Woody Harrelson Biography (2)

Woody Harrelson is one of a select group of actors that has triumphantly made the transition from the small screen to motion pictures. The actor 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,' Harrelson won an Emmy in 1988, and was nominated four additional times during his eight-year run on the show.

Harrelson won Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild 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. He starred with a stellar cast in Terence Malick's Oscar nominated war drama The Thin Red Line, Stephen Frears acclaimed feature Hi-Lo Country, and Ron Howard's EdTV.

Harrelson made his big screen debut as a high school football player in Wildcats, which also featured another burgeoning talent, Wesley Snipes, with whom Harrelson would later reunite in Ron Shelton's basketball comedy, White Men Can't Jump, and the action thriller, Money Train. He starred opposite Robert Redford and Demi Moore in Adrian Lyne's drama, Indecent Proposal, and won acclaim as the homicidal Mickey for director Oliver Stone in the powerful drama, Natural Born Killers. He played one-handed bowler ‘Roy Munson' in the Farrelly Brothers' comedy, Kingpin, a newspaperman caught in a web of intrigue in Volker Schlondorff's film noir thriller, Palmetto and a journalist covering war-torn Bosnia in Welcome To Sarajevo. Other film credits include Wag The Dog, Sunchaser, Doc Hollywood, L.A.Story, The Cowboy Way and Ron Shelton's Play It To The Bone with Antonio Banderas.Harrelson recently wrapped filming on director Mark Mylod's, The Big White, with Robin Williams and Holly Hunter, and Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, with Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder. He is currently filming The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio with Julianne Moore for director Jane Anderson.

Harrelson's environmental activism marries his film efforts in Ron Mann's Go Further, a road documentary following Woody and friends on their bicycle journey down the Pacific Coast Highway from Seattle to Santa Barbara.

Beginning in 1999, Harrelson revived his commitment to return 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, John Kolvenbach's On An Average Day opposite Kyle MacLachlan in London's West End in the fall of 2002, and in the summer of 2003 Harrelson directed the Toronto premiere of Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth at the Berkeley Street Theatre.

He remains most inspired by his role as ‘Daddy' in the improvisational group The Harrelsons, the long running sequel to A Life of Lonely Hedonism.

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