Jon Voight
Jon Voight is an actor, born 1938.
Jon Voight was born in Yonkers, New York in 1938 and arrived with one of the great American film debuts. Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy in 1969 is a Texan innocent who goes to New York convinced he will be paid for his looks, and Voight plays the naivety without a shred of condescension, which is why the film is bearable at all. Deliverance followed in 1972, and Coming Home in 1978 brought him the Academy Award for Best Actor along with a Golden Globe.
He was, at that point, the leading man of the new American cinema who specialised in decency under pressure. What is striking is how completely he later inverted it. From the mid-nineties he became one of the most reliable purveyors of avuncular menace on screen: Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible, Nate the fixer in Heat, the snake hunter in Anaconda, the intelligence chief in Enemy of the State. The same open, friendly face that made Joe Buck heartbreaking turned out to be extremely effective at hiding something.
Since then he has worked constantly and indiscriminately, and his filmography is a genuine mix: Howard Cosell in Ali, Roosevelt in Pearl Harbor, Lord Croft in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Patrick Gates across the National Treasure films, and a self-parodying cameo in Tropic Thunder. Television gave him the late peak. Ray Donovan ran for seven seasons and brought him a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, playing a monstrous, charming Boston patriarch who is the best late-career role he has had. He has four Golden Globes, a British Academy Film Award, four Primetime Emmy nominations, and received the National Medal of Arts in 2019.
Movies (70)
- Heat (1995)
- Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
- Anaconda (1997)
- Mission: Impossible (1996)
- Pearl Harbor (2001)
- Tropic Thunder (2008)
- National Treasure (2004)
- Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
- Megalopolis (2024)
- National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007)
- Transformers (2007)
- Zoolander (2001)
- Enemy of the State (1998)
- Varsity Blues (1999)
- Midnight Cowboy (1969)
- Holes (2003)
- The Rainmaker (1997)
- Ali (2001)
- Catch-22 (1970)
- Deliverance (1972)
- U Turn (1997)
- High Ground (2025)
- The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
- Uprising (2001)
- The Painter (2024)
- Four Christmases (2008)
- Man with No Past (2025)
- Glory Road (2006)
- Runaway Train (1985)
- Reagan (2024)
TV (5)
Where to start with Jon Voight
Watch Midnight Cowboy first. It is his debut lead and still the performance everything else is measured against, a man whose confidence is entirely borrowed and who has no idea yet that the city can tell.
Then Deliverance, where he plays the reasonable one in a group of men well past reason, and Coming Home for the Oscar-winning work, which is quieter and less sentimental than its subject matter suggests.
For the second career, Heat is the best of the supporting turns, a fixer who talks about crime the way an accountant talks about tax. Runaway Train is the great forgotten one, a brutal chase picture with real philosophical ambition. Anaconda is enjoyable trash and he knows it. Finish with Ray Donovan, the television role that gave him the most to play in thirty years.
The seventies
The decade the reputation rests on. Midnight Cowboy and Deliverance are both films about men discovering how little they understand, and Coming Home won him the Academy Award.
The villain years
From the mid nineties he became the go-to authority figure in large studio films, and the casting works precisely because thirty years of prestige work makes an audience inclined to trust him. Anaconda is the one where he abandons restraint entirely and it has to be seen.
The prestige supporting parts
Where the later work is strongest. His two scenes in Heat are among the best things in that film, and Runaway Train earned a nomination almost nobody remembers.
The franchise films
Two National Treasures, a Tomb Raider opposite his own daughter, and a Fantastic Beasts. This is the commercial half of the career and he is visibly enjoying most of it.