page_title: Sean Penn
section_title: Acting
hierarchical_section_title: Sean Penn / Career / Acting
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: au festival de Cannes.
context_page_description: Sean Justin Penn is an American actor, director, screenwriter, and producer. He has won two Academy Awards, for his roles in the mystery drama Mystic River and the biopic Milk.
  Penn began his acting career in television, with a brief appearance in episode 112 of Little House on the Prairie on December 4, 1974, and directed by his father Leo Penn. Following his film debut in the drama Taps, and a diverse range of film roles in the 1980s, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Penn garnered critical attention for his roles in the crime dramas At Close Range, State of Grace, and Carlito's Way. He became known as a prominent leading actor with the drama Dead Man Walking, for which he earned his first Academy Award nomination and the Best Actor Award at the Berlin Film Festival. Penn received another two Oscar nominations for Woody Allen's comedy-drama Sweet and Lowdown and the drama I Am Sam, before winning his first Academy Award for Best Actor in 2003 for Mystic River and a second one in 2008 for Milk.
context_section_description: Penn appeared in a 1974 episode of the Little House on the Prairie television series as an extra when his father, Leo, directed some of the episodes. Penn launched his film career with the action-drama Taps (1981), where he played a military high school cadet. A year later, he appeared in the hit comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), in the role of surfer-stoner Jeff Spicoli; his character helped popularize the word "dude" in popular culture. Next, Penn appeared as Mick O'Brien, a troubled youth, in the drama Bad Boys (1983). The role earned Penn favorable reviews and jump-started his career as a serious actor.
  Penn played Andrew Daulton Lee in the film The Falcon and the Snowman (1985), which closely followed an actual criminal case. Lee was a former drug dealer by trade, convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union and originally sentenced to life in prison, but was paroled in 1998. Penn later hired Lee as his personal assistant, partly because he wanted to reward Lee for allowing him to play Lee in the film; Penn was also a firm believer in rehabilitation and thought Lee should be successfully reintegrated into society, since he was a free man again.
  Penn starred in the drama At Close Range (1986) which received critical acclaim. He stopped acting for a few years in the early 1990s, having been dissatisfied with the industry, and focused on making his directing debut.
  The Academy Awards first recognized his work in nominating him for playing a racist murderer on death row in the drama film Dead Man Walking (1995). He was nominated again for his comedic performance as an egotistical jazz guitarist in the film Sweet and Lowdown (1999). He received his third nomination after portraying a mentally handicapped father in I am Sam (2001). Penn finally won for his role in the Boston crime-drama Mystic River (2003). In 2004, Penn played Samuel Bicke, a character based on Samuel Byck, who in 1974 attempted and failed to assassinate President Richard Nixon, in The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004). The same year, he was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Next, Penn portrayed governor Willie Stark (based on Huey Long) in an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's classic 1946 American novel All the King's Men (2006). The film was a critical and commercial failure, named by a 2010 Forbes article as the biggest flop in the last five years.
  In November 2008, Penn earned positive reviews for his portrayal of real-life gay-rights icon and politician Harvey Milk in the biopic Milk (2008), and was nominated for best actor for the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards. The film also earned Penn his fifth nomination and second win for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Penn starred as Joseph C. Wilson in Fair Game (2010), a film adaptation of Valerie Plame's 2007 memoir. He co-starred in the drama The Tree of Life (2011), which won the Palme d'Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. In 2015, Penn starred in The Gunman, a French-American action thriller based on the novel The Prone Gunman, by Jean-Patrick Manchette. Jasmine Trinca, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, Mark Rylance, and fellow Oscar-winner Javier Bardem appear in supporting roles. Penn plays Jim Terrier, a sniper on a mercenary assassination team who kills the minister of mines of the Congo.
caption: Penn at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival
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