Giamatti, Paul

▪ American actor

in full  Paul Edward Valentine Giamatti 

born June 6, 1967, New Haven, Conn., U.S.

      American actor who excelled at portraying likable, idiosyncratic everyman characters before establishing himself as a versatile leading man.

      Giamatti was born into an intellectually active family; his mother, Toni, was a former actor who taught English at a preparatory school, and his father, A. Bartlett, was a professor and president of Yale University before becoming commissioner of Major League Baseball. After graduating with a degree in English from Yale (B.A., 1989), Giamatti moved to Seattle, where he attempted to begin a career as an animator and appeared in several small film roles. He soon returned to New Haven, where he entered the Yale School of Drama (M.F.A., 1994).

      Giamatti began appearing in roles on and off Broadway soon after graduating from Yale. He was given a minor part in the television series NYPD Blue in 1994 and appeared in the Woody Allen (Allen, Woody) comedy Mighty Aphrodite (1996). In Private Parts (1997), a film about the life of radio personality Howard Stern, Giamatti played an acrimonious program director tasked with containing the outrageous Stern. Small roles in commercially successful films followed, including My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), The Truman Show (1998), and Saving Private Ryan (1998). In Man on the Moon (1999), a film starring Jim Carrey (Carrey, Jim) as the comedian Andy Kaufman, Giamatti took the role of Kaufman's good friend Bob Zmuda, and in 2001 he appeared in a remake of Planet of the Apes.

      Giamatti's first leading role came in American Splendor (2003), a critically lauded film about American comic-book author Harvey Pekar. He followed with the enormously successful Sideways (2004), in which Giamatti played a failed novelist and recently divorced high-school English teacher who travels with his friend to the wine-making regions of California for a celebratory trip before the latter's wedding. In 2006 Giamatti received his first Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor, for his work in Cinderella Man (2005), a biopic about the life of boxer Jim Braddock (played by Russell Crowe (Crowe, Russell)). His later movies include The Illusionist (2006), a drama about a cunning magician (played by Edward Norton (Norton, Edward)); Lady in the Water (2006), in which he starred as a superintendant who rescues a preternatural woman from his building's swimming pool; and the comedy Fred Claus (2007). In what was perhaps his most ambitious role to date, Giamatti portrayed the eponymous character in the Home Box Office (HBO) miniseries John Adams (2008); he won a Golden Globe Award for his performance.

* * *