Born Ronald Walken on March 31, 1943, in Queens, New York City, Walken was the son of a famous baker and a Scottish immigrant. He has two brothers, Ken and Glenn, the latter of whom also went on to become an actor and appeared in Apocalypse Now. His mother, Rosalie, had always wanted to be an actress and encouraged her children to get involved in show-business, finding Walken his first role (posing with kittens for a calendar) when he was just fourteen months old. Throughout his childhood he worked as a television extra, appearing in shows such as The Ernie Kovacs Show, Playhouse 90, and Armstrong Circle Theatre, studying in the meantime at New York's Professional Children's School. At the age of ten, Walken appeared on The Colgate Comedy Hour with Jerry Lewis, an experience that convinced him that comedy and dance were what he wanted his life to be about. Walken worked hard at everything which interested him, including helping out in his father's bakery and spending a summer as a lion tamer.

In his late teens, Walken worked as a backing dancer for Monique Van Vooren, the legendary diva and favorite of Andy Warhol, who decided that he would better suit the name Christopher, and so he changed it. Continuing a solid stage career, Walken appeared in High Spirits in 1964, meeting Noel Coward. Later that year came West Side Story, where he met and married casting director Georgianne Thon. The following year Walken played King Philip of France in The Lion in Winter, winning a Clarence Derwent award. He subsequently worked a string of major dramatic roles in productions such as Measure for Measure and, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo. His first film role came in 1969 in the independent movie Me and My Brother, adapted from the poems of Alan Ginsberg. Yet it was nine years later, shortly after he had narrowly missed getting the role of Han Solo in Star Wars, that he really hit the big time, winning an Oscar for his work in The Deer Hunter with Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep. Doomed epic Heaven's Gate (with Kris Kristofferson and John Hurt) followed, with Walken then opting for a smaller but critically acclaimed role alongside Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven.

Tragedy struck in 1981 when Natalie Wood, the young actress who had shot to fame alongside James Dean and Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause, drowned during a party to celebrate the completion of filming on Brainstorm. Wood was said to have developed a crush on Walken, who had spent the evening arguing with her husband Robert Wagner, but he was asleep when the accident happened and refused to speculate about it.

Walken has since appeared in a great number of successful films, including Bond movie A View to a Kill, with Roger Moore and Grace Jones; Ian McEwan’s adaptation The Comfort of Strangers, with Helen Mirren and Rupert Everett; Batman Returns, with Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, and Michelle Pfeiffer; True Romance, with Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, and Dennis Hopper; and Basquiat, with Benicio Del Toro and David Bowie. Walken worked with Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction and with Tim Burton in Sleepy Hollow. He has also won fame for his several appearances on Saturday Night Live, most notably with the band Blue Öyster Cult, suggesting that their music needed more cowbell. He has appeared in music videos for Madonna, Skid Row, and Fatboy Slim, and has written and starred in a musical about Elvis's afterlife as well as directing a short film, Popcorn Shrimp. Once, leaving a boxing match to find himself surrounded by a gang of young black men, he feared he was going to be attacked, only to be told "You are the coolest white man in America."

YUDDY