Billy Bob Thornton Profile
Date of birth:August 4. 1955
Place of birth:Hot Springs, Arkansas, USA
Astrology Sign:Leo
Height:6' (1.83 m)
Fathers name:Billy Ray Thornton (d. 1974)
Mothers name:Virginia Roberta
With entertainment dominated by fresh-faced puppets, it's extremely heartening to see someone break into the corridors of power when in their forties. Better still when that person's an accomplished writer, director, character actor and musician. Step forward Billy Bob Thornton, a backwoods renaissance man who's squeezed several (mostly unsuccessful) lives into one and come out on top of the Hollywood tree.
It could so easily have been very different. Whereas many of today's stars are the children of the Los Angeles glitterati, Billy Bob began life about as far from Tinseltown as an American can get. He was born on the 4th of August, 1955, at Hot Springs, Arkansas, and spent his first few years living, with up to 15 of his extended family, in his grandfather's shack in the woods around the hamlet of Alpine (population 100). Grandad was a forest ranger, and the family would eat what he shot - deer, possum an' sechlike. There was no running water or electricity, they would read by the light of coal-oil lamps. Billy Bob was a chubby baby. In fact, he later recalled "I was the fattest baby in Clark County. They put me in the paper. I was like a prize turnip". His father was Billy Ray - hot-tempered and of Irish descent - a High School history teacher and basketball coach who'd die from lung cancer when the boy was 18. His mother, Virginia Faulkner Thornton, half-Italian, half-Choctaw Indian, was a psychic and she would be the prime influence on her son. She'd also predict that he'd later work with Burt Reynolds and win an Oscar - he'd base the Cate Blanchett character in The Gift upon her.
After a few years, the family moved to Malvern (population a headspinning 9256), and here Billy Bob had greater access to his first love - music. With his younger brother, Jimmy Don (there'd be another brother, John David, born in 1969 and now a doctor), he'd devour the works of Elvis, Jim Reeves and homeboy Johnny Cash, then flipped over British invaders like The Beatles, The Kinks and The Dave Clark Five. But, though he'd later fall for witty experimentalists Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, his big thing was Americana, both Roots and Rock.
Billy Bob Thornton
Billy Bob Thornton
Billy Bob Thornton
Billy Bob Thornton
Billy Bob Thornton
Billy Bob Thornton
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