Chris Cooper

Chris Cooper (born July 9, 1951, Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.) is an American character actor who, because of his rugged visage and calm yet tough demeanour, is frequently cast in outdoorsman or military roles.

Cooper’s first involvement in theatre came when he was in high school and consisted of doing set construction for a local theatre. After military service with the U.S. Coast Guard Reserves, he attended the University of Missouri, where he studied both agriculture and theatre and graduated in 1976. He then moved to New York City. There he took acting classes from Wynn Handman and Stella Adler. Cooper appeared briefly on Broadway in Of the Fields, Lately (1980), and he appeared in a New York City production of A Different Moon (1983). He played a naive poet in the Seattle Repertory Theatre premiere of The Ballad of Soapy Smith and remained in that role when the play transferred to New York, and in 1985 he performed in a London production of Sweet Bird of Youth that was directed by Harold Pinter. In his film debut he was cast as the protagonist, a stalwart union organizer, in John Sayles’s Matewan (1987). He later played July Johnson in the television miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989) and Return to Lonesome Dove (1993). He appeared in the film Guilty by Suspicion (1991), about the Hollywood blacklists, and performed in Sayles’s City of Hope (also 1991).

In 1995 Cooper starred in the American Civil War movie Pharoah’s Army. In Lone Star (1996) he portrayed a character created for him by Sayles, that of a Texas sheriff investigating a long-ago murder that may have been committed by his father. He appeared in A Time to Kill (1996), based on a novel by John Grisham; in Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998), loosely adapted from Charles Dickens’s novel; and in Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998). In addition, he played the miner father of an aspiring rocket scientist in October Sky (1999) and portrayed the abusive and homophobic Colonel Fitts in American Beauty (1999).

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Britannica Quiz

Oscar-Worthy Movie Trivia

Cooper’s other movies included the comedy Me, Myself & Irene (2000), the Revolutionary War film The Patriot (2000), and The Bourne Identity (2002), in which he played Bourne’s CIA handler. Cooper brought offbeat charm to his role as passionate horticulturist John Laroche in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. (2002), a convoluted self-reflexive tale of the attempt by Charlie Kaufman (and his fictional brother Donald) to write a screen adaptation of Susan Orleans’s nonfiction book The Orchid Thief (1998); Cooper earned both a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award for his performance.

Cooper went on to play a horse trainer in Seabiscuit (2003), an FBI agent in the biopic Capote (2005), and an oil company executive in Syriana (2005). He won critical praise for his performance as double agent Robert Hanssen in Breach (2007) as well as for his roles in the 2007 movies The Kingdom and Married Life. His later films included The Company Men (2010), Sayles’s Amigo (2010), Redford’s The Company You Keep (2012), August: Osage County (2013), and Demolition (2015), and he portrayed J.D. Salinger in Coming Through the Rye (2015).

In 2017 Cooper lent his voice to the Pixar animated film Cars 3. His film credits from 2019 included A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, about Mister Rogers (played by Tom Hanks), and Little Women, an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s children’s classic. Cooper then appeared in the second season (2020) of the anthology series Homecoming. In Irresistible (2020)—a political satire written and directed by Jon Stewart—he played a retired U.S. Marine colonel running for mayor of a small town.