James Woods is an actor from the United States. He is well-known for his roles in many movies, plays, and TV shows. He got his start in acting with small parts on and off Broadway. Together with Sam Waterston and Michael Moriarty, he was in The Trial of the Catonsville Nine on Broadway in 1972.
In 1978, he got his big break on TV by playing Meryl Streep’s husband in the four-part miniseries Holocaust, which was praised by critics and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Limited Series. After making his film debut in Elia Kazan’s The Visitors, he had supporting roles in movies like The Way We Were by Sydney Pollack and Night Moves by Arthur Penn (1975).
Before Fame
James Howard Woods was born in Vernal, Utah, on April 18, 1947. He had a brother who was born ten years earlier.
Gail Peyton Woods, his father, was a military intelligence officer who died in 1960 after a routine operation. After her husband died, his mother, Martha A. Smith, ran a preschool and then married Thomas E. Dixon. Woods grew up in the town of Warwick, Rhode Island.
He went to Pilgrim High School and graduated in 1965. He is part Irish and was raised as a Catholic. For a short time, he was an altar boy.
Woods went to college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate.
He said on Inside the Actors Studio that he had wanted to be an eye doctor when he was younger. He joined the Theta Delta Chi fraternity and took part in and directed a number of plays with the student theatre group Dramashop. He left MIT in 1969, one semester before he was going to graduate, to become an actor.
Woods has said that he owes his acting career to Tim Affleck, who was a stage manager at the Theatre Company of Boston when Woods was a student there. Tim Affleck is the father of actors Ben and Casey Affleck.
What is James Woods’ Net Worth?
As of December 2022, James Woods Has an Estimated Net Worth of $8 Million (Source: Celebrity Net Worth). James Woods is one of the most well-known actors in Hollywood. He has been to a lot of different movies and TV shows.
James has won a lot of awards over the course of his career, and he has been nominated for a lot more. He got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1998.
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Where Does James Woods Live?
James Woods has a large number of properties. In 2014, Woods paid $2.2 million for a home in Hollywood Hills. In 2018, the house was back on the market with a price tag of $2.55 million. James spent $2.25 million to buy a house with a pool in Beverly Hills in 2015.
In 2017, he paid $2.1 million for a nearby house in the Beverly Hills area. The house has a living space of 1,705 square feet. He first put the property on the market for $2.66 million, but in 2018 he dropped the price to just $2.25 million. James Woods also owns a piece of land in Exeter, Rhode Island. As of 2018, the lakefront property could be bought for $1.1 million or rented out for $4,000 per month.
James Woods’s Journey in The Entertainment Industry!
James Woods first started acting in a number of off-Broadway plays. He didn’t get a chance to act on Broadway until he had been in almost 40 stage productions. That chance came in 1970 when “Borstal Boy” was put on stage. “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” “Moonchildren,” and “Finishing Touches” were some of the next shows to be put on Broadway.
During this time, Woods was also getting his start as an actor on TV and in movies with a few small roles. In 1972, he was in a movie called “The Visitors.” In 1973, he was in “The Way We Were.” Woods really got noticed when he and Meryl Streep starred in the miniseries “Holocaust,” which was praised by critics.
In 1979, he was cast as the main character in the movie “The Onion Field.” Woods’s performance was praised by critics, and he was nominated for several awards.
In 1984, James Woods joined Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci in the movie “Once Upon a Time in America,” which was another big moment for him. The Sergio Leone movie got a 15-minute standing ovation when it was shown for the first time at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. James’s next song, “Salvador,” came out in 1986.
Woods won a Primetime Emmy Award the following year for his part in the TV movie “Promise.” He won the award again for his leading role in “My Name is Bill W.” two years later. In 1989, Woods was the host of “Saturday Night Live” to end a successful decade.
In the 1990s, James Woods had one of his most well-known roles in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino,” where he once again worked with Robert De Niro. In 1995, the movie “Nixon” had another important role from this decade. In 1997, he got his start as a voice actor by giving Hades a voice in the Disney animated movie “Hercules.”
He played the same part in the TV show that came out of it, and he kept doing voice work for games like “Kingdom Hearts.” The last movie James Woods was in was “The Virgin Suicides,” which came out at the end of the 1990s.
Throughout the 2000s, Woods kept working as a voice actor in a number of animated movies, video games, and TV shows. Woods got a recurring role on the TV show “Shark” in the middle of the 2000s. To start off the new decade, he was in the movie “Too Big to Fail.” He got a part in the TV show “Coma” in 2012.
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Let’s Take a Closer Look into James Woods’s Personal Life!
Woods told the press during an interview for Kingdom Hearts II that he played video games all the time. In Rhode Island, he sells old things.
On December 14, 2015, a driver going west on Interstate 70 in Glenwood Canyon, Colorado, lost control of his car during an ice storm and crashed into five other cars. Woods tried to avoid the accident by swerving his Jeep Grand Cherokee. He hit a wall and then slid back into a guard rail 100 feet (30 meters) above the Colorado River. He got a small bump on the head.
In 1980, Woods got married to Kathryn Morrison-Pahoa, a costume designer. In 1983, they split up. In 1989, he married Sarah Owen, a 26-year-old horse rider and shop owner. Four months later, they got a divorce. In 1992, Woods went out with Heather Graham, who was in the movie Diggstown with him.
Woods was raised as a Roman Catholic, and he still follows the religion today.
Woods Likes To Play Poker
Woods plays poker a lot. He likes to play in cash games and tournaments. In 2004, he took part in the WPT’s Hollywood Home Game for the American Stroke Association. As of 2018, he had won more than 80 tournaments. In 2015, he came in seventh place at the World Series of Poker’s $3000 No Limit Shootout event, and in 2018, he came in fifth place at the WSOP’s $1,500 Dealers Choice event.
Legal Issues
Woods sued actress Sean Young for $2 million in 1988. He said she was stalking him after they were in the movie The Boost together. Young later said that Woods was too angry when she turned down his advances on the set. In August 1989, the case was settled out of court. As part of the deal, Young got $227,000 to cover her legal fees.
Michael Jeffrey Woods, Woods’ younger brother, died of a heart attack at the age of 49 in 2006. Woods sued Kent Hospital in Warwick, Rhode Island, claiming that the hospital was careless. In 2009, the case was settled.
In July 2015, Woods sued an anonymous Twitter user named Abe List and ten other Twitter users for $10 million over a tweet that said he was a “Cocaine Addict.” The tweet was said to be defamatory and was sent by Abe List. Woods tried but failed to find out the Twitter user’s name.
In October 2015, the Los Angeles Superior Court denied his motion for discovery, saying that he couldn’t “use the legal process to break through the anonymity of internet speakers unless he can make a prima facie case.”
But in a later ruling that was a surprise, the user’s Anti-SLAPP motion was turned down, and Woods was allowed to continue his lawsuit against List. The other ten defendants were taken out of the lawsuit.
In October 2016, the defendant’s appeal was turned down, and the Twitter user’s lawyer, Lisa Bloom, said that the user had died suddenly. Soon after, the case was settled out of court. In a letter to Woods, Bloom’s client said that he regretted sending the tweet and was sorry for any damage it did to Woods’ reputation.
In 2017, just before the Abe List case was settled, Portia Boulger sued Woods for calling her a Nazi in a tweet, which she said was false and hurtful. The tweet had a picture of a different woman giving a Nazi salute at a campaign event while wearing a Donald Trump T-shirt. Damages of $3 million were asked for by Boulger.
Under the innocent construction rule, the court sided with Woods. Boulger tried to get the decision overturned, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the decision.
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Controversies on Twitter
Woods has become well-known because he often talks about politics on his Twitter feed, which has led to him being locked out of his account more than once. In 2017, a Twitter argument between Woods and Amber Tamblyn got worse after Tamblyn said that Woods had preyed on her when she was young. Woods said that Tamblyn was lying.
In 2018, Woods turned his Twitter feed into a notice board for people who were missing after leaving their homes because of wildfires in California. He was credited with saving lives and helping to find loved ones and pets who had been separated from their families.
In a tweet from October 2018, he called George Soros, a Hungarian Jewish billionaire, and philanthropist, “satanic” and repeated a claim that Soros, when he was a teenager in Hungary, got through the Holocaust by pretending to be a Gentile and working with the Nazis. Soros was 13 when Germany invaded Hungary in 1944, and he was 14 when the war ended in 1945.
Woods came back to Twitter in February 2020, after being away for almost 10 months. In the same month, Woods spread a false Twitter meme that said anyone making more than $29,000 per year would be taxed at a rate of 52% under Bernie Sanders‘ proposed tax plan. In March 2020, he shared a photo of Florida Democrat Andrew Gillum that was called “intimate media” and was shared without Gillum’s permission. This time, his Twitter account was locked for a short time.
Researchers from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the Krebs Stamos Group did an analysis in 2022 and found that Woods was the top source of false information about the 2020 election on Twitter in the last few months of that year.
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