A Career that went from 0 to 100
Reprinted without permission
As movie plotlines go, this one sounds like it came straight from the Jimmy Stewart archives: unknown young actor saves major motion picture with a performance so riveting he receives an Academy Award nomination his first time out. Impressed, Woody Allen casts him in his upcoming movie. Young actor (by now not so unknown) arranges a special screening of Woody's movie to raise research money for the neurosurgeons who just removed his mother's brain tumor.
Throw in the fact that the young actor is the grandson of a famous real estate developer, is a Japanese-speaking Yale graduate, and an accomplished photographer, and you can forget about Jimmy Stewart - this is a perfect role for Edward Norton. In fact, it is Edward Norton.
At only 27 (or maybe 28; his exact birthdate is a little hazy), Norton has emerged as one of the leading character actors of his generation. And he's done it by slipping, chameleon-like, into astonishingly different roles. In the space of a year, he's gone from his debut as the psychotic altar boy in Primal Fear to Drew Barrymore's nebbishy love interest in Everyone Says I Love You to an uptight defense lawyer in the controversial The People Vs. Larry Flynt. And next up is another complete change of pace: He'll play a hate-mongering neo-Nazi in the independent film American History X.
What makes this slender young man with the slightly off-kilter features such a hot property? "He reminds me of Dustin Hoffman when Hoffman came on the scene," Primal Fear director Greg Hoblit has said. "It's not so much for glamour, but for sheer ability."
Which is what Norton wants to be known for. His personal life, he has made clear, is not for public consumption. "I don't want people to know that much about me," he told Entertainment Weekly. "Because it will distract them from the parts I play."
Given this approach, his history is a tad sketchy, but here's what's known: Edward Norton (his real name, and no connection with the character Art Carney played on The Honeymooners) was born into a well-to-do family in Columbia, Maryland, in 1969. His father, also named Edward was a federal prosecutor during the Carter administration and later became director of public policy at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. His mother, Robin, taught high school English before administering grants for a foundation. There is a younger brother, James, and a younger sister, Molly. The Norton children's grandfather was the late James Rouse, famed developer of upscale downtown renewal projects including Boston's Faneuil Hall, Baltimore's Harbor Place, and New York City's South Street Seaport.
From the age of five, when a babysitter took him to see his first
play, Cinderella, Norton knew he wanted to act. ("There were a
lot of little kids my age playing Cinderella's mice, and I really
wanted to be a mouse," he later remembered). He performed throughout
childhood and at Yale, where he also studied Japanese and graduated
with a B.A. in history in 1990. After a post-college stop in Japan,
where he worked for one of his grandfather's companies, Norton
returned to New York and the struggling actor circuit. Along with the
usual odd jobs - proofreader, waiter, assistant to casting directors - Norton took acting classes and managed to
perform in a number of plays. He also signed on with the Signature
Theatre (he's now on the board of the Off-Broadway company).
One of his early mentors was playwright Edward Albee (Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). Norton persuaded Albee to come watch him perform, and Albee was impressed. "He is one of the two young actors that I've seen in the last few years who really knocked me out," the playwright told the New York Times. "Every once in a while you see a special kind of talent that makes you say 'Wow' and Edward is one of those."
In 1995, he got his big break when teen- turned- twentysomething- heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio dropped out of the role of the stuttering, childlike psychopath in Primal Fear, Norton and his agent campaigned hard for the part, starting with studio casting director Deborah Aquila.
"We had done a cross-country search and seen 2,100 actors," Aquilla told the Times. "The character was so complex it was just really tough to find a truthful performance. This kid walked in and I couldn't believe it. He was a prodigy. I got on the phone to the director, and said, 'Get on a plane right away.'"
What no one knew at the time was that Norton had fibbed to get the part. In the screen test he affected a Kentucky accent, sounding for all the world like he came from the same part of country as the twangy-voiced altar boy, Norton had studied a tape of the film Coal Miner's Daughter to get the accent down, and told the casting director his grandparents were from eastern Kentucky. "There were a lot of guys up for the part," he later shrugged. "I felt I had to do something drastic to set myself apart."
The ruse worked, and even before Primal Fear finished shooting, copies of the audition tape began to circulate. The first response came from Woody Allen, looking for someone to play the young lawyer engaged to Drew Barrymore in Everyone Says I Love You.
Last October, Norton arranged for a special screening of Everyone Says in Baltimore for a special cause: to honor his mother and raise money to support new tumor treatments developed by the doctors who had operated on her brain. More than $100,000 was collected for the Johns Hopkins Hospital oncology team. Robin Norton, in a wheelchair, attended with the rest of the family and smiled as Edward posed for pictures with Barrymore.
Like everyone who acts with him, Barrymore is a fan. "Edward has a beautiful soul and heart," she later told People. "He is not out there self-destructing. He is Old Hollywood. He's classy. He's genuine."
After Everyone Says, director Milos Forman cast Norton in The People vs. Larry Flynt as the straightlaced lawyer who becomes rambunctious Hustler publisher Flynt's best friend and exasperated confidant.
That film led to rumors about Norton and his co-star, singer Courtney Love, who played Flynt's druggie wife, Althea. The two had supposedly become romantically involved off screen, with the fling continuing after the cameras stopped rolling. Not surprisingly, Norton has no interest in discussing this or any other questions about his romantic life. "Courtney is a friend of mine. Who I am not going out with," he told Interview. "Who I am not romantically involved with but worked with on a film." Case closed, end of discussion.
(Love, for her part, has called Norton "so brilliant, so chivalrous...both as an actor and as a person, he's pure class.")
If he has favorite pastimes outside of work, Norton is keeping them to himself as well. But one piece of evidence has slipped out: a portfolio of his photographs, candid shots taken on the Everyone Says and Larry Flynt sets, that were printed in Premiere last January.
Next up on his schedule is another role switch - that of the
scurrilous neo-Nazi in a small, independent film American History
X. How did he get the part? He auditioned. "There were people who
told me, 'Don't audition for this. They should be excited to have
you.' That's just nonsense. Nobody's seen me play this kind of
role."
Norton, who's barely recognizable in the part with his close-cropped hair, tattoos, and a goatee, has elaborated in the experience. "I don't have any built-in need to express this ugly racial stuff, and I don't claim to have any dark past or horrible experiences that make me need to do that. But it feels good to me psychologically and emotionally to let that kind of anger flow out of me. It's anger coupled with brilliance, and that's always a fascinating place to muck around as an actor."
Norton knows he's been incredibly lucky in a business that's 90 percent rejection. "In my case there was a sudden zero-to-a hundred thing that happened when I got the role in Primal Fear," he told Interview. "That one role changed the landscape of my opportunities radically, overnight."
Not that he thinks he's headed for the rarefied Gibson-Cruise-Willis stratosphere. "I can't see myself being a $15-million-a-picture actor who through his charisma puts asses in seats," he has said. "And I don't think my face is going to open a movie."
Right now, he's just waiting to see what comes next. He's kept up his links to the Signature Theatre and his New York roots, the better to find a good Broadway role.
And he's determined to keep his feet on the ground - literally as well as figuratively. "If I have to stop taking the subway," he once joked, "I'm going to have a heart attack."
If you have new information on Edward Norton (and you can provide a verifiable and reputable source), please email me- Susan
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