Early life

Matt Damon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Kent Telfer Damon, a stockbroker, and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an early childhood education professor at Lesley University. Damon is of English, Scottish, Finnish, and Swedish ancestry, and is a distant cousin of actors Ben Affleck and Casey Affleck. He has a brother, Kyle, who is an accomplished sculptor and artist. He and his family moved to Newton and lived there for two years. After his parents divorced, Damon and his brother moved with their mother back to Cambridge, where they lived in a six-family communal house. Damon grew up near Ben Affleck, a close friend since childhood and collaborator on several films, and historian and author Howard Zinn, whose biographical film You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train and audio version of A People’s History of the United States Damon later narrated.

Damon took to role-playing as a child partly because his mother raised him “by the book,” which made him feel as though “you couldn’t define yourself, because you already had been defined by her.” He attended Cambridge Alternative School (now Graham & Parks) and then Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where he was a disciplined student but had a “terrifying” first two years due to his short height at the time. As a lonely adolescent, Damon has described feeling “such pain in wanting to belong somewhere and not belonging.” Damon performed as an actor in several high school theater productions; he has credited his drama teacher at Rindge and Latin, Gerry Speca, as an important artistic influence, even though Damon recalls that, “Mr. Speca always seemed to trust Ben [Affleck] with the biggest roles and longest speeches.”

Damon attended Harvard University from 1988 to 1992 but did not graduate. While at Harvard, he studied English and lived in Lowell House. He took part in student theater, appearing in plays such as Burn This in Winthrop House and A… My Name is Alice (in one of the three male roles usually performed by women). Damon dropped out of the university to pursue his acting career in Los Angeles because he mistakenly expected Geronimo: An American Legend to become a big success. “By the time I figured out I had made the wrong decision, it was too late. I was living out here with a bunch of actors, and we were all scrambling to make ends meet,” Damon has said.

Acting career

Early years

Damon’s first film role came in 1988 when he was eighteen, with a single line of dialogue in the romantic comedy Mystic Pizza. As a student at Harvard University, he continued to pursue acting and performed small roles in projects such as the TNT original film Rising Son and the ensemble prep-school drama School Ties. In 1992, he landed a big part in Geronimo: An American Legend with Gene Hackman and Jason Patric. Four years later, he auditioned for a small role in Cutthroat Island, but was turned away. Damon next appeared as an opiate-addicted soldier in 1996′s Courage Under Fire. He was required to lose 40 pounds (18 kg) in 100 days (for only two days of filming). After following a self-prescribed diet and fitness regimen to lose the weight, Damon was told after filming that he was fortunate his heart did not shrink. He took medication for several years afterwards to correct the stress inflicted on his adrenal gland. Courage Under Fire gained him some critical notice, as The Washington Post labeled his performance “impressive;” Damon has stated that it was worthwhile to risk his health in order to properly portray his character and show the industry how committed he was to his work as an actor.

Breakthrough

During the early 1990s, Damon and Affleck wrote a screenplay about a young math genius, which they then pitched around Hollywood for a long time. Receiving advice from director Rob Reiner, screenwriter William Goldman, and their friend writer/director Kevin Smith, the two made changes to the script. The script eventually became Good Will Hunting (1997), and received nine Academy Awards nominations, earning Damon and Affleck Oscars for Best Original Screenplay. Damon was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for the same film, which also netted an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for co-star Robin Williams. He and Affleck were each paid salaries of $600,000, while the film grossed over $225 million at the worldwide box office. The two later parodied their roles from the film in Kevin Smith’s 2001 movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Also in 1997, Damon was the lead in the critically acclaimed drama The Rainmaker, where he was recognized by the Los Angeles Times as “a talented young actor on the brink of stardom.” After meeting Damon on the set of Good Will Hunting, director Steven Spielberg cast Damon as the titular character in the 1998 World War II film Saving Private Ryan.

Hollywood Star

Damon has become known for choosing a wide variety of film roles, from his portrayal of Patricia Highsmith’s anti-hero Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) to a fallen angel who discusses pop culture as intellectual subject matter with Affleck in Dogma (1999); from a conjoined twin in Stuck on You (2003), which got a mixed critical reception, to the low budget experimental film Gerry (2002), which he co-wrote with Casey Affleck and Gus Van Sant. Damon garnered generally positive critical reaction for his Golden Globe-nominated portrayal of Ripley, with Variety stating, “Damon outstandingly conveys his character’s slide from innocent enthusiasm into cold calculation.”

Damon’s attempts at essaying leading characters in romantic dramas such as 2000′s All the Pretty Horses and The Legend of Bagger Vance were commercially and critically unsuccessful. Variety said of his work in All the Pretty Horses: “[Damon] just doesn’t quite seem like a young man who’s spent his life amidst the dust and dung of a Texas cattle ranch. Nor does he strike any sparks with [Penelope] Cruz.” He was similarly deemed “uncomfortable being the center” of Robert Redford’s The Legend of Bagger Vance.

From 2001 to 2007, Damon gained wider international recognition as part of two major film franchises. He co-starred as thief Linus Caldwell, alongside George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Julia Roberts, in Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 remake of the Rat Pack’s 1960 caper film Ocean’s 11; the successful crime dramedy spawned two sequels, Ocean’s Twelve (2004) and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007). He played amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne in the hit action thrillers The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Entertainment Weekly placed Damon as an “action star” on its end-of-the-decade, “best-of” list, saying, “When he first signed on as the ass-kicking amnesiac Jason Bourne in 2002, no one would’ve predicted that Damon would become the decade’s best mixer of brawn and brains. Shows what we know.” In August 2007, financial magazine Forbes created a list of actors who generated the best box office performance related to their salaries; the list placed Damon as the most bankable star of the actors reviewed, revealing that Damon had averaged USD29 at the box office for every dollar he earned for his last three films.

Damon played a fictionalized version of Wilhelm Grimm in Terry Gilliam’s fantasy adventure The Brothers Grimm (2005), which was a critically panned commercial failure; The Washington Post concluded, “Damon, constantly flashing his newscaster’s teeth and flaunting a fake, ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ dialect, comes across like someone who got lost on the way to an audition for a high school production of ‘The Pirates of Penzance.’” Later that year, he appeared as an energy analyst in Syriana. In 2006, Damon joined Robert De Niro in The Good Shepherd as a career CIA officer, and played an undercover mobster working for the Massachusetts State Police in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong police thriller Infernal Affairs. Assessing his work in the two films, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that Damon “does what few stars with his kind of billing do: he disappears.” The Departed was a success amongst critics and audiences alike.

Damon had an uncredited cameo in Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (2007) and another cameo in the 2008 Che Guevara biopic Che. He lent his voice to the English version of the animated film Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, which was released in the United States in August 2009. He also made a guest appearance in 2009 on the sixth season finale of Entourage as himself, where he tries to pressure Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) into donating to his charity OneXOne—a real foundation for which Damon is an ambassador—and gets increasingly irritated when Chase does not seem to comply.

Damon next appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s dark comedy, The Informant! (2009), in which his Golden Globe-nominated work was described by Entertainment Weekly as such: “The star – who has quietly and steadily turned into a great Everyman actor – is in nimble control as he reveals his character’s deep crazies.” Also in 2009, Damon portrayed South Africa national rugby union team captain François Pienaar in the Clint Eastwood-directed Nelson Mandela film Invictus, which is based on the 2008 John Carlin book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation and features Morgan Freeman as Mandela. Invictus earned Damon an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The New Republic observed, “It is not a demanding role, but the ever-more-actorly Damon brings it off with low-key charm and integrity.”

In 2010, Damon re-teamed with director Paul Greengrass, who directed him in the Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum, for the action thriller Green Zone, which flopped commercially and received ambivalent reception from critics.

In motion pictures that feature him either as a leading actor or as a supporting co-star, his films have grossed a total of U.S.$1.94 to U.S.$2.42 billion (based on counting his roles as strictly lead or including supporting roles, respectively) at the North American box office, placing him in the top forty grossing actors of all time.

He has appeared as a guest star in an episode of Arthur, titled The Making of Arthur, as himself. During Season 5 of 30 Rock, he appeared as guest star in the role of Liz Lemon’s boyfriend in the episodes “I Do I Do,” “The Fabian Strategy,” “Live Show,” and “Double Edged Sword.”

Damon’s 2010 projects included The Adjustment Bureau, Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, and the Coen Brothers’ remake of the 1969 John Wayne-starring Western True Grit; the latter movie started filming in March 2010 and was released in December of that year.

Upcoming films

He will next work with frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh on a project as the longtime Liberace love interest, Scott Thorsen, opposite Michael Douglas in an upcoming film centered on the pianist’s life. Damon has also performed a supporting role in Kenneth Lonergan’s drama Margaret, which was scheduled for a theatrical debut in 2007 but is yet to be released due to production conflicts. He will also star in We Bought a Zoo, and has been cast to play in Elysium.

Producing Career

Along with Affleck and producers Chris Moore and Sean Bailey, Damon founded the production company LivePlanet, through which the four created the documentary series Project Greenlight to find and fund worthwhile film projects from novice filmmakers.The company produced and founded the short-lived mystery-hybrid series Push, Nevada, among other projects. Project Greenlight was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program in 2002, 2004, and 2005.

In March 2010, Damon and Affleck teamed up again to sign a first-look production deal with Warner Bros.

Humanitarian Work

Damon was the founder of H2O Africa Foundation, the charitable arm of the Running the Sahara expedition, which merged with WaterPartners to create Water.org in July 2009. He, along with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, and Jerry Weintraub, is one of the founders of Not On Our Watch, an organization that focuses global attention and resources to stop and prevent mass atrocities such as in Darfur. Damon supports the ONE Campaign, which is aimed at fighting AIDS and poverty in Third World countries. He has appeared in their print and television advertising. Damon is also an ambassador for OneXOne, a non-profit foundation committed to supporting, preserving and improving the lives of children at home in Canada, the United States, and around the world. Damon is also a spokesperson for Feeding America, the largest USA-focused hunger-relief organization, and a member of their Entertainment Council, participating in their Ad Council PSAs.

Damon is a board member of Tonic Mailstopper (formerly GreenDimes), a company that attempts to halt junk mail delivered to American homes each day. Appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show on April 20, 2007, Damon promoted the organization’s efforts to prevent the trees used for junk mail letters and envelopes from being chopped down. Damon stated: “For an estimated dime a day they can stop 70 percent of the junk mail that comes to your house. It’s very simple, easy to do, great gift to give, I’ve actually signed up my entire family. It was a gift given to me this past holiday season and I was so impressed that I’m now on the board of the company.”

Personal Life

Damon dated his Good Will Hunting co-star Minnie Driver. He later had a two-year relationship with actress Winona Ryder. From 2001 to 2003, he dated Odessa Whitmire, a former personal assistant of Billy Bob Thornton and Ben Affleck. While filming Stuck on You in 2003, Damon met Argentine-born Luciana Bozán Barroso (born 1976) in Miami, where she was working as a bartender. They married in a private civil ceremony on December 9, 2005, at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau near New York City Hall. Damon became stepfather to Barroso’s young daughter, Alexia, from her previous marriage. The couple’s first child together, daughter Isabella, was born on June 11, 2006. On August 20, 2008, Barroso gave birth to the couple’s second child, Gia Zavala Damon, both girls born in Miami, Florida. On October 20, 2010, Barroso gave birth to their third daughter, Stella Zavala Damon, in New York. As of 2011, Damon and his family reside in Manhattan.

Damon is a fan of the Boston Red Sox. After the team won the 2007 World Series, he narrated the commemorative DVD release of the event.

Damon enjoys playing poker and has competed in several World Series of Poker (WSOP) events including the 2010 World Series of Poker main event. He dropped $25,000 at the WSOP while researching his role as a professional poker player in Rounders (1998) and after filming the movie Damon was busted out of the 1998 WSOP by poker professional Doyle Brunson.