Belgian poster postcard. Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011).

Attractive American actor and producer Brad Pitt (1963) has received multiple awards and nominations including an Academy Award as a producer under his own company Plan B Entertainment. Pitt wildly varies his film choices, appearing in everything from high-concept popcorn flicks such as Troy (2004) to adventurous critic-bait like Inglourious Basterds (2009) and The Tree of Life (2011). He has received two Best Actor Oscar nominations, for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and Moneyball (2011).

William Bradley ‘Brad’ Pitt was born in 1963 in Shawnee, Oklahoma. His parents were William Alvin Pitt, who ran a trucking company, and Jane Etta (née Hillhouse), a school counsellor. He has a younger brother, Douglas (Doug) Pitt, and a younger sister, Julie Neal Pitt. After graduating high school, Brad enrolled in the University of Missouri in 1982, majoring in journalism. Two weeks before earning his degree, Pitt left the university and moved to Los Angeles, where he took acting lessons and worked odd jobs. Pitt's acting career began with uncredited parts in films like Less Than Zero (Marek Kanievska, 1987). His television debut came in May 1987 with a two-episode role on the soap opera Another World. In November of the same year, Pitt had a guest appearance on the sitcom Growing Pains. He appeared in four episodes of the legendary prime-time soap opera Dallas (1987-1988). In 1989 he made his film debut with a featured role in the slasher Cutting Class (Rospo Pallenberg, 1989) with Donovan Leitch. He first gained recognition as a sexy hitchhiker in the road movie Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), who romances and cons Thelma (Geena Davis). Biograpy.com: “Pitt's combination of charming bad boy charisma and sensual playfulness—particularly in a fiery love scene with Geena Davis—made him a genuine sex symbol (and wore out the rewind button on many a VCR).“ His first leading roles in big-budget productions came with the dramas A River Runs Through It (Robert Redford, 1992) and Legends of the Fall (1994), for which Pitt received his first Golden Globe Award nomination, in the Best Actor category. He starred opposite Tom Cruise and Antonio Banderas as the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac in the romantic horror film Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994), based on the novel by Anne Rice. Pitt also garnered attention for a brief appearance in the cult hit True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993) as a stoner named Floyd, providing comic relief to the action film written by Quentin Tarantino. Pitt gave critically acclaimed performances as an emotionally tortured detective in the gory horror-thriller Se7en (David Fincher, 1995) and as frenetic oddball Jeffrey Goines in the psychological Science Fiction film 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995). The latter earned him a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and an Academy Award nomination. Seven earned $327 million at the international box office. Pitt also starred in the legal drama Sleepers (Barry Levinson, 1996), and in an unglamorous, disturbing role in the cult film Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) about a bloody diversion for young professional males.

Brad Pitt was cast as an Irish Gypsy boxer with a barely intelligible accent in the British gangster film Snatch (Guy Ritchie, 2000). He then played Rusty Ryan in the heist film Ocean's Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001) with George Clooney. Well-received by critics, Ocean's Eleven was highly successful at the box office, earning $450 million worldwide. It had two sequels, Ocean's Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004) and Ocean's Thirteen (Steven Soderbergh, 2007). Ocean's Twelve earned $362 million worldwide, and the third sequel earned $311 million at the international box office. CNN's Paul Clinton described Pitt and Clooney's dynamic as "the best male chemistry since Paul Newman and Robert Redford." Another commercial success was Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004), based on the Iliad. For his part as Achilles, he spent six months sword training and it helped establish his appeal as an action star. Troy was the first film produced by Plan B Entertainment, a film production company he had founded two years earlier with Jennifer Aniston and Brad Grey, CEO of Paramount Pictures. He then had a hit with the stylish action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Doug Liman, 2005), opposite Angela Jolie. Mr. & Mrs. Smith earned $478 million worldwide, making it one of the biggest hits of 2005. Pitt starred opposite Cate Blanchett in Alejandro González Iñárritu's multi-narrative drama Babel (2006). Pitt's performance was critically well-received. Babel received seven Academy and Golden Globe award nominations, winning the Best Drama Golden Globe, and earning a nomination for the Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe. Pitt then appeared in the black comedy Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2008), his first collaboration with the Coen brothers. The film received a positive reception from critics, with The Guardian calling it "a tightly wound, slickly plotted spy comedy", noting that Pitt's performance was one of the funniest. Pitt received his second and third Academy Award nominations for his leading performances in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008) and Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011). In Benjamin Button Pitt played the title character, who is born as a 70-year-old man and ages in reverse. The film received thirteen Academy Award nominations in total and grossed $329 million at the box office worldwide. Pitt's next leading role came in the war film Inglourious Basterds, (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Pitt played Lieutenant Aldo Raine, an American resistance fighter battling Nazis in German-occupied France. The film was a box office hit, taking $311 million worldwide, and garnered generally favourable reviews.

Brad Pitt had another commercial success with World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013), a thriller about a zombie apocalypse. Pitt produced the film which grossed $540 million against a production budget of $190 million. He also produced The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006) and 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013), both of which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and also the experimental drama The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2009), a historical drama based on the autobiography of Solomon Northup. His productions Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011) and the comedy-drama The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015), garnered Best Picture nominations too. Moneyball received six Academy Award nominations including Best Actor for Pitt. Not only his work, but his personal life is also the subject of wide publicity. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Pitt was involved in successive relationships with several of his co-stars, including Robin Givens, Jill Schoelen and Juliette Lewis. In addition, Pitt had a much-publicised romance and engagement with his Seven co-star Gwyneth Paltrow, whom he dated from 1994 to 1997. From 2000 to 2005, he was married to actress Jennifer Aniston. During their divorce, he fell in love with actress Angelina Jolie on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The entertainment media dubbed the couple "Brangelina" and they married in 2014. They have six children together, three of whom were adopted internationally. In 2015, Pitt starred opposite Jolie, in her third directorial effort, By the Sea, a romantic drama about a marriage in crisis, based on her screenplay. In September 2016, Jolie filed in real life for divorce from Pitt. In the World War II romantic thriller Allied (Robert Zemeckis, 2016), Pitt and Marion Cotillard played an intelligence officer and resistance fighter, respectively, who fell in love during a mission to kill a German official.

Sources: Biography.com, Wikipedia, and IMDb.

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