MARTIN SHEEN
Date of Birth: August 3, 1940
Birth name: Ramon Estevez
If you were writing a test and got seven out of 10 you might think that was pretty good. But if you were the seventh out 10 children like Martin Sheen was you might not have the same feeling about those numbers.
Born in Dayton, Ohio to a Spanish immigrant father and Irish mother, Sheen headed to New York straight out of high school and began his career off-off Broadway while supporting himself as janitor, car washer, soda jerk and messenger boy. He first garnered critical notice at 24 when he played the lead on Broadway in The Subject Was Roses, a role he later reprised for the screen version.
His most memorable early screen role was playing teenage serial killer Charlie Starkweather in the Terence Malick film Badlands. But the role he's probably most closely identified with is his performance as the army captain in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now who's sent upriver to Cambodia to assassinate a renegade Green Beret (Marlon Brando). Sheen suffered a heart attack during the demanding Philippines shoot and the opening scene of the movie features his own blood as he's cut after punching out the mirror in his hotel room after drinking to excess.
Sheen's first Golden Globe nomination was for his supporting role in The Subject was Roses (1968). He received his first Emmy nomination in 1974 for his outstanding lead performance in the TV movie The Execution of Private Slovik. The same year he won Best Actor at the San Sebastian International Film Festival for Badlands (1974). In 1978 he won a Saturn Award for Best Actor in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, co-starring Jodie Foster. Although he's had seven Emmy award nominations throughout his long career, he's won only once, in 1994 for a guest appearance on the sitcom Murphy Brown. In 1999, he took on the role of the President of the United States in the weekly TV drama The West Wing, and won his first Golden Globe.
He and his wife, Janet, to whom he's been married since 1961, have four children, all of whom have become actors: Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, Renée Estevez and Ramon Estevez. Sheen has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in motion pictures.