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Dafoe’s dad was a doctor and his mom<br />
a nurse, and because they were seldom at<br />
home, he was raised mostly by his five sisters.<br />
“My parents started out as Eisenhower<br />
Republicans,” he says, “but by the time I<br />
came around they had loosened up.” Luckily,<br />
he thrived on the chaos. Once, when he was<br />
8 years old, he shut himself into a closet<br />
for two days. He wasn’t hiding or depressed.<br />
He just wanted to feel what it was like to<br />
be confined in a small space for a long period<br />
of time, like the astronauts in the Gemini<br />
rockets on the news. “Nobody in my family<br />
noticed,” he remembers.<br />
“He was always a performer,” says his<br />
brother Don, 67, a transplant surgeon in<br />
“ He got ahold of<br />
a gorilla suit and climbed<br />
the side of a building.”<br />
Laguna Beach who drove up to Santa Barbara<br />
for the film festival. “He was always doing<br />
crazy stuff to create a stir. I remember once<br />
when he was 10 or 12 years old, he got ahold<br />
of a gorilla costume and climbed the side of<br />
a building in downtown Appleton, like King<br />
Kong.” Adds brother Richard, 65, a commercial<br />
litigation attorney in Dallas who also attended<br />
the Santa Barbara ceremony, “He was always<br />
doing creative things. If he got a term paper<br />
assignment, he’d find a way to act it out in class<br />
instead of writing it.”<br />
Occasionally, Dafoe’s creative spirit landed<br />
him in hot water, like the time he borrowed<br />
his high school’s video camera to shoot<br />
a documentary and got expelled for making<br />
what the principal called “pornography”<br />
(“<strong>The</strong>re was a bare bottom in it,”<br />
Dafoe says). But he didn’t want to stick<br />
around Appleton, anyway, so he bolted<br />
for Milwaukee, where he camped out<br />
on a friend’s sofa, started sitting in on<br />
drama classes at the university and<br />
eventually fell in with a small theater<br />
troupe where he first began learning<br />
4<br />
1 From left: Dafoe with<br />
Sheen and Tom Berenger.<br />
2 As Max Schreck in<br />
Shadow of the Vampire.<br />
3 <strong>The</strong> Green Goblin in<br />
Spider-Man.<br />
4 On the set of <strong>The</strong><br />
Last Temptation of Christ<br />
with Scorsese.<br />
2<br />
to act. “But I never thought acting could be a<br />
profession,” he says. “I didn’t know anybody<br />
that made their living in the entertainment<br />
industry. It was just something I liked<br />
to do, something I had fun with, a social<br />
thing. I thought maybe I’d end up joining the<br />
Merchant Marines or the Army.”<br />
He started taking acting more seriously<br />
when he came to New York in the mid-1970s.<br />
That’s around the time he gave his name<br />
a Dutch makeover, dropping the “ia” and<br />
adding an “e” (although “William” is still on<br />
his driver’s license and passport). “It’s not<br />
like I was looking around for a stage name,”<br />
he says, “But I knew that I didn’t want to be a<br />
William or a Bill or a Billy.” It turned out to<br />
be a smart move; the new cool moniker helped<br />
him fit in with the downtown crowd he was<br />
hanging with. Before long, he was the youngest<br />
actor in the Wooster Group, a theater company<br />
in an old metal stamp factory in SoHo<br />
that mounted wacky experimental productions,<br />
like a version of Our Town with all the<br />
actors in blackface while sex videos played<br />
on monitors on the stage. <strong>The</strong> critics weren’t<br />
always kind, and money was always a problem<br />
(Dafoe made extra bucks by doing figure<br />
modeling for art classes), but it was here that<br />
he met his mentor and muse — and, for a long<br />
time, his partner. <strong>The</strong>ater director Elizabeth<br />
LeCompte was 33 and Dafoe was 22 when they<br />
began a relationship that lasted for nearly<br />
three decades (their child, Jack Dafoe, is now<br />
a 34-year-old public policy researcher) until<br />
they parted in 2004, after Dafoe met Italian<br />
director Giada Colagrande, 42, while shooting<br />
<strong>The</strong> Life Aquatic in Rome. “I wasn’t looking for<br />
anything, but I fell in love,” he says matter-offactly.<br />
“And so my life changed.”<br />
After the breakup, Dafoe was “excommunicated”<br />
from the Wooster Group, where<br />
LeCompte remains as director. But for<br />
many years, that small theater was Dafoe’s<br />
center of gravity, even as <strong>Hollywood</strong> beckoned.<br />
Technically, the first film he shot, in<br />
1980, was <strong>The</strong> Loveless, a low-budget biker<br />
drama co-directed by Monty Montgomery<br />
and a young first-time auteur named Kathryn<br />
Bigelow. But that film’s release was delayed<br />
for two years, so Dafoe’s first appearance in<br />
movie theaters ended up being a small part<br />
in Michael Cimino’s much more high-profile<br />
Heaven’s Gate. Dafoe spent three months<br />
on the set of that infamous train wreck as a<br />
“glorified extra” before getting fired. “We<br />
were standing on the set in full costume and<br />
makeup and they were adjusting the lights,<br />
and the woman next to me whispered a joke,”<br />
he says. “I laughed too loud. Cimino whirled<br />
around, looked at me and said, ‘Willem,<br />
step out!’ and he sent me back to my hotel<br />
room. An hour later, I was presented with a<br />
plane ticket and told to go home.” He can’t<br />
recall what the joke was but remembers “it<br />
was something dirty.”<br />
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER<br />
57<br />
FEBRUARY 7, <strong>2018</strong>