American actor Kevin Spacey built a formidable career giving life to enigmatic, dangerous and charismatic anti-heroes, but ended up being marginalized by Hollywood due to various accusations of sexual assault against different men from which he has always been acquitted.
Does your new judicial victory herald your return to the big screen? After a month on trial in London, the actor was found not guilty on Wednesday, his 64th birthday, of sexually assaulting four men in the UK.
Two-time Oscar winner, with a penetrating and hypnotic charm, Spacey honed his craft on the stage before embodying characters on the big screen. as a middle-aged father lusting after a teenage girl in “American Beauty,” a serial killer in “Seven” and the villain in “Superman Returns.”
But in 2017 his career stopped short, after being one of the first stars involved in the global #MeToo phenomenon, accused of sexual assault by several young people, something he has always denied.
Kevin Spacey Fowler was born in New Jersey in 1959.. He grew up in California, where he briefly attended a military school from which he was expelled.
The actor spoke in court about a difficult childhood, with a father he has described as a “white supremacist” and a “neo-Nazi”, who despised gays and did not appreciate his son’s interest in theatre.
Despite this, in 1979 he enrolled in Juilliard, the prestigious art school in New York.
His greatest success in those early years of theater came in 1986, in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”, in which he shared scenes with Jack Lemmon.
His first movie role was in “Run Out Of Cake” that same year, starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.
He also took his first steps in television and gained acclaim as a paranoid, psychotic and incestuous young crime boss in the series “Wiseguy.”
In 1995 he played the serial killer of “Seven”. He also won his first Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in “The Usual Suspects.”
Spacey’s crowning glory came in 1999 with “American Beauty.” He won his second Oscar, this time for Best Actor, thanks to that film that won five Academy Awards, including best picture.
– From the tables to Netflix –
In subsequent years, Spacey garnered mixed reviews as he leaned towards lighter roles.
In 2003, he announced that he was assuming the artistic direction of the Old Vic theater in London.
His ten-year tenure in the historic theater it was widely acclaimed.
He starred in and drew actors and directors to diverse and daring productions, reveling in Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and staging American classics by Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.
During that time, he also garnered plaudits on the big screen as the ill-fated Lex Luthor in “Superman Returns: The Return”.
In 2013, he contributed to the streaming revolution in Hollywood. by taking the lead in Netflix’s first big series “House of Cards,” where he gave life to an unscrupulous congressman who arrives at the White House.
The series became a cultural phenomenon. It was the first exclusively online series to be nominated for and awarded an Emmy.
-#MeToo-
But Spacey’s empire began to fall in October 2017.
Just three weeks after the allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein came to light, Spacey was shocked by the #MeToo scandal.
Actor Anthony Rapp was the first to accuse him, claiming that Spacey sexually assaulted him at the age of 14 at a party in New York in 1986.
Spacey quickly apologized, but he was criticized for trying to divert attention from the news by confirming his homosexuality, an open secret in Hollywood for years.
In less than a month, he had been accused of assault by multiple men in the US and UK, banned by Netflix and removed at the last minute from the movie “All the Money in the World”.
In 2019, assault charges against the actor in Massachusetts were dropped. Last October, a New York court threw out Rapp’s $40 million lawsuit for sexual misconduct.