Brad Pitt

Brad Pitt (born December 18, 1963, Shawnee, Oklahoma, U.S.) American actor known for his portrayal of unconventional characters and for his good looks. After gaining attention for his role in Thelma & Louise (1991), Pitt channeled his magnetism as a leading man in such movies as A River Runs Through It (1992) and Legends of the Fall (1994) but avoided being typecast by assuming unorthodox roles in 12 Monkeys (1995) and Fight Club (1999). Pitt won an Academy Award for his performance in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019).

Early life and work

Pitt grew up in Springfield, Missouri, and attended (1983–87) the University of Missouri before dropping out just short of graduation to move to California and pursue an acting career. After playing minor television and movie roles, Pitt captured the public’s attention as a charming scoundrel in the film Thelma & Louise. He followed up with such movies as A River Runs Through It, Interview with the Vampire, and Legends of the Fall (1994). Pitt then starred as a police detective in the gritty thriller Se7en (1995) and as a demented malcontent in the fantasy 12 Monkeys (1995), for which he won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Oscar.

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Films from the late 1990s and beyond

Pitt deliberately played against type as Austrian mountain climber Heinrich Harrer in Seven Years in Tibet (1997), an Irish Republican Army terrorist in The Devil’s Own (1997), a modern-day personification of death in Meet Joe Black (1998), and an underground boxer in Fight Club (1999). In 2000 Pitt married actress Jennifer Aniston. The following year he starred in Ocean’s Eleven, a comedy caper about con artists. The film was a major success and led to the sequels Ocean’s Twelve (2004) and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007). In 2004 Pitt portrayed the Greek warrior Achilles in Troy.

The action comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) paired Pitt with actress Angelina Jolie, with whom he became romantically involved. Pitt continued to lend his talents to films covering a wide range of subject matter, including Babel (2006), a film that traces the intersecting lives of characters from divergent backgrounds, and the period western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). Pitt further demonstrated his versatility in 2008, portraying a dim-witted would-be blackmailer in the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading and a man who ages backward in the poignant fantasy The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. His chameleonic turn in the latter film earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.

In 2009 Pitt starred in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a World War II drama about a group of Jewish American soldiers trained to kill Nazis in German-occupied France. The following year Pitt provided the voice of the superhero rival of the titular villain in the animated film Megamind. In Terrence Malick’s impressionistic drama The Tree of Life (2011), he played a domineering father in 1950s Texas. Pitt later scored another best actor Oscar nomination, for his performance as real-life general manager Billy Beane in the baseball drama Moneyball (2011). The film chronicles how Beane assembled successful teams with the Oakland Athletics by using statistics to acquire cheaper, less-well-known players. Pitt subsequently starred as a mob enforcer in the crime drama Killing Them Softly (2012) and as a former United Nations investigator fighting to contain a zombie pandemic in the thriller World War Z (2013).

Pitt had supporting roles in 12 Years a Slave (2013)—which was based on the true story of Solomon Northup, a free person of colour who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the mid-19th century—and in the crime drama The Counselor (2013). In Fury (2014) he played an American army sergeant commanding the remnants of a decimated battalion during the last days of World War II. The following year Pitt reteamed with Jolie, this time in By the Sea, a marital drama she also wrote and directed. He then portrayed a morally grounded former investment banker in the black comedy The Big Short (2015), about the 2008 financial crisis. In the World War II thriller Allied (2016), Pitt starred as a Canadian intelligence officer whose wife (Marion Cotillard) might be a German spy. In 2017 he portrayed a four-star general in War Machine, a military satire that was released on Netflix.

Pitt later reteamed with Tarantino in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019), playing the stunt double of a washed-up actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) in 1969 Los Angeles. For his performance, Pitt earned both an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award for best supporting actor. Also in 2019 he starred as an astronaut searching the solar system for his missing father (played by Tommy Lee Jones) in the futuristic drama Ad Astra. Pitt’s credits from 2022 include the action-romance The Lost City, in which he had a memorable cameo, and Bullet Train, about a group of assassins on a high-speed train. That year he also costarred with Margot Robbie in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, a dramedy set in Hollywood during the 1920s.

In addition to acting, Pitt headed his own film-production company, Plan B Entertainment. The company partnered with several others to produce 12 Years a Slave, and Pitt won an Academy Award for his producing role when that film was named best picture.

Personal life and humanitarian causes

Pitt’s involvement with Jolie and his 2005 divorce from Aniston were intensely scrutinized by the tabloid press. In 2006 Pitt adopted Jolie’s two children, Maddox and Zahara, whom she had adopted from Cambodia and Ethiopia, respectively. The couple had their first biological child, Shiloh, in May 2006. The next year they adopted a boy, Pax, from Vietnam, and in 2008 they added biological twins, Knox and Vivienne, to their family. Pitt and Jolie married in 2014, but two years later Jolie filed for divorce.

The couple often used their celebrity status as a platform for speaking out on behalf of a number of humanitarian causes. Pitt cofounded and was actively involved in Not on Our Watch, a campaign that directed resources to developing countries in crisis, notably the Sudanese province of Darfur. In 2006 he established the Make It Right Foundation, a multimillion-dollar project to construct environmentally friendly homes in New Orleans for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The undertaking attracted numerous high-profile architects, but it was plagued by construction issues that resulted in several legal disputes. Notably, in 2015 the foundation sued the wood supplier after a number of completed homes began rotting; the suit was settled out of court. Three years later homeowners filed a class-action lawsuit against the foundation, alleging poor construction; in 2022 Make It Right agreed to pay the plaintiffs $20.5 million.

Pitt was also interested in art, and in 2022 he exhibited a number of sculptures at a museum in Finland. His “brutally honest” works included a miniature house assembled from tree bark and tape.