MY LIFE IN 10 PICTURES
10 Pictures
From Gettysburg to Godless, revisit Jeff Daniels’ storied Hollywood career.
“I never said, ‘I’m going to be a big star.’ I said, ‘I’m going to be a good actor.’ And that took the pressure off.”
— Jeff
BORN IN Georgia and raised in Michigan by a “not particularly bohemian family,” Jeffrey Warren Daniels isn’t that different from the everymen he’s played. “The town I lived
in was so small, most kids participated in everything — on all the teams, in town plays.” And as his career took off with films such as Arachnophobia and Speed, he returned to Chelsea, Mich., with his wife, Kathleen, to raise their kids, Ben, Lucas and Nellie. “If living there costs me a career, I don’t care,” says Jeff, who turns 63 on Feb. 19. “Michigan keeps you sane through the ups and downs.” Despite nutty detours like Dumb and Dumber, Jeff’s long career
has proved that slow and steady wins the race.
1
1983 BAD TERMS Playing the unfaithful Flap in his first hit, Terms of Endearment, didn’t endear him to the public. “A driver told me, ‘I wanted to beat the hell out of you.’ I went to see [it] and a girl begins repeating, ‘What a jerk.’ [I said] ‘Hope you enjoyed the movie’ ” and ran out.
2
1985 ROSE IN BLOOM After Woody Allen fired Michael Keaton 10 days into shooting, he cast Jeff opposite Mia Farrow as a film idol who jumps off the screen in The Purple Rose of Cairo. “Halfway through, [he] told me I was good. Instantly I knew I was going to make a living in this business.”
3
1986 WILD AT HEART The screwball comedy-turned-violent thriller Something Wild (with Melanie Griffith) brought out a hidden talent in Jeff. “I moonwalk,” he’s said. “I learned it for the high school reunion scene. Unfortunately, there were about 300 extras watching me learn [who] were not impressed at all.”
4
1993 CIVIL SERVANT Jeff loved playing Civil War vet Col. Joshua Chamberlain in Gettysburg because “he was a great unsung American hero.” Through research and shooting in historic locations, he “became a Civil War buff. That movie has been used in classrooms and opened up young people’s eyes to the country’s history.”
5
1994 DUMB LUCK “You’ve got to be fearless with your career,” so Jeff played Jim Carrey’s pal in Dumb and Dumber. It won over Clint Eastwood, who cast him in Blood Work and told him: “The toilet scene. That happened to me.”
6
1998 IN LIVING COLOR “I’ve been telling everybody that this is the best movie I’ve ever been in,” he said of playing a 1950s black-and-white TV character whose colorful paintings bring him into the real world in Pleasantville. “When I read the script, it validated my life. The discovery of what it means to be an artist. It’s got to matter.”
7
2005 FATHER KNOWS BEST? Jeff doesn’t mind dad roles. “The trick is in finding new things to do with them,” he says. “The father I played in [the divorce drama The Squid and the Whale] just scared me. I had no idea how to play him. That’s why I did it.”
8
2012 ANCHORED DOWN “There was a lot of memorizing,” he says of his Emmy-winning turn as verbose anchor Will McAvoy on HBO’s Aaron Sorkin drama The Newsroom. “My weekends, forget it! I brought golf clubs the first season. They never left the apartment.”
9
2013 LASTING LOVE “It was family first, career second — a close second but second,” reflects Jeff, who married high school sweetheart Kathleen in 1979 and raised three children. “Our kids are in their 20s now, which is a wonderful time. There’s a freedom that comes with [an empty nest], and [we] are really enjoying it.”
10
2017 SADDLE SORE What was the big takeaway from playing an outlaw in the Netflix miniseries Godless? “You got to be able to stay on the horse,” says Jeff, who fell off three times. “The last time I broke my wrist on the second-tolast day of shooting. That hurt.”