Biography: Woody Harrelson

After Woody Harrelson had his first outing with director Oren Moverman on The Messenger, he received nominations for Best Supporting Actor from the Academy Awards, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild. 

He received the same nominations as Best Actor for his critically acclaimed portrayal of controversial magazine publisher Larry Flynt in Milos Forman‘s drama, The People Vs. Larry Flynt.

Other films include Play it to the Bone, The Thin Red Line, The Hi-Lo Country, Ed TV, Wag the Dog, Welcome to Sarajevo, Kingpin, Natural Born Killers, Indecent Proposal, White Men Can’t Jump, After the Sunset and North Country, Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, Richard Linkletter‘s A Scanner Darkly, Paul Schrader’s The Walker, No Country for Old Men, the box-office smash Zombieland, and he co-starred with Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn in Management. 

He appeared opposite Will Smith in Seven Pounds, and with Mike Epps and Ray Romano in The Grand, an improvisational comedy centered around a poker tournament, directed by Zak Penn. He also starred opposite Will Ferrell in Semi-Pro, a comedy about the waning days of the American Basketball Association. In TransSiberian, Harrelson and Emily Mortimer portrayed an American couple who board the TranSiberian express and are plunged into a web of duplicity and murder. He re-teamed with his North Country co-star Charlize Theron in Sleepwalkers and in The Battle in Seattle, with Theron and André Benjamin.

The actor combined his environmental activism with his film efforts in Ron Mann’s Go Further, a road documentary following Woody and friends on a bicycle journey down the Pacific Coast Highway from Seattle to Santa Barbara.

Harrelson first endeared himself to millions of viewers as a member of the ensemble cast of NBC’s long-running hit comedy, Cheers. For his work as the affable bartender Woody Boyd, the actor won an Emmy in 1988 and was nominated four additional times during his eight-year run on the show.  He appeared as a recurring guest-star on the hit series Will and Grace, and reprised his role of Woody Boyd on a very special episode of Frasier. 

In 1999, the actor revived a career-long commitment to the theatre by directing his own play, Furthest from the Sun at the Theatre de la Juene Lune in Minneapolis. He followed next with the Roundabout’s Broadway revival of the N. Richard Nash play The Rainmaker in 2000, Sam Sheperd‘s The Late Henry Moss in 2001 and John Kolvenbach‘s On An Average Day opposite Kyle MacLachlan in London’s West End in the fall of 2002.  In the summer of 2003 Harrelson directed the Toronto premiere of Kenneth Lonergan‘s This is Our Youth at the Berkeley Street Theatre. In the winter of 2005/2006 Harrelson returned to London’s West End, starring in Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana.

Filmography courtesy of Millennium Entertainment. Rampart is in theaters March 2nd, 2012.