Sean Penn

Early life

Penn was born in Los Angeles County, California, the son of Leo Penn, an actor and director, and Eileen Ryan (née Annucci), an actress. He has one living brother, musician Michael Penn. Another brother, actor Chris Penn, died in 2006. His paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Russia. Penn’s mother is a Roman Catholic of Italian and Irish descent. According to Penn’s mother, Leo Penn may have had distant Spanish ancestry, as the family’s surname was originally “Piñón”. Penn was raised in a secular home and is an Agnostic.

Career

Penn appeared in a 1974 episode of Little House on the Prairie as a then blonde-haired extra because his father, Leo, directed some of the episodes. Penn launched his career with the 1981 film Taps, followed a year later with the comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (in the role of Jeff Spicoli), and has since starred in over forty movies.

In 1983, Penn turned in one of his best early performance as Mick O’Brien, a troubled youth in the drama Bad Boys. It earned Penn favorable reviews and jump started his career as a serious actor.

In 1985, Penn gave a memorable performance in the role of Andrew Daulton Lee in The Falcon and the Snowman. Lee was a former drug dealer by trade, convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union and was originally sentenced to life in prison. Lee was paroled in 1998. According to an April 8, 2005, interview in The Guardian, Penn later hired Lee as his personal assistant, partly because he wanted to reward Lee for allowing him to play Lee in the film, and also because he was a firm believer in rehabilitation and thought Andrew Lee should be reintegrated into society now that he is a free man again.

In 1986 he starred in the drama At Close Range, opposite Christopher Walken. The film was based on a true story and gained positive reviews from critics. Fans and critics noticed the change in Penn’s body build. Penn appeared very muscular and in shape. It’s considered to be the first film to cash in on Penn’s status as a sex symbol. The film featured his then wife Madonna’s single “Live to Tell”. The music video for the song featured clips from the movie. The video played heavily on MTV and the music video helped promote the film.

In April 1987, during the production of Colors, Sean Penn was arrested for punching a photographer who was taking pictures of him without permission. He served a month in jail for the assault.

In 1991, Penn made his directorial debut with The Indian Runner, a film based on Bruce Springsteen’s song “Highway Patrolman” from the Nebraska album. He also directed music videos, such as: Shania Twain’s “Dance with the One That Brought You” in 1993 and Peter Gabriel’s “The Barry Williams Show” in 2002. He also appeared on an episode of Viva La Bam in 2004 with his son, Hopper. He has since directed three more films: The Crossing Guard in 1995, The Pledge in 2001, and the critically acclaimed Into the Wild in 2007.

Penn will star in Gus Van Sant’s bio-pic Milk, as real life gay rights icon Harvey Milk; the film is scheduled for a late 2008 release.

You think you have to want
more than you need
until you have it all you won’t be free

society, you’re a crazy breed
I hope you’re not lonely without me

When you want more than you have
you think you need
and when you think more than you want
your thoughts begin to bleed

I think I need to find a bigger place
‘cos when you have more than you think
you need more space

society, you’re a crazy breed
I hope you’re not lonely without me
society, crazy and deep
I hope you’re not lonely without me

there’s those thinking more or less less is more
but if less is more how you’re keeping score?
Means for every point you make
your level drops
kinda like its starting from the top
you can’t do that…

society, you’re a crazy breed
I hope you’re not lonely without me
society, crazy and deep
I hope you’re not lonely without me

society, have mercy on me
I hope you’re not angry if I disagree
society, crazy and deep
I hope you’re not lonely without me

Into The Wild

The short life of 24-year-old self-styled adventurer Chris McCandless, chronicled in a best-selling book by Jon Krakauer, became an inspiration for young people seeking to reconnect with nature and face the world on their own terms. The true story is now a feature film adapted from the book and directed by Sean Penn. Alan Silverman has a look at Into The Wild.

Editor Says:
“This is a movie of real beauty. It made me cry. I felt moved in a way that happens very rarely. It was an inspiration. The feelings it evoked were all based on the power of the acting and the writing. The words were real and human. The relationships seemed real and human. This may not seem like a great feat - but I consider it a true rarity. It didn’t feel calculated and artificial, like so many movies (read: Crash - but I’m not here to bash that…). It was very organic, natural and (I can’t say it enough) just beautiful. Cripes, it’s making me sound like a hippie, for heaven’s sake. This for me was Penn’s best work since Indian Runner.“
You will find a lot of information about the film in this article; you can listen movie’s musics, watch trailers and some scenes and you will find true picture and look real informations about the real palyers in the real world.

Listen awesome Into The Wild’s music

Chris McCandless was born into American suburban comfort, growing up in Northern Virginia and graduating with honors from a prestigious university. He is supposed to go on to law school, but abruptly decides to reject what he considers the materialism of his parents’ dreams for him.

Into The Wild

To Chris it is a big deal. He donates the $20,000 in his college fund to world hunger relief and, adopting the nickname ‘Alexander Supertramp,’ sets off on a back roads journey that takes him from the wheat fields of the American midwest to the barrios of northern Mexico and, ultimately, to the continent’s last great wilderness.

With no survival equipment, no camping gear and not even a compass, McCandless treks off the beaten path near Denali National Park. He happens upon the hulk of an abandoned school bus and that makeshift shelter becomes his solitary home for almost four months - the last four months of his life.

Watch awesome Into The Wild’s trailer

(Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)

“He was a very, very smart guy who really made the circumstances for his survival to be very difficult by design. He wanted to be in the most challenging survival environment that he could get,” explains Emile Hirsch, who stars as Chris McCandles.

“The movie does not present him as a flawless hero and I think one of the keys to McCandless is that he is not a perfect person,” he adds. “This is not a glorification of Chris, in my opinion. This is a story about a real, complicated person who had virtues and he also had problems.”

“The point of this thing is the heroism of his will and the courage that this young man had. All the rest of it is somebody else’s folly for me,” director Sean Penn says.

Into The Wild

Penn took a quest of his own: a 10-year journey from when he first read the book that took him to meet the McCandless family in Virginia and then retrace the path Chris took on his travels, meeting the friends the young man made along the way. Penn angrily dismisses critics who say Chris made fatal mistakes that could have - should have - been avoided, such as not taking a map with him on his final trek into the Alaskan wilderness. “This is a guy who wanted to challenge himself in a way that for us to judge would just be ridiculous,” says Penn. “He could have gone out there naked in the woods. You go out there and challenge yourself the way that you want to challenge yourself; but I think that this isn’t about whether there was more equipment to be bought at Patagonia, it is about somebody who had a will that is so uncommon today …a lack of addiction to comfort that is so uncommon and is so necessary to become common or humankind does not survive the next century.”