| Christopher Walken Biography: | ||||||||||||||||
 From Saturday Night Live to The Deer Hunter to an Award-winning dance in a Fatboy Slim video, Christopher Walken has done it all to entertain us. His face is known and loved around the world, as one of the hardest-working, memorable actors to grace the silver screen, but he started in Queens. Walken grew up in Astoria, born in 1943, the son of immigrants, a German baker and a Scottish mom with show-biz aspirations. Christopher Walken came into this world as Ronald Walken (named after actor Ronald Coleman) on March 31, 1943. Born the middle child in a family of three boys, he was raised along with his brothers Ken and Glenn, in Queens, New York. Walken still remains a resident of New York City to this day, and for the past couple of decades has owned a brownstone on Manhattan's upper West Side in addition to a home located in the Connecticut countryside. Christopher's parents were both immigrants who met in the U. S. as young adults and married in 1936. Walken's father, Paul, came from Germany and spent a long career as the owner and operator of Walken's Bakery in Astoria, Queens. Paul, who passed away in February 2001, was a ferocious worker who regularly made a practice of keeping his young sons busy in the bakery after school. Perhaps that work ethic, instilled so early on, is one of the reasons Walken has said that he is happiest when he is busy working.   The fifties were the golden age of television and there were plenty of employment opportunities for the Walken brothers with over 90 live TV shows being produced in New York City at the time. Walken was often an extra on those live programs, and by the time he was ten years old, Chris had already worked with such greats as Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, and Sid Caesar. Some of the early television programs Chris appeared on included the Ernie Kovacs Show, Colgate Comedy Hour, Playhouse 90, and the Armstrong Circle Theater. He was also a regular character on the television series, The Wonderful John Acton and later, Chris was seen in episodes of Naked City, Hawaii Five-O, and Kojak. Walken received his childhood education at Professional Children's School in Manhattan, during which time he trained specifically to be a dancer. Chris eventually went on to use that training extensively by spending the beginning of his career as a dancer in musicals, and as can be seen in Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice video, Walken still uses his early dance training very successfully to this day.  In 1963 Chris met his wife, Georgianne Thon, while he was playing Riff in West Side Story and she was a dancer playing the part of his girlfriend, Graziella. They were wed in 1969 and still remain married today. Georgianne once worked with her husband when she played the small part of Wendy Abramson in the movie Brainstorm. She has since left acting behind and went on to become a successful casting director who recently won an Emmy Award for casting the Sopranos.  Chris continued to work in theater, both on and off Broadway, for years until he landed his first movie role.Though he screen tested for leading roles in such films as Love Story and Star Wars, he didn't win a significant part in a movie until 1971 when he was chosen to play alongside Sean Connery in The Anderson Tapes. Walken went on from there to star in The Happiness Cage, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, The Sentinel, and Roseland, and was finally seen by the masses when he played Duane Hall, Diane Keaton's very weird brother, in Woody Allen's production of Annie Hall. Then for his next film, Walken was given the part of Nick in Michael Cimino's masterpiece, The Deer Hunter. For playing his part so well, Walken won the 1978 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and from that moment on, his life would never be the same. During the years immediately afterward Walken appeared in a vast number of movies including the Stephen King adaptation, The Dead Zone, the James Bond film, A View to a Kill, and he played arch-villain Max Shreck in Batman Returns. Walken also worked with director Robert Redford on The Milagro Beanfield War, and played Sergeant Toomey in Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues. And who can forget those unforgettable Walken monologues from the movies True Romance and Pulp Fiction. Throughout most of his career, Walken has tended to specialize in playing villains and unbalanced types in his film roles, though he has had the opportunity to play different kinds of parts on occasion. For instance, he once played the cat in one of his favorite projects, Puss in Boots, a movie where Chris could be seen singing, dancing, and performing cat-like movements with a feline perfection. Most of the world was finally made keenly aware of Walken's exceptional dancing ability when he starred in the Fatboy Slim music video, Weapon of Choice. Finally, an entirely new generation, The MTV Generation, found an opportunity to know Walken in a different light. Instead of the villain, they have been introduced to the song and dance man who has been there all along. In addition to his other talents, Chris has also proven himself to be an entertaining comedian who enjoys showing off his song and dance skills as well as spoofing his darker characters on Saturday Night Live. A program he has hosted a total of six times now and for which he won a 2001 American Comedy Award.  Christopher Walken Quote: "Emotional power is maybe the most valuable thing that an actor can have." | ||||||||||||||||
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