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James Howard Woods (born April 18, 1947) is
an American actor.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, he grew up in Warwick,
Rhode Island where he attended Pilgrim High
School. His mother was of Irish Catholic descent and Woods was raised a Catholic. He conducted his
undergraduate studies at MIT where he majored in
political
science (though he originally planned on a career as a surgeon), but dropped
out in 1969, just before his graduation, in
order to pursue a career in acting. Woods headed to New York City when he called his mother and told
her the truth. While his mother wasn't thrilled at the prospect of her son
pursuing a career as an actor, she blessed him to follow his dream. Before this
transition to acting, however, he was considered a brilliant student and was
permitted to enroll in a linear algebra course at UCLA while still in high school, having scored a perfect
800 on the verbal portion of the SAT and a 780
on the quantitative aspect. He is claimed to possess an I.Q. of 180.
His career has been noted for the intense characters he has chosen. He was
nominated for an Academy
Award twice: the first in 1987 for Best Actor in Salvador and
again in 1996 for Best Supporting Actor
for Ghosts of Mississippi. He has also
garnered critical praise for his voice work for Hades in Disney's Hercules. His personal favorite of all
of his roles, however, is as the domineering gangster Max in Sergio Leone's gangster epic
Once Upon A Time In America
(1984).
Woods appeared as himself in the episode of The Simpsons entitled "Homer and Apu", and in an
episode of Family Guy
entitled "Peter's
Got Woods". On a flight to Los
Angeles several weeks before the attacks on September 11th, 2001, Woods grew
suspicious of four of his fellow-passengers: well-dressed men who appeared to be
of Middle Eastern
descent. Throughout the flight, the men stared straight ahead, did not speak
with one another except in low, hushed tones, and did not eat or sleep. Woods
became so convinced that the men were "casing" the plane that he kept his
cutlery after lunch and shared his suspicions with a flight attendant. "I said,
'I think this plane is going to be hijacked.' I told her, 'I know how serious it
is to say this,' and asked to speak to the captain." The first officer promptly
assured Woods that the cockpit door would be kept locked and the plane landed
safely.
On the evening of September 11th, Woods told the FBI in Los Angeles about the encounter. At six-forty-five
the next morning he was roused by a telephone call from an FBI agent. "I said,
'I'll get ready and I'll come down to the federal building,'" Woods recalled.
"He said, 'That's O.K. We're outside your house.'" When he was shown
photographs, Woods thought he recognized two of the hijackers - Hamza Alghamdi, who was
on United Airlines Flight 175 (which
struck the south tower of the World Trade Center) and Khalid Almihdhar, who
was on American Airlines Flight 77 (which
struck The Pentagon).
According to writer Annie Jacobsen, FBI agents told her in a private conversation
that Mohammed Atta, who was the unofficial
leader of the 9/11 hijackers, was in fact on the flight with Woods. |
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