Benicio Del Toro
Benicio Del Toro is an Oscar-winning Puerto Rican actor whose commitment to independent film has won him critical acclaim. He is also famous for his string of celebrity romances.
Benicio Monserrat Rafael del Toro Sanchez was born on February 19, 1967, in San Germán, Puerto Rico, growing up in nearby Santurce. His parents, Gustavo Adolfo Del Toro Bermudez and Fausta Sanchez Rivera, were both lawyers. While his brother Gustavo became a doctor, it was expected that Benicio would carry on the family tradition by becoming a lawyer. However, the family's life was disrupted when Fausta died of hepatitis, and they subsequently moved to Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, where Del Toro spent his teenage years. As a small child, he had enjoyed playing games in which he pretended to be Tarzan, and had also delighted in performing for crowds, throwing himself into the sea from the Bridge of Two Brothers to impress tourists.
This interest in the pretend remained with him even while he worked hard at boarding school and enrolled in a business course at the University of California in San Diego. Taking a drama course to fill up his schedule, Del Toro fell so deeply in love with acting that he dropped out to study at the Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York. Del Toro was later tutored by legendary coach Stella Adler at her school in Los Angeles, where he worked alongside Mark Ruffalo and Bud Cort.
Del Toro broke into television in 1988 with a part in Miami Vice, and more minor roles followed. His big break came in 1989 when he was cast opposite Timothy Dalton in Licence to Kill, as the youngest Bond Villain ever. Though the film was not a great commercial success, it established Del Toro as a force to be reckoned with. Thereafter, he received critical acclaim for his roles in films like The Indian Runner , with Viggo Mortensen, Patricia Arquette, and Dennis Hopper; Fearless, with Jeff Bridges and Isabella Rossellini; and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, with Marlon Brando and Tom Selleck. He also appeared in a music video - La Isla Bonita - for Madonna. Commercial success finally arrived in 1995 with Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, in which he starred alongside Kevin Spacey, Stephen Baldwin and Gabriel Byrne. This won him an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actor, a prize which Del Toro won again the following year for his work in Basquiat, directed by his friend Julian Schnabel, himself a protégé of Jean-Michel Basquiat's sometime mentor Andy Warhol, who was portrayed in the film by David Bowie.
Despite his success, Del Toro continued to favor roles in unusual independent pictures. In 1988 he appeared with Johnny Depp in Terry Gilliam's epic adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, playing Thompson's lawyer and friend Oskar Zeta Acosta, otherwise known as Dr. Gonzo. He subsequently won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Actor for his work in Stephen Soderbergh's acclaimed Traffic, alongside Michael Douglas; and he received a further Oscar nomination for 21 Grams, in which he appeared with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.
Off-screen, Del Toro has made headlines with his personal relationships. Between 1998 and 1992 he was engaged to actress Valeria Golino, who starred with Kurt Russell in John Carpenter's Escape from L.A., and with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. He has also been romantically linked to Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve; Alicia Silverstone, who cast him in Excess Baggage, her début film as a producer; Claire Forlani, who appeared with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins in Meet Joe Black; Lost in Translation star Scarlett Johansson; and television actress Sara Foster, the daughter of composer David Foster and former girlfriend of Leonardo DiCaprio.
Del Toro is currently working on Steven Soderbergh's Guerilla, in which he plays Che Guevara. He also keeps busy doing voice work for a big screen adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.
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