Brad Pitt (born December 18, 1963, Shawnee, Oklahoma, U.S.) is an American actor known for his portrayal of unconventional characters. 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).
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.
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 color 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.
