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Early life
Hawke was born in Austin, Texas, to Leslie Carole (ne Green) and James Steven Hawke, a high-ranking executive at Conseco, a financial services organization. His maternal grandfather, Howard Lemuel Green, served five terms in the Texas Legislature and was a minor league baseball commissioner. Hawke’s parents were students at the University of Texas at the time of his birth, and separated five years later.
Hawke was raised by his mother, and the two lived in several places before settling in New York, where he attended the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights. After his mother remarried when he was 10, Hawke moved to New Jersey, where he attended West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South. He later transferred to the Hun School of Princeton, a secondary boarding school, from which he graduated in 1988.
Hawke wanted to be a writer throughout his high school years, but he instead began acting while at Hun School, taking classes at the McCarter Theatre on the Princeton campus. Hawke made his stage debut at the age of 13 in George Bernard Shaw Saint Joan. Hawke studied acting at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but dropped out of the university after he was cast in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society. He twice enrolled in New York University’s English program, but dropped out in both cases to pursue acting roles.
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At age 14, Hawke asked his mother to let him go to a casting call in New York. Hawke made his feature film debut in the 1985 film Explorers playing a kid dreaming of aliens, opposite River Phoenix. The film received favorable reviews, but was not a box office success. Hawke admitted he stopped acting for a brief time after the release of Explorers due to the film’s failure; Hawke said the disappointment was difficult to bear at his young age, and added, “I would never recommend that a kid act.” In 1989, he was cast alongside Jack Lemmon and Ted Danson in the comedy drama Dad, playing Danson’s son.
Hawke was cast in a supporting role in Dead Poets Society (1989) as Todd, a shy student transformed by an inspiring English teacher played by Robin Williams; the film’s success was considered Hawke’s break-through. After filming ended, Hawke revealed, “I didn’t want to be an actor and I went back to college. But then the [film's] success was so monumental that I was getting offers to be in such interesting movies and be in such interesting places, and it seemed silly to pursue anything else.” The film received generally favorable reviews, with Variety writing, “Hawke … gives a haunting performance.” With revenue of $235 million worldwide, the film is the most commercially successful of his career.
He next appeared in the 1991 film White Fang, his first leading role, a film that tells the story of a friendship between a Yukon gold hunter and a wolfdog. White Fang is based upon the novel by the same name by Jack London. He later appeared in the war film A Midnight Clear (1992) and Alive (1993), the latter of which was based upon Piers Paul Read’s 1974 book, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors.
Critical success
Hawke at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival
Hawke’s next part was in the Generation X drama Reality Bites (1994) as Troy, a slacker who mocks the ambitions of his girlfriend, played by Winona Ryder. Roger Ebert, in a review of Reality Bites, said Hawke was convincing and noteworthy in the film, adding, “Hawke captures all the right notes as the boorish Troy.” The New York Times noted, “Mr. Hawke’s subtle and strong performance makes it clear that Troy feels things too deeply to risk failure and admit he’s feeling anything at all.” Despite his acclaimed performance and hopes from the studio that the film would gross a substantial amount of money, Reality Bites was marked as a flop. Also in 1994, Hawke directed the music video for the song “Stay (I Missed You)” by singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb.
The following year, Hawke starred in Richard Linklater’s 1995 drama Before Sunrise. The film follows a young American (Hawke) and a young French woman (Julie Delpy), who meet on a train and disembark in Vienna, where they spend the night walking around the city and getting to know one another. According to the San Francisco Chronicle Hawke and Delpy “interact so gently and simply that you feel certain that they helped write the dialogue. Each of them seems to have something personal at stake in their performances.” The newspaper concluded that their relationship “begin[s] to grow on you”.
Hawke published his first novel, The Hottest State, in 1996, about a love affair between a young actor and a singer. Hawke said of the novel, “Writing the book had to do with dropping out of college, and with being an actor. I didn’t want my whole life to go by and not do anything but recite lines. I wanted to try making something else. It was definitely the scariest thing I ever did. And it was just one of the best things I ever did.” However, the book received mostly negative reviews. Entertainment Weekly said, “Ethan Hawke … opens himself to rough literary scrutiny in The Hottest State. If Hawke is serious … he’d do well to work awhile in less exposed venues, perhaps focusing on shorter stories and submitting them to little magazines.”
In 1997 he starred in the science fiction film Gattaca, his highest budgeted movie to date. The film received generally favorable reviews from critics, and earned $12 million worldwide at the box office. The following year, Hawke appeared in Great Expectations, the contemporary film adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel of the same name. Also in 1998, he collaborated once more with director Richard Linklater in the film The Newton Boys, based on the true story of the Newton Gang, a family of bank robbers from Uvalde, Texas.
His only movie in 1999 was in Snow Falling on Cedars. In the movie, Hawke plays a reporter named Ishmael Chambers, who is wounded in World War II and comes home to take over his family newspaper after his father’s death. It is based on David Guterson’s novel of the same title. The movie received mixed reviews and Entertainment Weekly concluded, “Hawke scrunches himself into such a dark knot that we have no idea who Ishmael is or why he acts as he does.”
Hawke’s next film role was in Michael Almereyda’s 2000 film Hamlet, in which he played the title character, as a film student, set in contemporary New York City and adapted from William Shakespeare’s play of the same name. In discussion of the film, Hawke described it as a way of making the play into film “accessible and vital”. Salon.com wrote: “Hawke certainly isn’t the greatest Hamlet of living memory … but his performance reinforces Hamlet’s place as Shakespeare’s greatest character. And in that sense, he more than holds his own in the long line of actors who’ve played the part.” In 2001, Hawke appeared in two more Linklater movies: the animated Waking Life, in which he shares a single scene with former co-star Julie Deply contemplating the afterlife, and the psychological drama Tape, in which he plays a small-time drug dealer.
Training Day and after
Hawke next took the supporting role of rookie cop Jake Hoyt in Training Day (2001), a film that follows two narcotics detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department over a 24-hour period in the gang neighborhoods of South Los Angeles. It also starred Denzel Washington. The film was successful at the box office, earning $104 million worldwide and garnered generally favorable reviews. Variety wrote: “For his part, Hawke … shows signs of coming to new life as a screen actor after somnolent turns in the likes of Snow Falling on Cedars. Hawke adds feisty and cunning flourishes to his part that allow him to respectably hold his own under formidable circumstances.” Paul Clinton of CNN reported that Hawke’s performance was “totally believable as a doe-eyed rookie going toe-to-toe with a legend [Washington]“. He regarded this as “the best movie I’ve made in a long time”. For his performance, Hawke earned Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor.
Hawke at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival
In 2002, Hawke made his directorial feature debut with Chelsea Walls, an independent drama film about five struggling artists living in the famed Chelsea Hotel in New York City. The Boston Globe criticized the way Hawke directed the film, writing: “…Hawke’s direction, if there is any, it certainly isn’t apparent. The shots are frequently bland and uneven, and the players act as though their only instruction was ‘Just show up at the set and remember your lines.’ ” The film was critically and financially unsuccessful.
Hawke published his second novel Ash Wednesday, released in 2002, a road story about an AWOL soldier and his pregnant girlfriend. Hawke said that the novel was written in two different voices, “alternating between the soldier and his girlfriend”. The Guardian complimented Hawke and noted that Ash Wednesday was “sharply and poignantly written, and makes for an intense one-sitting read”. PopMatters also complimented Hawke, adding: “Hawke writing style is enjoyably easy. His prose moves deftly back and forth from serious to comic, and his dialogue is often dead-on.” On February 2, 2003, Hawke made a guest appearance in the second season of the television series Alias, where he portrayed a C.I.A. agent, who is not to be who he says he is.
In 2004, Hawke returned to film starring alongside Angelina Jolie in the thriller Taking Lives. The film received negative reviews. The critical success of Before Sunrise led Hawke to return to the…
