Billy Bob Thornton
www.billybobthornton.net

Billy Bob Thornton Academy Award-winning writer, actor, director, and musician, Billy Bob Thornton has an extensive and impressive career in motion pictures, television, and music. Charismatic and uniquely talented, Billy Bob has established himself as one of the most sought-after filmmakers of his generation.
    Billy Bob Thornton is the oldest son of high school basketball coach Billy Ray Thornton and Virginia Faulkner Thornton, a psychic who predicted his 1997 Oscar® win. Born in Hot Springs, Arkansas on August 4 (that makes him a Leo), Billy Bob was named after (respectively) his father (Billy) and his mother's grandfather (Bob). Yes, Billy Bob is his legal, given name. At the advanced age of seven months, he became a sensation in the local papers by setting a record as the heaviest infant in Clark County at 30 pounds. He was followed by two brothers: Jimmy Don and John David.
    It was a different kind of South in the mid-1950s to early 1960s. Billy Bob can recall seeing the segregated water fountains and restrooms facilities of the pre-Civil Rights era, as well as the abject poverty of the rural corners of the state. Residing in a small cabin in the woods of Alpine, Arkansas (population 100), the Thornton clan often subsisted on the local game that Billy Bob's maternal grandfather, a forest ranger, culled from the surrounding wilderness. Their cabin had no electricity or running water, and sometimes up to 15 members of the family lived there. When Billy Bob turned two, his uncle Don Faulkner, a charming, footloose musician whose expertise included playing the saw, gave him something every little boy of that era coveted: a Roy Rogers guitar! With Uncle Don's gift, Billy Bob would do his junior Elvis impersonation atop--of all things--a circus foot-stand for elephants that somehow wound up in the Thorntons' backyard.
    In 1963, the Thorntons moved to Malvern, Arkansas, a quintessential all-American small town noteworthy as "The Brick Capital of the World." To make ends meet, Virginia did psychic readings from their home, taking trade in food when the clients had no money. Billy Bob has noted that, when your mother is a psychic and your father is a basketball coach, "It sets you apart."
    In Malvern, third-grader Billy Bob began writing short stories, prompted by his mother (an English major), who introduced him to the works of such Southern writers William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Erskine Caldwell (a major influence on Billy Bob's work). He also took up acting for the first time, playing a wise man in a school nativity play. The first line he delivered in his acting debut was, "Hark!" (although it came out "Harp!"). His first directing gig was a grade-school production of Dracula.
    As children, he and his younger brother Jimmy were eager participants in the family ritual of listening to albums each night before going to bed, absorbing everything from Elvis Presley, Ray Price, and Jim Reeves to The Beatles and other British Invasion stars. At one point, Virginia actually brought Billy Bob out to the highway so that they could wave at Elvis when The King's tour bus passed by.
    Shortly after Billy Bob's graduation from high school in 1973 and mere days after his 18th birthday, his father Billy Ray passed away at the age of 44 from lung cancer likely caused by exposure to chemicals at a factory job. During his father's final months, Billy Bob devotedly cared for him, often cradling Billy Ray in his arms as he carried him up to his room.