| Matt Dillon - Biography |
| Matt Dillon - Biography |
Born to Roman Catholic parents in the upscale New York suburb of New Rochelle, Dillon was raised in a large, supportive family--he is the second-eldest in a brood of five sons and one daughter. He had his first brush with destiny in the fourth grade, when he played the role of Benjamin Franklin in a school play; a sixth-grade presidential fitness award gave him his first small taste of celebrity.
In Hommocks Junior High, he caught the eye of talent scouts working for Hollywood agent Vic Ramos. Ramos was looking for "realistic types" with no previous acting experience, and Dillon fit the bill on pure swagger.
His discovery led to the fateful meeting with Kaplan, who subsequently cast Dillon in his first feature-film role as the teen hoodlum whose untimely death sparks gang violence in Over the Edge. Dillon stuck with what worked--that is, his proven ability to characterize a hostile juvenile hunk--in his next two films before making a bold departure with 1982's Liar Moon, in which he played a sweet juvenile hunk. The savvy Ramos worked overtime during this period to get his client's picture on the cover of every teen mag in print; his efforts soon yielded both a Matt Dillon fan club and a deluge of admiring mail. With the world in his pocket, the youthful celebrity quit high school midway through his junior year to devote himself entirely to acting.
The next phase of his career would be defined by the young-adult fiction of author Susan (S.E.) Hinton, whose novels provided the subject matter for his next three films. Ms. Hinton and Dillon formed a special bond on the set of Tex, in which Dillon played the title role of a spirited young hoss growing up on a farm with his responsible older brother. When director Francis Ford Coppola approached Hinton with plans to adapt her novel The Outsiders, she secured the central role of small-time hood Dallas Winston for her young actor friend. Dillon cemented his image as the big screen's leading portrayer of surly youth with his third starring role in a Hinton adaptation, Coppola's moody, atmospheric Rumble Fish.
Even during his years as a teen idol, critics had begun to single out Dillon as a talented actor with the potential to stick around in the biz for years to come. He starred in 1984's whimsical coming-of-age comedy The Flamingo Kid. He showed further promise as a small-time gambler on a big-time winning streak in 1987's The Big Town, and added another memorable character to his gallery of sullen hoods in Kansas the following year.
But it was Dillon's seamless, thoroughly believable characterization of a drug-addicted loser on the road to nowhere in Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy (1989) that forever banished any lingering memories of his pinup days. Both the film and Dillon's performance were lauded by critics across the nation: as one writer succinctly stated, "Until Drugstore Cowboy, I never believed Matt Dillon was a real actor."
Dillon's résumé has run the gamut of genres from thrillers (A Kiss Before Dying) to grand-scale biopics (Malcolm X) to romantic comedies (Mr. Wonderful) since his momentous, career-making performance in Drugstore Cowboy. He played a grunge-rockin' slacker in Cameron Crowe's Singles; a schizophrenic homeless man in The Saint of Fort Washington; and a cocky F.B.I. agent in Golden Gate. In 1996 alone he incarnated a woebegone ex-football star who can't stop cheating on his girlfriend in the ensemble flick Beautiful Girls; a sixties surfer dude with a genius for harmonics in the period piece Grace of My Heart; and yet another surly hood with a gang in tow in Kevin Spacey's Albino Alligator.
In between acting jobs, Dillon has branched out into the restaurant business. Close to home in his native New York, he co-owns both a bar called the Whiskey and a swanky uptown eatery called the Falls. While he remains one of Hollywood's hunkier bachelors, Dillon has recently been stepping out with red-hot model-turned-actress Cameron Diaz, whom he first met, appropriately enough, while he was filming Beautiful Girls. Dillon will next be seen in a supporting role in the long-anticipated comedy In and Out, which arrives in theaters this September; he's wrapped a small role in The Pitch, a dark comedy along the lines of Robert Altman's The Player; and he's currently filming the thriller Wild Things, which is set for a spring of 1998 release.