, for The Old Woman, based on the short stories by Russian poet Daniil Kharms (2013). Finally, for Romeo Castellucci, Willem Dafoe starred in Il velo nero del pastore, based on the enigmatic short story by Hawthorne (2016). In 2016 he participated in Biennale Teatro in the masterclass section, teaching a workshop dedicated to acting.

Throughout his career as a film actor, he has won many international acknowledgments and was nominated for four Oscars (the last time in 2019 for At Eternity’s Gate by Julian Schnabel, for which in 2018 he won the Coppa Volpi at the Venice International Film Festival), and for four Golden Globes (the last time in 2024 for Poor Things, the film that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival).